Last year, Simone Bamba of Mission Maranatha Church in Boston along with a group of six others sponsored Ibrahim, a Somalian refugee who spent 19 years in South Africa after escaping conflict in Somalia. Several members of the sponsor group, including Bamba, are immigrants or refugees themselves.
“We saw it as an opportunity to give back to the government because as immigrants in this country, you know, we’ve received so much and we want to give back as citizens of the country,” she said. “We want to say thank you to the country.”
While the program only requires a 90-day commitment, the relationship between Ibrahim and Bamba’s group has extended beyond their initial assignment. They have helped him look for jobs, paid for bus tickets, and showed him around the neighborhood—even connecting him with the local Somali community.
In Park Forest, Illinois, Craig Williams sponsored a Ukrainian couple, Edgar and Elley, through the Uniting for Ukraine program. Williams also cited his faith as the reason he chose to get involved.
“I’m a believer. This isn’t from a human perspective, but it’s from a kingdom perspective,” he said. “I feel that at some point in time, after I’m gone from this earth in this form, I’ll be in front of Jesus, and I wanted to be able to have comfort in explaining to the King that I was not going to just sit by and not help anybody. I wanted to help someone.”
“There’s a verse in the Bible and it indicates that when you do something or when you help the least of them, you’re helping God,” Williams added. “I have fallen in love with God and I wanted to help him. But he’s a spirit and so what better way to help God than to do what he asks us to do?”
Other organizations are also partnering with churches to support refugees, including World Relief, a Christian humanitarian organization whose goal is “to develop sustainable, locally-driven solutions to some of our world’s most urgent problems.”
World Relief, which was founded in the wake of World War II, works to provide emergency humanitarian aid to refugees, as well as trauma counseling and immigration legal services, with the goal of helping refugee families cultivate long-term support systems.
Through Churches of Welcome, World Relief is working to create “a national movement of churches, all with different backgrounds and histories, embarking on a discipleship journey and missional opportunity to engage one of the greatest humanitarian crises of our time.”
Churches of Welcome provides resources to churches, including training courses, discussion groups, and live forums, to equip church leaders to help their people see welcoming refugees as a matter of Christian discipleship.
“Our generation is presiding over the greatest humanitarian crisis in the history of the world, where over 118 million people are forcibly displaced—many of them Christian sisters and brothers,” Daniel Yang, National Director of Churches of Welcome, told ChurchLeaders.
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“I believe this is the canary in the coal mine for Great Commission Christians,” Yang added. “The church’s level of urgency to help vulnerable people in refugee camps and nonpermanent settlements around the world is the indicator of health from which we do global missions. Our motive to go ‘over there’ is tied to our work to welcome many here.”
This article has been updated for clarity.
