As the Church adopts a new, strong, righteous presence in this age of the uprooted, increasingly stepping into positions and platforms that equip it to hear, understand, serve, and be served by refugees, it needs also to turn the spotlight on them, not us. As in our own stories, there is so much nuance in the stories of refugees. It is important, from time to time, that we step into those details. Listen closely to the difficulties. Feel deeply the pain. Rise joyfully in the victory.
There are realities that we must dwell in and great truths we must make known.
In a practical sense, we need to recognize the bigness of the situation.
It is, to begin with, geographically and demographically big.
In the 1990s, the focus was on the Gulf, Somalia, and Yugoslavia. Today we focus largely on Syria, Iraq, and Sudan. Zooming in on such crises is important, but we must not forget that there are tens of millions more displaced people in other far-flung places, many of whom will never receive media coverage and will likely not garner more than a paragraph or footnote in American history books written fifty years hence.
Such obscurity should not sit well with the Church. No one is nameless before God. All are worth knowing and worth caring for.
This inconspicuousness, however, is a significant hindrance to the Church’s care for the displaced. One of the biggest obstacles facing refugees is their anonymity. In the West, many don’t know refugees and are ill-informed about the realities of refugeeism around the world. Apart from a half-baked awareness that Syrian refugees exist and are allegedly causing havoc in Europe and drowning in the Mediterranean, most Westerners simply don’t know what is going on with uprooted people globally. Don’t know where they’re from, what they’re fleeing, where they’re stuck, or what ails them.
This process of naming and identifying is meaningful both to those being named and to we in the Church who are only now discovering them. Can we name the people groups or countries from which refugees come? Can we label the conflicts? Can we identify the policies that hurt them? The laws that bind?
The Church needs to find the wrongdoers that have provoked refugeeism, naming the systems and calling out their ills. The prophet Elijah sought out Ahab, saying, “I have found you because you have sold yourself to do evil in the eyes of the Lord” (1 Kings 21:20). Would that we become prophets too, finding evil so that we can look it in the eye and speak truth to power.
The Church also needs to find refugees. It needs to know them.
In her classic work The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt told us:
Only fame will eventually answer the repeated complaint of refugees of all social strata that “nobody knows who I am”; and it is true that the chances of the famous refugees are improved, just as a dog with a name has a better chance to survive than a stray dog who is just a dog in general.
It is an easy truth to grasp and a hard one to live out. Western Christians are so insulated from the rest of the world, so thoroughly bubble-wrapped and trained to the narratives of narrow American media, that it will be difficult for some to actually encounter the displaced.
We must do it nonetheless.
In encountering refugees—in simply acknowledging them to the world—the Church credibly and powerfully raises awareness about their plight. Awareness is a vital piece. Awareness propels greater awareness. It inspires helpers. It prompts discussions on how to engage.
So much depends on the story. So know it and tell it. Tell of the Ethiopian mother who fled with nothing but the clothes on her back. Tell of the Bosnian who lost his family in Sarajevo. Tell of the Honduran who came through a high-fenced border in the belly of a truck.
We should hope that we can tell stories to raise the visibility of refugees before they are dead.
Aylan Kurdi, the drown Syrian child, became famous—but it was too late for him. Omran Daqneesh, a five-year-old boy from Aleppo made famous in a photograph of his shocked, dust-covered figure in the back of an ambulance, threw a spotlight on violence in Syria, but only after many children died. The Church should do everything it can to seek out people in desperate straits and tell their stories before the final chapter is written.
The simple, sad fact is that a refugee with a good story will go farther than one without. Sometimes, when criteria for aid becomes stricter, families will deliberately make themselves more vulnerable so that they will qualify. This includes injuring and impregnating themselves (because more children usually means more aid). The truth of the matter, however, is that every story is divine and important. We should care regardless of their vulnerability, their attractiveness, or how death-defying their story sounds. We should care before they are dead.
Every church and every NGO needs a Chief Storyteller—preferably, many storytellers—because stories are the things that drive humans to do what we do. Stories evince truth. They stir emotion. They compel action. Stories make us care.
So let’s tell the stories of refugees. Let’s make them famous.
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