Houses of worship across the country will be crucial, as the U.S. has said it plans to welcome 95,000 Afghans by September 2022.
“In order to help someone reach that initial stability when they first arrive in the U.S. and then have a place to really grow into having that feeling of belonging, it requires a broader community response, and churches are the key way that World Relief really engages that,” White said.
Six of the nine refugee resettlement agencies assisting new arrivals are faith-based. They include Church World Service, Episcopal Migration Ministries, HIAS (founded as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society), Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and World Relief, an evangelical Christian organization founded to address urgent humanitarian needs in Europe during World War II. They naturally depend on their connections with local religious organizations.
Many churches that have volunteered in the past are eager to help as those agencies rebuild after years of cuts to the U.S. refugee resettlement program and a record low number of arriving refugees in the fiscal year that ended in September — just 11,411. The Biden administration has set an ambitious goal of welcoming 125,000 refugees in the coming year.
Illinois alone currently is expecting to welcome 890 Afghan evacuees, and the Chicago area about 500, according to White. World Relief Chicagoland is preparing to resettle about 130 of them arriving in the area on humanitarian parole, he said.
The organization is turning to longtime partners like Immanuel Presbyterian Church, a congregation of about 280 people that has been partnering with World Relief to help refugees and immigrants in the area for longer than its ministers can remember.
Caring for refugees is “part of the heartbeat for our church,” said the Rev. George Garrison, its senior pastor.
For Immanuel, part of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, that commitment is inspired by God’s biblical commands to Israel to “be sensitive to the sojourner and the wanderer among you, because that’s who you were when you were in Egypt,” Garrison said. That’s reiterated later in the New Testament, when similar imagery is used to describe the church, the senior pastor added.
“We recognize we are so blessed. We’re in such a position of advantage here. And when people come and don’t have anything, we respond out of love and compassion,” he said.
