Migration in Christian Perspective: Notes

On Wednesday 19th June 2024, the Sanctuary Foundation hosted a half day conference at St. Mellitus College called “Migration in Christian Perspective”. With some of us gathered in person and many more tuning in from all over the world it was a fabulous afternoon of insight and wisdom drawn from the experience of some stellar thinkers and practitioners.

The materials from the event will come in good time (and I’ll link to them) but hope these notes are an encouragement or of value for others.

All these shared with the caveat that any of the mistakes and errors are down to my transcription and not the people speaking! I also didn’t take notes for every session so this is a partial record.

Intro

Dr. Krish Kandiah (Sanctuary Foundation) opened the event with a shocking graphic from Theos (a think tank). The British Election Study Internet Panel was asked ‘Do you think Britain should allow for more or fewer of the following kinds of people to come and live in Britain?’ On every measure Anglicans scored lowest.

In the analysis (which covers multiple electoral issues) Theos unpack that those labels can differ between the ‘cultural’ versus the ‘practicing’ Christian but in every single case (Anglican, Roman Catholic, Other Christian) the ‘practicing’ follower of Jesus returns the lowest score for asylum.

Paraphrasing Krish he said “Our consumer and individual gospel means people think they can be Christians and opposed to welcoming the stranger”.

He shared something he’d been told by a Rwandan Christian. In 1994, 90% of Rwanda identified as being Christian, meaning that the genocide was carried out by Christians on Christians. My notes say: “How can this be? Because the up-down Gospel didn’t translate into peer relationships.”

Old Testament perspective

Dr. Chris Wright (Langham Partnership) gave us an Old Testament perspective on what the scripture actually has to say about immigration. He went at quite an incredible pace and this would be something I’d urge anyone interested in the biblical arguments for this to watch it as soon as it is available. But for now, here’s my capturing on what he shared.

Reading materials

1. Jonathan Burnside, The Status and Welfare of Immigrants: The Place of the Foreigner in Biblical Law and its Relevance to Contemporary Society, Jubilee Centre, 2001.
2. Christiana van Houten, The Alien in Israelite Law, Sheffield JSOT Press, 1991.
3. Barnabé Anzurii Msabah, The Wayfarer: Perspectives on Forced Migration and Transformational Community Development, Carlisle, Langham Publishing, 2021.
4. Mark and Luke Glanville, Refuge Reimagined: Biblical Kinship in Global Politics, Downers Grove, IVP Academic, 2021.
5. David L. Baker, Tight Fists or Open Hands? Wealth and Poverty in O.T. Law, Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 2009.

My notes say that he started with Matthew 22:37-39, the Greatest Commandment¹, references scripture from Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18, both books which go on to add that ‘you shall love the foreigner as yourself’. That’s Deuteronomy 10:19 and Leviticus 19:34.

A history of migration and mixing of the nations

It’s a core and fundamental part of the sovereignty of God and His plans for His people:

• Abraham in Genesis 23:4
• Moses in Exodus 2:22
• Israel and the nations in Deuteronomy 2:1-23, 23:7 and 26:5
• Leviticus 25:23
• The whole book of Ruth
• Amos 9:7
• Matthew 2:13-23
• Acts 8
• 1 Peter 1

The Old Testament Hebrew

Dr Wright then took us through the 2 Old Testament words for foreigner from the Hebrew.

The first is ger/gerim. This is the closest word to our concept of immigrant. Resident foreigners in Israel without land or kin. This is a community of people dependent on the grace and favour of Israelite households. These people often became gerim because of societal upheaval.

The second is nokriyim/zarim. These are travelling strangers and closer to our understanding of a tourist. People whose home is elsewhere but who are temporarily passing through. They were exempt from some societal rules (for example they could be charged interest) but they are included in the concept of the Kingdom in 1 Kings 8:41-43, Isaiah 56, 60, and 61.

Old Testament provision for foreigners

• Protection from abuse and oppression: Exodus 22:21, Leviticus 19:33
• Justice: Exodus 23:9, Deuteronomy 1:16-17 and 24:17-18
• Sabbath: Deuteronomy 5:12-15
• Inclusion in worship: Exodus 12:45-49, Deuteronomy 14:28-29, 26:12-13, 29, 31, and Leviticus 16
• Fair employment: Exodus 21:1-11, Deuteronomy 15:12-18 (‘Hebrew’ is bonded labour) and 24:14-15
• Food and gleaning: Leviticus 19:9-10, Deuteronomy 24:19-22 and Ruth
• Right of asylum and non-return: Deuteronomy 23:15-16, Numbers 35:15 and Joshua 20:9
• Equality before the law: Leviticus 19:34 (balanced with Leviticus 19:18 as mentioned at the start of his talk). It pairs with Deuteronomy 10:19 with its direction “to love those who are foreigners, for you yourselves were foreigners in Egypt.”

3 Old Testament motivations

1. This is your personal experience and it should govern the way that you respond to others encountering the same.

It is embarrassingly ironic that so many Western societies built on migration are those which experienced this over centuries are now opposed to others doing the same. This can even include second generation immigrants and those who benefited from welcome should now oppose giving the same to those facing the same situation. He also drew the hypocrisy between a language of migrants versus expats.

2. It is the fundamental character of God.

¹⁷ For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who shows no partiality and accepts no bribes. ¹⁸ He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the foreigner residing among you, giving them food and clothing. ¹⁹ And you are to love those who are foreigners, for you yourselves were foreigners in Egypt.

Deuteronomy 10:17-19

3. Sharing the blessing is an act of covenant obedience. As expressed through Deuteronomy 26 and 27.

Prophets and foreigners

Isaiah 16:2-5

Jeremiah 7:6-7 and 22:3

Ezekiel 22:6-9 and 29

Malachi 3:5

There is just a huge quantity of biblical material about love for the foreigner.

Dr Wright asked whether we are becoming less biblically literate, especially from the OT perspective? Is that a factor in the cultural disconnect in normative faith versus practice?

As an aside (and not from Dr. Wright) this is something that makes me so grateful for the work that Croydon Vineyard are doing with the Tour Of The Torah.

Women and migration

Dr. Elaine Storkey (Writer, Broadcaster, Global Justice/Peace-Seeker, Academic, Philosopher-Theologian, Christian Feminist) was next up. I always cherish hearing Elaine speak as I’ve never failed to learn something absolutely brilliant from her perspective on God.

The Book of Ruth

The book of Ruth starts with famine causing migration. This is a story about environmental (economic) refugees. Elimelek, takes his wife and sons and moves to Moab where the sons marry Moabite women. In the end, Naomi, the mother, outlives all the men in her Israelite family and is left with her two Moabite daughters in law.

There is a need for Naomi to return to her home and back to Israel. Naomi encourages her daughters in law to stay in Moab and return to their family. Orpah eventually does so after Naomi insists but Ruth refuses.

Now Ruth becomes the migrant and the stranger in the strange land.

Ruth is vulnerable in many ways: she’s in an alien country, she’s living economically precariously, she’s a widow, she’s sexually vulnerable.

The resolution of the story does come through marriage and establishing a new family in the land of her mother in law. And this act of migration from Moab to Israel is part of the genealogy of Jesus. Ruth, the non-Israelite alien is there honoured and remembered in the lineage of Jesus.

New Testament Perspectives

• Justice and mercy are to be shown to the alien and the stranger
• Generosity to widows and orphans is a hallmark of the early church as seen in Acts 7
• Protection of the vulnerable

It is the way that we worship: we come in humility and worship in spirit and truth beyond we do anything else.

Jesus has the track record of siding with the excluded and vulnerable. When it comes to the woman caught in adultery (John 8:1-11) Jesus’ word to her at the end is to ‘leave her life of sin’. He is neither condoning nor condemning of her but defending her and freeing her.

Elaine highlighted the link between two stories of Mary and Martha. In Luke 10:38-42 we see Martha ‘distracted by all the preparations’ and Mary sat at Jesus’ feet. In John 11, after Lazarus has died, it is Martha who comes to greet Jesus and the dynamics are somewhat reversed to how they had been previously.

The real crisis of displacement

• War and conflict
• Different experiences between genders
• Women are caught in the crossfire
• Women targeted because of their role in the community
• Women’s vulnerability as migrants
• Women trafficked
• Asylum as a human right, not a luxury

Challenges for migrant and refugee women

• Disruption of family ties and low income
• Forcible displacement
• Persecution – it’s bad, should we stay or go but go where and go how?
• Subject to power and control
• Teenage pregnancy and the subsequent challenges of being pregnant, giving birth and parenting well in the context of being a refugee on the road without a safe place to call home

Gender related constraints are cross cutting: gendered social norms can limit mobility, impede access to services and deny economic opportunities to participate in decisions about them.

Women and girls who are displaced and live in community many have access to services and better economic opportunities

Women from professional livelihoods find it difficult to be recognised as such because identity stereotypes take over: often seen as being able to produce incredible food (which they can) but relegated to the idea of chef rather than the incredibly skilled, expensively trained and broadly talented people they are.

UK rules aren’t well thought through. It costs £250,000 to train a new doctor and it costs £25,000 to recognise/normalise a foreign arrival’s previous qualifications².

To respond to the needs of those who migrate to a new society you have to address the intersectionality of their needs. This is a challenge of gender and displacement to reduce gender disparities in the things people can access and own, the education they can receive, the work they are paid to do, and their agency and empowerment to make choices.

It’s important to support women’s peer orgs that work with migrant women and understand the cultural background, particularly in those circumstances where there are heightened risks of gender based violence and honour attacks.

Dr. NT Wright

NT Wright came to us via a pre-recorded interview with Krish.

No borders? In the UK experience we have such a fixed idea about borders because they’re fixed by the sea. He told a story of someone in Bratislava who had lived in the same house for their whole life, but had lived in multiple different countries.

Experience of whiteness: The Oxford English Dictionary use of white dates to the point at which Europeans went to other parts of the world. It was a natural thing to be in Africa and use black as the description but it wasn’t at all natural to settle on white. Black/White plays into a naive binary about general geopolitics. What about Asia? What about Latin America?

Social Darwinism: In the 1st century anyone could be a slave and it wasn’t a question of pigmentation. Social Darwinism started to sow the idea of difference and people took that to treat black and white as separate races.

Ethno-nationalism as a denial of Acts 17 and betrayal of the Bible’s promises about God’s creation of all people on the earth.

Immigration in support of Christian culture: Lots of immigration, especially those who seek refuge in the UK, is from those seeking a Christian country as a safe haven because of being a Christian minority in their non-Christian homeland³.

On the Holy Land: People want to say Israel are wrong or Israel is in the right. The Bible is mis-used. Romans 8 isn’t one strip of territory. It is the whole world. The whole world is the Holy Land.

On present age: We live more in a time of Jeremiah than we do the time of Paul. How do we minister?

Chinese church as a theological Galapagos. The church in China is cut off from the rest of the world. Those millions of Christians are exploring their faith without the background wisdom that we all draw on. There is a huge amount of revelation that they will have to share with the rest of us. Pointed to the ‘Dark Ages’ but a period of time where the church in Ireland was the seedbed for all sorts of things that flourished afterwards.

Was the Ukraine response of opening up homes racist? The ease with which UK homes were opened up to be shared with white, European Christians has raised this challenge. Krish and NT Wright exchanged a story about foster care: that a family whose only experience of children is babies doesn’t start with welcoming teenagers but 18 years later they’ll do what they couldn’t at Year 1. It’s a learning continuum about growing into the role you have.

John the Baptist versus Daniel/Joseph. The church wears different hats. It’s one thing to be outside of the structures and the system like a voice shouting in the wilderness but it’s another to have a position and a responsibility to contribute constructively in the halls and courts of a country.

The church’s super power is delivery.

Migration and the climate emergency

Dr Ruth Valerio, environmentalist and theologian, social activist and author.

Ruth started by sharing about sociologist Professor Zygmunt Bauman. One of his most memorable metaphors is to describe global society as being made up of vagabonds and tourists. As Ruth describes it in this blog post:

Vagabonds have no choice but to move: forced from their homes by environmental and social dislocation, needing to find work and the means of sustenance. The tourists are those who move by choice, free to move and take good jobs, moving around the world on holiday.

The climate crisis is a big factor in creating migratory pressures but it is nuanced and important to understand those nuances:

• Rapid Onset Emergencies: in 2022, 1m Somalians were displaced by drought.
• Indirect of Slow Onset: the changing climate threatens and leads people to migrate. In Honduras and Guatemala the combination of climate with other factors becomes a push for people to move.
• Movement isn’t uniform. There isn’t a mass bloc of movement. Some is internal and temporary. People always want to live at home. No-one wants to have to move. But land is becoming permanently unliveable. And that means living at home just is not possible.
• Internal displacement doesn’t automatically lead to external migration but it can. Pakistan floods displaced 8m people. They moved internal. The country was already struggling. So thousands did migrate irregularly to Europe. Pakistanis were not usually among the most frequently seen irregular arrivals but first half of 2023 they were at the top because the floods came on top of economic circumstances that meant they couldn’t go home, and they couldn’t stay where they were.
• It’s happening all of the world. Environmental challenges are moving people around in high income countries too. 3.2m US adults have been displaced by environmental crises. But most of them made their way home. Lower and Middle Income Countries have less capacity to deal – both in the state but also in individual households.
• Issues compound. The most vulnerable countries tend to host the biggest numbers of the displaced. Those countries do not have the capacity to support refugee communities, especially if there are additional challenges. For example clean and plentiful water supply.
• There is no legal term of climate or environmental refugee. The only type of legal definition is based on conflict. Everyone else is an economic migrant. Economic migrants could be moving because of the climate emergency but almost impossible to disentangle these things.
• Don’t forget the millions who would love to escape but can’t.
• Reject fear mongering rhetoric.
• The Christian imperative isn’t to put efforts into stopping people moving across borders but to do everything we can to tackle the climate crisis and other push factors that cause people to have to leave their homes.

The Bible is so holistic: care for the world, make peace, look after those who are forced to flee and are looking to make their home among you.

No more notes

There were other speakers we heard from during the day. Some of them I didn’t hear from as I was in different sessions or I didn’t as comprehensively capture their talks and you will need to wait for the recordings but here are three of the others to look out for when the Sanctuary Foundation shares:

• The Rt Revd Dr Guli Francis-Dehqani is the Bishop of Chelmsford. She spoke powerfully from her own experience of having left Iran in the wake of the Iranian Revolution in 1980, when she was 13 years old, and has never been able to return since. It was good to hear her perspective on what it means to contribute as a member of the “Lords Spiritual” to the wider political discourse and dialogue in the UK (which as I’ve noted elsewhere doesn’t feel to me to reflects the values of the Kingdom)
• Reverend Dr. Hikmat Kashouh who leads a church in Lebanon. They’ve got nearly 50 different worshipping congregations across the country. Lebanon is home to one of the largest displaced populations in the world. He told us about how his church offers a holistic service to refugees and never shies away from the scale of the need but always meets them with love.
• Dr Ruth Padilla DeBorst came to us live from Costa Rica and gave some helpful insight into the Central America context when it comes to migration flows and the desperation of people who are attempting to cross The Darien Gap – the 60 mile stretch of the border between Colombia and Panama. Their church has opened a rest house and sanctuary along the migration trail. They can’t meet everyone’s needs but they offer what they have to those they can: doing small acts of practical love within the scope of your own gleanings. She urged everyone to read the Papal Encyclical, Fratelli Tutti.

1. ³⁷ Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ ³⁸ This is the first and greatest commandment. ³⁹ And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ ⁴⁰ ↩︎
2. We have seen one example of how this played out with a cardiologist seeking asylum in the UK from a country where you or I would be fleeing if we had to. Having arrived here with his pregnant wife their child had been born while they waited for the decision from the Home Office. In the meantime an American NGO discovered their case and secured them a new life in the UK, including visa and everything. An amazing outcome for the family who were not being recognised as having such value by the UK government. The family contacted the Home Office to withdraw their claim (knowing that they were now welcome in the US and thinking it made sense that their case was no longer processed). Of course, because they were no longer seeking asylum but had not yet left for the USA they were immediately evicted and now labelled as illegal. This was a family with a baby, let alone that he’s someone with a skill that would be hugely valuable for Britain. ↩︎
3. A later speaker made the point about people’s fears of immigration being a threat to Christianity in the UK that 14% of people in London have African heritage but 60% of the people in church on Sunday are black. Immigration is not killing the church. ↩︎