What will the church do with the refugee crisis of our time?
Today, more than 19 million people have been forced to flee their home countries because of war, persecution, and oppression, and every day an estimated 42,500 more join them. The refugee crisis in our world today is a global issue for the body of Christ—something the church cannot ignore.
The phrase “refugee crisis” might be hard for you to grasp—until you see the photographs of a Syrian toddler, dead on a Turkish beach, after the boat in which his family was attempting to flee to Europe capsized at sea. Or until you see children sleeping on floors and sidewalks as their desperate families crowd in a Hungarian train station, fearing officials will send them off to sinister camps. Or the pictures of Greek tourism towns filling up with tents and humanitarian workers, to accommodate refuges arriving on their shores daily in wobbly boats.
This past summer I took a group of teenagers on a mission trip to Germany. Over the last five years our ministry has been in strategic missions partnership with German churches in organizing gospel-centered baseball camps for youth and children. These sports outreaches are engaging German culture in fresh ways, bringing communities together, and sharing the gospel with unreached people groups. This year, we had the impelling assignment of piloting a new baseball camp in Berlin. While there, we visited a refugee camp and hosted some of the refugee kids at our sports camp during the week.
Here you will find hundreds of men, women, and children who have been driven from their homelands due to war, civil unrest, or other crisis situations. I met a Yazidi refugee from Iraq. He was a taxi driver who had to flee his country because of ISIS. Unfortunately, they could only afford to send one family member, so he went ahead of his family to seek out asylum in Germany. He is now waiting for paper work to go through to see if he can bring his wife and eight children there. But he has lost contact with them and doesn’t know if they are even still alive. I met Ali, a Syrian refugee. He also left his war-torn country in search of a safe place to bring his family. It took him three months to travel to Berlin. I just received an email from Ali saying that his asylum was granted and now he must continue the convoluted process of getting the rest of his family there.
We heard many other heart wrenching stories at the refugee camp in Berlin.
Over the next year, Germany expects to receive up to 800,000 asylum-seekers. The world is coming to Germany! Some of our network of missional communities in Germany are already involved with serving many of these refugees. One partner church in a town of 30,000 inhabitants, now has 5,000 refugees at the refugee camp in their community. Their church, which has hosted baseball camp for several years now and seen multitudes of young people come to Christ through this ministry, was itself born in 1990 with a core group that was made up of dozens of Russian refugees seeking asylum in Germany. Their church came into existence because of outreach to refugees. It’s in their DNA so it only makes sense for them to do everything in their might to serve the refugees in their area because, as one of my friends there has said, “Our church does know [from personal experience], that people need a home, shelter.”
This worldwide crisis isn’t going away overnight. It puts the global church at a very critical crossroads in our generation. I wonder what history will write about the church of our day one hundred years from now? Did we minister to “the least of these,” did we “Give justice to the weak and the fatherless; maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute. Rescue the weak and the needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked” (Psalm 82:3-4 ESV), or did we just do church as usual?
Sociologist Rodney Stark documents that the early church’s engagement with suffering people was crucial to its explosive growth in the first few centuries. Their influence spread exponentially throughout the Roman Empire and impacted their world right in the heart of a pagan culture that was hostile and intolerant toward Christianity. The church grew from about 25,000 Christ-followers to approximately 20,000,000 Christ-followers in its first three centuries. Stark gives us a great explanation for how that occurred. Cities in the Roman Empire were characterized by poor sanitation, contaminated water, high population densities, open sewers, filthy streets, unbelievable stench, rampant crime, collapsing buildings, and frequent illnesses and plagues. Rather than fleeing these urban cesspools, the early church found its niche there. Stark explains that the Christian concept of self-sacrificial love of others, emanating from God’s love for them, was a revolutionary concept to the pagan mind:
Christianity revitalized life in Greco-Roman cities by providing new norms and new kinds of social relationships able to cope with many urgent urban problems. To cities filled with the homeless and impoverished, Christianity offered charity as well as hope. To cities filled with newcomers and strangers, Christianity offered an immediate basis for attachments. To cities filled with orphans and widows, Christianity provided a new and expanded sense of family. To cities torn by violence and ethnic strife, Christianity offered a new basis for social solidarity. And to cities faced with epidemics, fires, and earthquakes, Christianity offered effective nursing services.
Around the time of 165 AD, a devastating epidemic swept through the Roman Empire that lasted fifteen years and claimed the lives of anywhere from a quarter to a third of the empire’s population. Some suspect that it was smallpox, but historians don’t know for sure. But one thing is certain: It was extremely lethal. Nearly a century later, another plague ravaged the Roman world, killing massive numbers of people. It is reported that in the city of Rome alone, 500 people were dying per day at the height of the epidemic.
“In the midst of the daily horror of family members and friends dying all around, many people fled the cities and sought refuge in the countryside—especially those among the privileged classes, who had estates where they could retire until the devastation passed,” says Mike Breen. “The pagan priests and philosophers of the day were powerless to explain the disaster or curb its advance, so many simply ran for their lives.”
Though these responses may seem like what you would expect in a time of great disaster and upheaval, one group of people refused to leave the cities in a panic. Like Nehemiah in ancient Persia, their hearts were broken for the things that break God’s heart. This group of people intentionally stayed in the cities to look after the sick and dying, willing to provide whatever they could for those who were suffering, even if it only meant a decent burial after the disease took another life. These people, looking very much like missional tribes, demonstrated care and compassion by nursing the suffering in this epidemic. These remarkable people who stayed in the cities to care for those being ravaged by the epidemics were Christians. Many of these Christians actually lost their lives while caring for others.
Here’s what Dionysius, the Bishop of Alexandria, wrote in an Easter letter around 260 AD, during the second epidemic:
“Most of our brother Christians showed unbounded love and loyalty, never sparing themselves and thinking only of one another. Heedless of danger, they took charge of the sick, attending to their every need and ministering to them in Christ… Many, in nursing and curing others, transferred their death to themselves and died in their stead… Death in this form… seems in every way the equal of martyrdom.”
Breen points out that these early followers of Jesus weren’t trying to do anything heroic or significant. They were expressing simple obedience to Jesus’ command to “do to others what you would have them do to you,” and living out his mercy, justice, and compassion.
Mother Teresa said, “Don’t look for big things, just do small things with great love.” Because these early Christians did small acts of mercy with great love, they gave many sufferers hope that stretched beyond the grave and a compelling vision to root their lives in something eternal. It is presumable that many of the sick that did recover naturally became Christians and joined the communities that had nursed them back to health. “Because of these kinds of dynamics, Christianity went from a marginal sect on the fringes of Jewish society to the most dominant faith of the entire Roman Empire within a few hundred years,” says Breen.
Aid and relief organizations have noted that the refugee crisis is an opportunity to show Christ’s love and open the world’s eyes to the goodness of our God. Steve Van Valkenburg, an area director for one of these organizations in the Middle East, said, “I think that a lot of refugees see that there is something different there, they see the Muslim on Muslim fighting, and then they see how the Christians are reaching out with love and caring — that has to do something with their hearts.”
In collaboration with our network of missional communities in Germany, Breakaway Outreach will be sending winter gift/care packages and Christmas greeting cards for the children in refugee camps. It may not seem like much, but all of us who call ourselves followers of Jesus Christ must begin to ask the question of, not only how do we support our German friends in caring for refugees pouring in to their land, but how do we partner with God in His agenda in dealing with the greatest global crisis in our hour?
The early church exploded because it became a movement of missional communities nursing and caring for people in the middle of a pandemic crisis. A hundred years from now, what will be written about how the church of our day handled its greatest global crisis? Did we show up or did we play it safe?
To do nothing is a failed strategy—and simply too high a price to pay to caress our own false sense of securities halfway around the world. In ancient Persia, Nehemiah’s heart was broken for the hurting people in Jerusalem. He couldn’t go back to business as usual in the secure confines of the Persian king’s palace. He was moved by compassion—care thrust into action. He not only rebuilt walls, but the lives of the most distressed people of his times.
Has your heart been broken for the things that break God’s heart?
What will you do about it?
Here are 8 Ways YOU Can Help Refugees.
Shapers: Leadership That Restores Hope, Rebuilds Lives (leadership lessons from Nehemiah with great parallels to the refugee crisis of our times).