Episode Transcript
[00:00:10] Speaker A: With an open mind and a Christ shaped conscience is how CEO of Christianity Today Russell Moore said we should approach the topic of today's conversation. So that is my invitation for you as well. I'm Kristin Mockler Young and this is Becoming Church, the podcast where we discuss how the message and movement of Jesus is not just about becoming Christians, but about becoming the church.
Each week we explore conversations around faith, culture and the evolving church today. Matthew Sorens of World Relief is here to help us understand the complexities of immigration, especially when it comes to refugees. If this is not an issue you're familiar with, then you're actually exactly the person that we made this episode for. Matthew will explain the terminology, the processes, how this is a non partisan message and what we can actually do to love our neighbors better.
Oh, and a quick warning that around 42 minutes in, Matthew will make a reference to the Christmas guy in the red suit that likes cookies. So if you've got kids around, you probably want to have headphones handy.
Matthew, welcome to the Becoming Church podcast.
[00:01:14] Speaker B: Great to be with you, Kristen.
[00:01:16] Speaker A: So great to have you here. We met a couple years ago, I guess, when at the Mexico border when I went to learn about immigration.
[00:01:24] Speaker B: So, yeah, we enjoyed having you and others there in San Diego and Tijuana. And that's relevant to the conversation we're gonna have today, I think as well in some ways also.
[00:01:33] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I think it's gonna be really good. I know this is one of those topics that can be really divisive for people, but we want to educate and help people kind of understand maybe even why that's the case. So before we get into your book, why don't you explain to us what you do at World Relief?
[00:01:50] Speaker B: Yeah, I have been at World Relief basically my whole career. I started as an intern, went to Wheaton College in Illinois, and then did an internship with World Relief in Central America.
Really fell in love with the organization and with our mission, which is to boldly engage the world's greatest crises in partnership with the church.
And I didn't actually know what World Relief did in the United States to live out that mission, but there was an office down the street from the college where I was studying. So I applied for a job when I got back and was finishing college and eventually joined the Immigration Legal Services team.
Worked providing legal services to immigrants for a number of years and then pivoted into a role focused on local churches and eventually kind of national denominations and other church networks. Really tried to help figure out how do we help the church which is at the center of our mission at World Relief, to respond to the crisis of displacement globally and with its ramifications in the United States in ways that are consistent with Scripture, that are guided by mission. And so now I do. So I lead our advocacy team for World Relief, which is a small part of what we do at World Relief, but it's addressing anything around governmental relations or public policies that are impacting the communities that we are serving, whether in the United States or elsewhere in the world.
[00:02:58] Speaker A: Okay, so World Relief does more than just immigration. They do, like, kind of crisis in general.
[00:03:05] Speaker B: Yeah, we respond to crises all around the world, and a lot of that is related to migration, because the reasons that people migrate are usually some sort of a crisis, whether a natural disaster or a war or conflict or persecution. So, for example, we work in refugee camps in a place like Burundi, and then we also resettle people from places like Burundi and East Africa to the United States when we're able to.
So we're sort of at that full point of that spectrum. We don't want people to have to leave. We want to come alongside local churches in various parts of the world to help people flourish where they're at. And then when it is necessary for people to leave, when they're facing a threat to their life or to their well being, we want to make sure that they're welcomed and integrated into new communities, like where I live in Chicagoland or in North Carolina or various other parts of the United States.
[00:03:50] Speaker A: Yeah, and we'll get more into that in a second. I want to want you to help us understand the difference, you know, between all these things. But since you specifically work with, like, governmental, public policy stuff, how have you seen it change? Like, how has your role changed? How have things that World Relief changed over the last, you know, I don't know, year or so?
[00:04:09] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, that might take the rest of our hour to talk through, but the changes have been very profound. And I do think that's important, you know, for those who. This is sort of something they see briefly in the news. It's easy to miss just how dramatic the changes are.
So the. Probably the change that most profoundly affected us at World Relief is the suspension of the US Refugee Settlement Program.
[00:04:31] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:04:32] Speaker B: Which was announced on January 20th of 2025. So. So we'll probably get into exactly what is a refugee? How is that different from other immigrants? But essentially the process that the US Government has had for about half a century where the government as identifying people overseas who fled their homes because of a well founded fear of persecution and then vets them overseas. And a very small share of those folks globally are brought on an annual basis to the United States. World Relief has since the 1970s, been a part in close collaboration with local churches of receiving those families, of helping them integrate into communities.
So we haven't had new families, with very limited exceptions, we haven't had new families to receive in the last year and a half or so. There's still plenty of folks who arrived in 2024, 2023 or others. We're still in the process of integration. So I don't want anyone to hear there's no need for the church to be involved in this anymore. That's absolutely not the case. And I would say the other part of that is the funding that was the governmental funding for caring for refugees also in significant ways, went away.
So we still work really closely with local churches and individuals to help provide the resources for families in their integration process.
But that's been a huge change. And then there's been layers of changes for other categories of immigrants who we would also serve as well. So people with temporary protected status who are not technically refugees but might have a refugee like situation, many of them have lost their legal protections in the last year and a half. And then some of them have become vulnerable to being detained or even to being deported. Sometimes one member of a family is detained and deported, but you've got children left behind. So that's another dynamic we are very concerned with and paying close attention to and looking at how that also affects the church in the United States.
[00:06:06] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:06:07] Speaker B: And then on top of all that, you also have the changes globally. So World relief operates in 11 countries around the world, again, serving people who we want to be able to flourish where they're at whenever possible, serving refugees who have left one country to another. But you've seen the United States Agency for National Development, usaid was basically shut down a little bit more, more than a year ago.
And there are still some ways that the United States is involved in foreign assistance around the world, but there's just far fewer of those ways than there were a year and a half ago. And that has sort of ripple effects for families facing things like an Ebola crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo right now or various other health crises that are impacting really, really vulnerable people who important to our conversation. As Christians, we believe our people made in the image of God.
[00:06:55] Speaker A: Yeah. And really that is the heart of World Relief. That is the heart of, I mean, you know, our mutual friend Bree with Women of welcome. It is that idea that, like, we care about people because God cares about people, because God created all people and he loves all of his people.
It's pretty simple, actually.
[00:07:13] Speaker B: Yeah.
That is really the fundamental idea that if it is true what Genesis 1 says, and it's of course repeated elsewhere in the scriptures, that human beings are made in the image of God. Yes. It means that human beings have inherent dignity and value, regardless of your country of origin, regardless of your nationality, regardless of your religion, your gender, your ethnicity, any other factor we could think of to qualify people.
If we believe that, and that is an audacious belief, and not everyone in the history of the world has believed that. But if we really believe ought to come to compel us as God's people, as the church, to respond in ways that affirm that dignity and to protect human life wherever we can to help people to flourish. Because not only are people made with dignity in the image of God, they're also made with potential in the image of a creator God. And I mean, that's fundamentally been our experience as we serve a lot of immigrants throughout the United States is, of course, we want to help people because they have value in themselves, because innately they are made in God's image. But also it is because they're made in God's image that we should not be surprised that they have all sorts of ways to contribute because they are made in the image of a creator God. I mean, man and woman were put in the garden and told to. To cultivate, to. You know, there's this. This commission in the very beginning of the scriptures to human beings, to work and to grow things. And we see immigrants doing that along with other human beings. And it's been a blessing to the United States. In my view.
It. It could continue to be a blessing for the United States. And it also is a huge opportunity for the church to live out its mission as well.
[00:08:42] Speaker A: Yeah, well. And I think specifically whenever I talk about, I mean, a lot of my content, I'm a pastor, a lot of my content online is, you know, focused at the. Towards the Christians anyway.
But not everybody that listens, you know, even to this show would consider themselves a Christian, partly because of just the way Christianity has gotten a little wonky and a little confusing lately.
But I do think that it's something specifically toward the Christians. Right. Like where this is a bit of my challenge is going, hey, if you really do believe this, everything that you just said, if you really do believe in the imago DEI and that people were created in the image of God, then that has to align with your belief. Like that has to be the lens that we see everything through, including immigration. Why do you think that the this is such a hard topic for Christians to get on board with if they're like, I do believe this is true?
What is the disconnect, do you think?
[00:09:33] Speaker B: I think the disconnect in my view is that very often there are people who genuinely love the Lord, who love the Scriptures and it's just never occurred to them. And I think this is actually on pastors. And I appreciate a pastor like you, Kristen, who's willing to engage this. That's frankly, that's not a free pastor. It's never occurred to all sorts of Christians that this, their theology has anything to say to how they think about immigrants.
And I think that that's a real deficit of discipleship. And this isn't just like my anecdotal observation though. I've been at this for quite a while and we've done polling with Lifeway research and we ask self identified evangelical Christians, what's the most important factor influencing your views on immigration? And it's one of those checkbox surveys, right? So like we gave them a little hint the Bible was on the list. When you see that as an evangelical Christian, you're supposed to know it's the right answer. Only 23% of people check that box. And in fact less than 40% of people of evangelicals specifically listed the Bible in the top three influences on their views on immigration.
So what is, and I want to be clear, there's millions of people in that 23% who are very faithfully responding to the Scriptures and loving their immigrant neighbors. And we get to work with those churches at World Relief and we're so thankful for them.
What I also recognize is that the potential is much greater because you have more than three quarters of people who are responding to this through some other lens. And some of those are good things, like my own personal experience or the views of friends and family.
Some of them could be good or could frankly be really harmful like media or political views.
That's always going to be a mixed bag, but rarely is that going to give you a distinctly biblical perspective. And I think I also want to be really clear to say knowing what the Bible says about immigrants doesn't tell you who to vote for. It doesn't tell you how many refugees should come into the United States every year. It doesn't tell you, well, you know, who should be vulnerable to being detained or deported. Like Those specific questions require prudential wisdom for us to apply. But there are some really clear principles in scripture, starting with that idea that these are people made in the image of God. So even if sometimes there's people who have violated law and need to be detained or deported, we have to treat them with dignity. Like that is.
Like there are ways to do that in ways that are more dignifying.
And I think it also should cause us. I mean, another biblical principle is that God, before he establishes or, you know, before Romans 13 says that God ordains government, we have God ordaining the family unit. Also in Genesis, like this is man and woman being put into marriage. Jesus is really clear what God has joined together, no one should put apart. And yet we have immigration policies that take a husband out of the family or take a wife out of the family, take a mother out of a family, leave kids behind.
And I, I think, I would acknowledge there are rare circumstances where that's probably necessary to protect the well being of children or, you know, if somebody commits a really horrific crime. Sure. But there are also circumstances where it doesn't make any sense at all. Like, I mean, we have situations right now with large numbers of people from Haiti, which is a country where World Relief operates in partnership with lots of local churches. We're really aware of the dire circumstances in Haiti today.
Those individuals came to the United States at the invitation of a sponsor who was lawfully present in the United States through a lawful process, they were granted temporary protected status. And then our government very abruptly tried to take temporary protected status away. And as we're recording this, this is being debated in the Supreme Court, if the federal government followed the right procedures to do that, but presuming that they are allowed to take that away and those hundreds of thousands of Haitians are detained and deported, some of those folks have been here lawfully since 2010 when an earthquake hit. If you can imagine, in 15 years, a bunch of them have had children.
Those children under the 14th amendment are US citizens. The US government also says that US citizens under no circumstance should travel to Haiti because it is so dangerous. So if you're in that family situation, mom and dad are being told you now have to leave.
Kids are told you should not go to the country, the only country that your parents can go to.
What should you do?
Or what if it's just mom being told you have to leave? But dad is here lawfully, and those circumstances are actually more common than I think people would realize.
Dad is here with a permanent, more durable legal Status. And mom had this temporary legal status that's been taken away very abruptly.
People are put in these awful circumstances. And it's not about public safety. Again, these are people who've passed criminal background checks already to get the temporary protected status. It's not even about, you know, conserving resources, because with temporary protective status, you don't qualify for a bunch of public benefits in most cases.
This is people who want to work and provide for their own families who are very often parts of local churches. So you're also disrupting local congregations.
And to me, it just doesn't make a lot of sense. And that I think when you talk to most Christians and you explain the real dynamics on the ground, I mean, I've heard this. I have this conversation with a friend two days ago, well, I want violent criminals to be detained and deported. I didn't want all this. And I said, we absolutely agree. You know, I think that that is part of this other governmental principle or this other biblical principle of God ordaining government. Government has an obligation to ensure order and look out for the safety of. Of citizens. That's an appropriate. A good thing. Government is a good thing. We see that in Romans, chapter 13. It just feels like government has gone well beyond looking out for the good of citizens when it is actually taking citizens family members away, when it is splitting up families, when it is scaring people from going to church. Like, there are religious liberty dynamics to this as well. So I think if we could get to the Bible first, the policy questions would not be perfectly clear, but we'd have a lot more wisdom to bring to how we engage in some of the policy discussions.
[00:15:05] Speaker A: Okay. And we'll get more into. I want to, you know, the people that are like, I did want this, but I did not want what's happening now. We're going to get later into, like, practicals of what they can actually do. But your book, Seeking Refuge, the Human Face of the Global Refugee Crisis. Okay, I did realize this is a re release. And so my question to you is, y' all put this out 10 years ago. Why are you re releasing it now?
[00:15:28] Speaker B: You know, we did the first edition of this book. My. My friend Stephen Bowman and Issam Smear and I with Moody Publishers, and we started working on it probably 2015. It came out 2016. It was in the midst, if you can recall back, the Syrian refugee crisis was in the news. The first edition of the book, the image sort of says Syrian refugee crisis without saying it.
And that was, you know, it was a time When I think a lot of Americans were rethinking, you know, refugee resettlement, that to be really honest, that was always the safe, happy, bipartisan part of immigration for the United States. I mean, going back to the 70s, yeah, the Vietnamese folks who came after the war, the South Sudanese Lost Boys, like the fall of the Soviet Union, like you had all these waves of people coming, fleeing persecution, coming into the country lawfully, which I think people need to be clear. Refugee resident is actually not about the border. The border's important too. But this is about people coming in after being vetted overseas, coming on airplanes at the invitation of our government, welcomed by churches and other faith based groups. And I think around 2016, we saw the beginnings of questions. Do we still want to be the country that does that?
We'd gone from a country that in 1980 was resettling more than 200,000 refugees per year, and those numbers had declined a bit. And there's a question of, are we still going to do this? Are we going to respond to the Syrian crisis, or do we need to close our doors?
And we started that first edition of the book with kind of the troubling lament of the reality that there were 60 million people around the world forcibly displaced from their homes. So some of those as refugees outside their country, but 60 million just displaced in any way from their homes by persecution, by conflict, by violence.
The reason we have a new edition of the book is because today that number is 120 million. 10 years later.
[00:17:09] Speaker A: Holy moly.
[00:17:10] Speaker B: This, I would argue, is actually the greatest crisis facing the world right now. And a lot of Americans are not paying attention to it, and a lot of the church is not paying attention to it. And that is our central thesis. It was in the first edition as well. But even more so now, we actually need the church to be on the forefront of this crisis in the United States, but also internationally. Like this is a dynamic that has gotten a lot worse. And you can think of the reasons. I mean, it's Afghanistan, it's Ukraine, it's wars that we pay less attention to. The United States, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo. It's violence in Burma, also known as Myanmar. That the other dynamic that I think is worth Christians being particularly attuned to is people persecuted for a whole bunch of reasons, all of which are, you know, important.
A significant share of refugees historically are people persecuted for their faith. And the faith that actually gets more people in trouble than any other at this point in the world is Christianity. So if we want to stand with the Persecuted church, which I think we ought to do, which are a good biblical reasons for that. We should be wanting there to be a refugee resettlement process. Of course, we should want it to be safe and we should want it to be well ordered, but we should want there to be a process when someone is persecuted for their faith in Jesus and has to flee their home or lose their life for them to have a place to go. And historically, the United States has been that place for not most of the world's refugees. In fact, at a high time, like 2024, it was 1/4 of 1% of the world's refugees who got resettled to the United States. Okay, we're now down to, well, basically no traditional refugees are being resettled in 2026. And we can get into the details, but that is fundamentally why we did edition of the book Seeking Refuge. We want to help the church understand what the Bible says, to put a human face on this. Because ultimately my mind doesn't know what to do with 120 million forcibly displaced people, but I can think of four or five friends who've lived through that and tell their stories with, obviously with their permission, and then also to address the concerns that people have. Look, what about safety and vetting and security?
What about some of the policy questions? What about the economics in.
A lot of Americans are struggling right now. And I understand very well the sentiments of, like, can we afford to help anyone else when we're barely taking care of ourselves?
But I think there's actually some really good answers to that.
And then ultimately for this to be really practical. Well, what do you do? Okay, now I have this biblical worldview on this topic. I've had some questions answered. What do I do in my own community? What do I do as I think about the rest of the world as well? How do I pray? How do I advocate?
[00:19:39] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Well, Matthew, before we get into the. Those practicals, I want to help everybody maybe that's trying to learn or educate themselves for the first time. Right. On all of, like, migration. So will you explain to us the difference between a migrant, a refugee, and an asylum seeker? And maybe, like, what the different pathways are, if they're different for each different type of person?
[00:20:02] Speaker B: Sure.
So a migrant or an immigrant is sort of the most basic term. It's someone from one country going to reside somewhere else.
And that. That's the umbrella term. I mean, that includes refugees probably, but refugees are distinguished under both US and international law.
There's a convention that the US has been a party to for Decades. Now that basically defines a refugee as someone who's outside of their country of origin, who has a well founded fear of persecution. That is on account of their race, their religion, their political opinion, their national origin or their particular social group. So one or more of those five reasons.
And again, by that definition, so the 120 million figure I shared, is anyone forced from their home. But about 40 million people around the world have been forced from their country. So they meet that definition of a refugee forced by persecution for one or more of those five reasons.
[00:20:51] Speaker A: So a refugee is someone who does not want to leave their country.
[00:20:54] Speaker B: Right. They have no choice.
[00:20:55] Speaker A: They don't have a choice because they
[00:20:57] Speaker B: will face persecution or at least a reasonable expectation that they would face persecution. Okay. Now the way the United States envisions refugees is we consider you a refugee. If we, our government determined while you were still in that second country. So a Ukrainian who fled to Poland, a Syrian who went to Jordan, a Burmese person who went to Thailand, our government has determined that you meet that definition. And then a small share of the world's refugees get resettled, meaning we vet them overseas, they fly on airplanes, they land at airports in the United States, they find jobs and begin their lives in this country. Okay, an asylum seeker is basically someone who didn't get that invitation to permanently resettle in the United States, but they made the wrong way here. Now that could be on a temporary visa, a tourist visa, a student visa, could be if they got to the US Border. You have to get to the United States to seek asylum in the United States.
[00:21:47] Speaker A: Yes. You have to be in the country in order to say, now I'm seeking asylum, I'm already here.
[00:21:52] Speaker B: Okay? In or the language of the law is arriving at like you have to get to the United States, okay to and asylum is basically saying, hey, please don't send me back because I also have a well founded fear of persecution for one or more of those five reasons. And there's supposed to be a process, and I say supposed to because it's not working right now, but under the law there's supposed to be a process where you would basically prove with documentary evidence, which like a side note is sometimes easy, but usually is not easy because sometimes the people who say they're going to kill you didn't send you a notarized letter with all the specific reasons, you know, like you can't. Sometimes you've got, I heard this rumor and this happened to my neighbor and I was afraid and I thought it was going to happen to me. Too, because it was happening to Christians or it was happening to people with my skin color, or it was happening to people who supported this candidate in the elections.
Sometimes it's covered by the local newspaper and that's really helpful in a court case. And sometimes it's not. And that's like you're, it's. These cases are always difficult because it's just you don't always have all the documentary evidence. But under the law, if you can prove that you have a well funded fear, persecution for one or more of those reasons, you're supposed to be allowed to stay. And if you can't prove that you'd usually be deported, then there are all sorts of other categories of immigrants as well. And I won't go through like every category because it's like an Alphabet soup of the different kinds of visas you can get. But you have immigrants who have a family sponsor, you have immigrants who have an employer sponsor.
And I should say those are very limited and mostly for people who are considered highly skilled. So one of the fundamental reasons we have people who fit into this other category of skill, skills, no legal status, whether you call them undocumented or unauthorized or unlawfully present, is because there's a bunch of people who didn't fit in any of the categories that exist. But if they managed to get here otherwise, whether they overstayed a visa or they had or they crossed the border unlawfully and were never apprehended, which was really common in like the late 90s and early 2000s, it's actually a lot less common now. But those folks don't fit into any legal category. They're not lawfully present, and yet they very, almost always, I mean for adults at least, are working.
And that is usually part of why they came in the first place.
And it's also complicated because once they've been here a while, and the average undocumented immigrant has been here more than a decade, in fact, we're very close to the point where the average undocumented immigrant has been here for 20 years.
A bunch of them have US citizen relatives. So you have a lot of mixed status families where one member of the family is US Citizen, another has a green card, a lawful permanent resident status, and two others have no status whatsoever. So you have these complicated family situations.
And then the last thing I would mention in terms of categories, I know this is super complicated, but you also have a number of people who want some sort of a temporary legal status. So refugee status, I was going to
[00:24:28] Speaker A: ask you about that.
[00:24:29] Speaker B: Okay, Refugee Status is supposed to be permanent.
If you're granted asylum, that's supposed to be permanent. If you have a green card, what's called lawful permanent resident status, through a family sponsor, that's supposed to be permanent. With the caveat, of course, if you commit a crime or, you know, there's certain things you can still do that would be lead you to be deported. But there's also temporary statuses. There's people on a temporary work visa. There's people on a tourist visa. There's people with something called humanitarian parole, which was basically.
I hate that term because it sounds like people leaving prison has nothing to do with a crime. It's a legal authority that the federal government, the Department of Homeland Security, has to allow someone in the national interest, at the discretion of the Secretary of Homeland Security, of what the national interest is and for humanitarian or public interest reasons. So we saw large numbers of Afghans come to the United States after the fall of Kabul to the Taliban in 2021 with humanitarian parole. We saw hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians who the previous administration allowed to come to the United States with humanitarian parole. We had Venezuelans and Haitians and others. So it's a lawful entry process, but it also, because it is at the discretion of the executive branch, it can be granted fairly easily and quickly, and it can be taken away fairly easily and quickly. And those people then enter lawfully, and then they have no status at all. They're vulnerable to being detained or deported.
[00:25:48] Speaker A: Okay. And I think that's what my biggest question is right now. And I think maybe some other people, too, because, you know, there's. It keeps changing and there's mixed. Mixed messaging, but really, like, unless they are granted full citizenship, nowhere in that process is there guaranteed safety. Is that correct? It's not like, okay, if you're in the process, then you're. You're good to finish the process. It's kind of like they should be good to finish the process, but it's not actually happening that way.
[00:26:15] Speaker B: I think that's like it should be. There's a lot of things that function on sort of norms like, this is the way it's always worked. And some of those things are written into laws, but some of them are just like the way it's always worked. So, for example, the way it has worked for a long time is if you came to the United States, I mean, I have friends who are directly in this circumstance, you came in with a tourist visa, but then you filed for asylum in a timely way within one year of arrival to say, hey, actually I have a well funded fear of persecution, my friends. I'm thinking of it's because of their faith, their ministry that they operated in Latin America that was under threat from gangs.
They filed their paperwork just the way they're supposed to.
They entered lawfully. It has long been the case that of course they will run a criminal background check. They will allow you to apply for work authorization after a certain amount of time. Basically you can work, you are not eligible for any sort of public benefits while you're in that limbo as asylum seekers, but you're allowed to be here, you're not unlawfully present until such time as you get your immigration court date and a judge decides, yes, you get asylum, you're here permanently and from there you're on a process to be able to apply for citizenship if you choose to do so, or no, you don't qualify, your tourist visa is no longer valid, so we're going to detain and deport you.
What has been happening in the last year is people who are in that limbo have been detained, so they're held in detention centers. They still can't be deported under the law until they get a final decision on their court date. But they could sit in a jail like detention center. And by the way, this includes adults, but also sometimes children for months to years because the asylum process is very backlogged.
And again, I think that would make sense in this very rare circumstance where that asylum seeker, we have credible reason to think that he's a terrorist or like, yes, he, you know, like, like he has a criminal record.
But the vast majority of these people, there's no reason to think that there's any sort of public safety threat.
And also it costs a ton of money to run a jail like detention facility.
It doesn't cost much to let that person go work and support themselves and pay their own rent. And so it's a little bit, it doesn't make much sense from like a fiscal perspective and then again from a Christian like value human life perspective. It's just not great for kids to grow up in jails.
[00:28:24] Speaker A: And like I feel like we should all be able to agree on this.
[00:28:27] Speaker B: And again, when you talk about like what about public safety concerns? Like you think the five year old's public safety concern, like, it doesn't, it doesn't really compute when you start to think about some of these dynamics. And a lot of these cases, some are just adults, a lot of them involve children. Because when, you know, when mom and dad are Being threatened. They don't usually leave the kids behind in that dangerous place. You travel as a family together, if you. If you can.
So I think, yeah, that's. I think that one of those dynamics that, like, it was just long the case that maybe the government had the authority to detain asylum seekers if they had a compelling reason, but they just wouldn't do so for both fiscal and for common sense and like humanitarian reasons.
And now they're. They're not doing so universally, which is why it's also confusing. I mean, you don't know for sure what's going to happen, but they're doing it in a significant number of cases.
Likewise, something like temporary protected status. I'm on that level, I'm sympathetic to the arguments. Well, temporary is in the name. You knew that was temporary when you applied for it. But I talked to a young man last week who has been in the United States since he was a very small child. He's now an adult from Honduras. And Honduras is a country that has had temporary protective status consistently renewed every 18 months, basically since 1998, when Hurricane Mitchell hit that Central American country.
And it has been the assessment of various governments since then that it's still not actually safe to send people back to that context. So we'll let people continue to stay with temporary protected status. Again with tps, you don't get public benefits. You don't. You have to pass criminal background check to qualify for it. So, like, these are not people who have any criminal concerns about, in this case. This guy's grown up here. And, you know, that's a very common situation. If you let 20 years pass is children will be born, children will grow up.
In his case, he was not born here, he'd be okay. But, you know, he came as very small child and he went from working, had actually a great job, and then his work authorization was taken away when temporary protective status for Hondurans was terminated a few months back.
And he hasn't yet been detained and deported. But that is a possibility that he lives with now going, you know, with the threat of being sent to a country he barely remembers.
And I think that, you know, I would argue, like, yeah, we should have temporary protective status for genuinely temporary, you know, natural disasters that get fixed. And when it is, when it has been agreed by our government that 10 years have passed, let's say, and it's still not safe to go back, why don't we just let someone apply for a green card?
[00:30:51] Speaker A: And I do think then can't the temporary be because they've just, they're going to become citizens. Like that would still be temporary, but then we let them go through the process of.
[00:31:00] Speaker B: Yeah, and I think that's the one of my, like, principal misconception when I started working in immigration law was I thought there was a process.
There's not a process. There are lots of processes and most people don't qualify for any of them. So, like if you have a U.S. citizen spouse, there might be a process again presuming you had a lawful entry. And even that just last week we had, as we're recording this, there was an announcement that actually people who came in lawfully on like a student visa, who met their woman, meets her husband, he's a US Citizen, they fall in love, they get married, he wants to file petition for her. It used to be possible you're just going to adjust your status in the United States.
Now the government is saying, for reasons we don't really understand, and we're still trying to understand the full details of this, actually in most cases, people are going to have to go back to the country of origin to process that. It'll probably take a year or two. So you're going to have this married couple will have to live apart. And I've had some people say, well, the US Citizen go live in Honduras, like maybe if Honduras will let him come, which is also. They have processes too, but he's probably not going to be allowed to work. And could you leave your job and leave your church and, you know, potentially leave children and like what? Like these are complicated situations. People's lives are rooted in a place and I just don't understand the rationale for it. But it. And there's also all these dynamics get challenged in court. So there's just a lot of back and forth in courts. And much of what I'm saying, you know, tomorrow a judge might say, actually no, that was not a lawful process. That's no longer the rules. But it is profoundly disorienting. And I think especially for someone to go back to refugees, like, it's not really a choice to go back to their country of origin because they will be killed, or it's a real possibility that they will be killed for reasons like their faith, for reasons like their ethnicity, which they can't change.
You know, this is people's lives who are on the line in a really profound and troubling way. And I think, I just think as a country, we can do better. I think the church can do better in leading the way towards saying here's this value of human dignity that we hold very clearly. Here's the value of family that we believe in. Here's the value of loving our neighbors. And, you know, it's really hard to read the story of the Good Samaritan and conclude that your neighbor is only the person who lives next to you and only if they share your ethnicity and your country of origin, your religion. Like, that's just not the example that she just gave us of what it looks like to love your neighbor.
And I think, you know, when the government steps in with these policies, it actually limits the ways that the churches that the church in the United States can minister in ways that we feel that we've been called by God to do.
[00:33:31] Speaker A: Yeah.
Matthew, what have you personally learned about faith from, you know, different refugees that you've. That you literally know, like, in your life?
[00:33:41] Speaker B: Yeah, like, so much. I mean, I.
My wife and I, well, even before we were married, I lived in this apartment complex outside of Chicago where most of my neighbors were refugees. And then my. My.
We. We got married, had our wedding reception in that apartment complex, and our daughter was. Our first daughter was born when we lived there. And most of our neighbors were refugees and then other immigrants as well. But it's an incredibly vibrant, unique neighborhood. A lot of our neighbors there were Karen. Burmese. So it's this ethnic minority group from Burma, also known as Myanmar, most of whom are Christians, I think. You know, Burma is not a primarily Christian country. It's a primarily Buddhist country with a very repressive military government that has no respect for religious freedom whatsoever. And that's why the vast majority of the refugees historically who've come from Burma are either Christian or Muslim. They're both religious minority groups that are very severely persecuted. So in our neighborhood, we had a lot of this ethnic group, the Koran, who are largely Baptists and Anglicans, some other Burmese folks who were Catholic.
And I mean, just to give you a sense, these are people who basically were forced out of their country first, first out of their homes and then out of their country, lived in a refugee camp. And these particular folks were in Thailand for more than a decade. And people need to understand a refugee camp is. I mean, they vary what they look like. And people are in different circumstances, not always in camp settings, but it is basically like you're not allowed to leave. You're not allowed to work. You're there to wait. People talk about people being warehoused, and sometimes for decades. It's this incredible waste of human potential. But people waiting, theoretically safe but subsiding on rations from the UN or from some, you know, charity, wanting to help, to contribute and pride of themselves, but not being allowed to do so. Finally, they're given the option to come to the United States. And this happened particularly under the administration of George W. Bush. We started to see large numbers of. Of Burmese refugees starting to arrive in the US more than 70,000 of them. And again, most of them were Christians. They were my neighbors in this apartment complex. And I. There was actually a. A Burmese church that met in the. The apartment right underneath mine, like a little small house church. I would know that church was happening because there'd be like 50 sets of shoes outside of the apartment. These people do not wear shoes inside the house. That's like a cultural taboo.
And like really loud worship music. Like, some of, you know, I wouldn't recognize the words, but I'd recognize some of the tunes because they're the same songs that we sing in my church.
And I've had some of those neighbors at my door to make sure that I know who Jesus is.
Like in, you know, in broken English, but people who just so passionately love the Lord and want everyone to know who Jesus is and what he's done for them.
And I've followed Jesus most of my life. You know, it wasn't my first introduction to the gospel, but I actually have learned some things about following Jesus from my refugee neighbors who, who, you know, like, you kind of lose the nominal Christian crowd when you're persecuted for your faith. At the point that you're choosing, like, do I want to keep living my comfortable life or do I want to follow Jesus? You know, if you don't really believe this stuff, you're not going to choose to follow Jesus. And so you have people whose faith has been really tested by persecution.
I think there's a Burmese pastor in Oklahoma who I've gotten the chance to meet, and he said, you know, first of all, he's in Oklahoma, so, like, very Christian part of the United States. He said, before I came to the United States, I didn't think that this country was 99% Christian. I thought it was 100% Christian, like you all have in God We Trust on your money, like.
And also this was the country that had sent the missionaries that brought the gospel to his people group. I mean, he's not a new believer, he's third or fourth generation. But he, like, I know Christians who celebrate Adoniram Judson Day every year for the missionary who brought the gospel to their people group in Burma and so my friend basically said, you know, I got to Oklahoma, and I was so excited to be in the United States and saw these beautiful church buildings. And then I went into some, and a bunch of them were kind of empty and, like, mostly filled with old people. And he said, at a certain point, I realized that maybe God didn't just bring me here to save my life, though very well, likely did that. But he also brought me here to bring the gospel back to the country that brought the gospel to my people in the first place.
And I actually think that's a. I mean, that's not just Burmese. That's so many. I mean, so many of my Congolese refugee friends have a passionate Christian faith.
Refugees from Venezuela. I can think of people who I've worshiped with in my own church who just bring a really deep trust in Jesus, a trust in Jesus that's been refined by hardships that I never have experienced and never hope to experience.
But I think that also goes to. Back to the scriptures. In Matthew 25, we're told that Jesus says, I was hungry. You gave me something to eat. I was thirsty. You gave me something to drink. I was a stranger, and you welcomed me. And the disciples said, wait, Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or sick or in prison or a stranger? And Jesus says, well, whatever you did for the least of these my brothers and sisters, you did it unto me.
And we like to leave out the second part because it's a little uncomfortable, but whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.
And we could debate from a theological perspective, I'm not saying that that act of receiving the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, is salvific. Like, it's probably more that we have received God's grace, and that leads us to be the people who will welcome strangers and feed the hungry.
That is supposed to be the fruit of our faith. That is supposed to be the way that Jesus at the end of time, is judging the nations and saying, well done, enter into my rest or. Or get away from me. I never knew you.
[00:39:13] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
It's such a wild picture to think about. Okay, Even. Even your example, like, they were learned about Christianity, came over here, and now they're like, oh, now we need. We need to bring it to America.
Which, I mean, yeah, I'm not, like, super in disagreement about that, but. But Matthew, that makes me think about, you know, the Christians, and we're. We're talking Christians specifically in this moment, at least. Right. That are all about mission trips, and they want to go other places, and they want to go to other countries, and they're all about taking the gospel there and loving people there.
But then they have a hard time doing that here. Can you speak to what you think that disconnect is?
[00:39:52] Speaker B: Yeah, I think, again, it's often just a lack of imagination. Like, I think that, you know, in the book of Acts, Paul says in Acts 17, from One Nation, God creates every nation, and he establishes exact times and places where they should live. And he does so for a reason, Acts 17:27, so that men and women would seek him and reach out to him and find him, though he's not far from any one of us.
And I think what to me that says is, God is sovereign over the movement of people. Like, there are awful reasons why people have had to leave their countries.
There are economic reasons, There are social reasons, political reasons. But above all, that is the hand of God and the movement of people towards an end. And it is so that people would seek him and reach out to him and find Him. And that God could work through the movement of people to draw people to himself is, I think, a beautiful story that's been unfolding throughout world history. It's God's mission at work.
And I think God is inviting his church into that. I mean, it's intentional. Like, we tend, as those of us who are evangelical Christians, we think a lot about missions like Go to the ends of the earth.
That's good. But we forget that that passage starts with Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth. And we're missing something profound if we don't notice that God in His sovereignty has sent the ends of the earth to a place like North Carolina or Illinois or California or Colorado. And again, some of those people will surprise you because you will tell them what you think about Jesus, and they will tell you what they think about Jesus. And they love Jesus as much as we do. Others of them will be like, who's Jesus? Like, I don't know that story, or I've heard a few things in my religious tradition.
But it's actually an incredible opportunity precisely because in the United States, we live in this context with religious freedom, like those mission trips. I mean, don't send people to places like Afghanistan and Somalia for a reason. Like, it's against the law to go there with the intention of sharing your faith. It would be against the law for people to make the decision to decide to follow Jesus if they wanted to. And yet people from those countries Come to the United States where we are blessed with religious freedom, where we're free to share our faith and people are free to receive it or to reject it. And I want to be really clear. At World Relief, we don't do proselytism. We don't trick people into following Jesus. We don't say, we'll serve you as long as you pray this prayer. We serve all people without exception. And yet proselytism is not the same as evangelism. Evangelism is an open invitation. Not under pressure, not coercive, not a hard pressure, like sales pitch, but it's an open invitation into a relationship with Jesus. And very often that comes about as a result of a question. It's when you've been loved and welcomed by a team from a local church, which, by the way, the church would be called to do, whether those people would ever share your faith or not, like the Good Samaritan, love your neighbor story is binding regardless of if those people are Christians or not or if they might ever consider it. But when we do that part faithfully, it's actually pretty common that you get the question of, why. Why do you love us so much?
And we get to. First, Peter says, be ready to give an answer to everyone who asks you for the reason for the hope that is within you and to do so with gentleness and respect. And one of the things we want to do with this book, seeking Refuge, is help people think about how to. How to do so with gentleness and respect. Like, it's important that we understand where people are coming from, that we are sensitive even to the power dynamics of, like, I don't want my refugee friend thinking that they need to come to church with me if I'm gonna. For me to keep being their friend. You know, I don't want that. Like, I don't want them to presume that.
[00:43:10] Speaker A: Conditional.
[00:43:11] Speaker B: Yes. And, yeah. I also. I want people to know who Jesus is. Jesus has transformed my life. It's. I think, actually a lot of refugees are coming from context where talking about what you believe is a little more normal than in the United States, where we're very, like, uncomfortable about talking about faith.
And there's all sorts of obvious ways for that to come up, you know, like Christmas time. Like, I've had people tell me, like, okay, you all are Christians. You believe in this fat man in the red suit. It's like, well, no. Like, for whatever reason, we sometimes lie to our children about that, but that's not what we actually believe. I'm sorry if People are listening to this car with your children. But maybe you should think about why we tell our children this.
But here's what we actually believe about Christmas. We believe that the God of the universe, who created the universe is a triune God, which, like, hard concept for Christians to explain. Turns out most of us haven't thought that carefully about how weird this is, but central Christian belief and Jesus Christ became a human being while being God, fully God and fully man. And like my Muslim friends believe in Jesus and that they believe that Jesus existed. They like Jesus, they don't believe that he was God become man. So, like, there's this opportunity for me to explain what we actually believe and why that's such a radical. Like, that's what is very unique about my faith and in the person of Jesus. And, you know, it's just an opportunity for conversation. And they might be like, wow, I want to know that Jesus too. And I would love for that to happen. They might be like, I think that's crazy. And the great thing about religious freedom is they're allowed to do that.
But we could stay in that friendship and in that conversation and learn from one another. And we have seen lots of people, in the context of religious freedom that we have in the United States, make the decision to become followers of Jesus from Muslim backgrounds and Hindu backgrounds and from religious traditions that I didn't know existed before I was in relationship with refugees. You know, that I have friends who are Mandayan, they believe in John the Baptist, like that's the foundation of their faith. Like they don't believe in Jesus, they believe in John the Baptist. It's not Muslim, it's not Jewish. It's, you know, like the whole different thing. And they're persecuted in Iran, they're persecuted in Iraq, and along with Christians, along with Jewish people. And so, you know, there's all sorts of ways to just broaden our worldview as well.
[00:45:15] Speaker A: So I just realized persecution is not always even persecution of faith. It's not always because they're Christian, but it's because they are not choosing the faith of whatever that country is.
[00:45:25] Speaker B: Yeah, there are definitely religious minorities who are Christians. There's also religious minorities. I mean, if I'm going to go back to Burma, like, the Christians are absolutely persecuted. So are the Rohingya, who are largely Muslim.
[00:45:35] Speaker A: Got it.
[00:45:36] Speaker B: And I mean, you could argue they've been more persecuted by the Burmese regime in the last few years and just horrific.
Large numbers of people crammed into camps that are overcrowded, without adequate resources to you know, basic needs like food and shelter are inadequate. And I've had those folks as my neighbors as well. The Rohingya, Muslim, Burmese refugees.
I've had some of them as neighbors. And my, my daughter's first little friend was the little Rohingya girl who lives in the same apartment building as us. And, you know, just a lovely family who I've gotten to know. And, you know, I think there's so many opportunities and who's gone through horrific suffering very similar to what the Christians have gone through. And I think, again, if we believe in the dignity of every human person, we want to welcome Christians who are persecuted for their faith. That's sort of like low bar obvious to me as a Christian. But also we don't want anyone persecuted for their beliefs. If I believe in religious freedom, which I really do, that has to be for the people who believe things other than what I believe also.
[00:46:35] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:46:36] Speaker B: I mean, even like, you know, you know, we're both Christian, we're both Christians, Kristen, we probably don't believe 100% of exactly the same things. And that's okay. Like, that's the beauty of religious freedom. And we can coexist in the society. That's one of the blessings of this country.
[00:46:50] Speaker A: Yeah, well, and I love that you said that. I mean, I feel like that's kind of the second time that you brought up, like, we don't do this as Christians because people are Christians. We do this. We take care of people as Christians because that's what we're called to do.
But I do see, I want to know, Matthew, in your opinion, because this is one of the things that I see argued is the idea of, like, whether or not Jesus was actually a refugee. Some people have their, their reasoning for yes, why he was, and others for no, why he wasn't. And before I let you answer, I do just want to point out, like, I do think a common misconception is if we get this right, then that will allow us to justify the way that we do or don't treat people.
And so if that's the case, if you're entering into that argument with that, like, it doesn't matter anyway because God says they're his people. But still, what's your thought on that?
[00:47:37] Speaker B: I mean, full disclosure, we have a chapter called Jesus was a refugee in the book, so I'm going to take that position, but with the caveat of they didn't have the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees that defined a refugee on an international basis. When Jesus, Mary And Joseph fled from Bethlehem to Egypt because of a well founded fear of persecution under King Herod.
So if you go back to that legal definition, I mean, I think you could like one question is, well, was there persecution on account of their race, their religion, their political opinion, their national origin or their social group?
Social group is kind of the catch all term that can encompass a lot. Or depending how you narrow you want to, we might not. So we could debate that. Yeah, I don't think it says in Matthew 2, you know the answer to that question. There's a lot that we're not told. The other argument is, well, they're not really outside of their country of origin because this was all the Roman Empire, like Egypt and Judea and Galilee. All these were different parts of the Roman Empire with different leaders.
And that's true. So maybe Jesus was an internally displaced person within one country had he not crossed international boundary. This was also before we had the concept of the nation state. So I guess a lot of the, when we add contemporary legal terms onto a time when they didn't exist, like we're going to have a hard time pinning this down. I would say if we're, I mean, probably the best descriptor of Jesus is actually an asylum seeker because we don't have any reason to think that they got permission before they left and then, you know, had the document when they crossed into Egypt, they probably got there and said, hey, Herod's coming to kill all the little boys in Bethlehem, can we come here? Or maybe there was no one who asked them a question of the border at all. We really don't know. From Matthew 2, I would say that if they were asked those questions in the US context and there's actually a really fascinating book kind of digging into like what if we did apply contemporary categories to Jesus's story on this question of Jesus being a refugee. But you know, if in a contemporary asylum context, if the asylum officer asks why, why do you have 1,200 fear persecution? And the answer is an angel told me that there's going to be a genocide. I'm not sure you're going to win your case. That doesn't count as documentary evidence in our system. But I'm thankful that Jesus, Mary and Joseph made it to Egypt. And I mean, obviously in God's sovereignty, I don't think this could have happened. But our Lord and Savior was not killed prematurely. At probably the age of two, he escaped persecution on divine instructions to his earthly father to get up in the middle of night, take Jesus Take Mary and flee, which is by the way, a story that sounds, maybe not the angel angelic morning part, but the get up in the middle of the night you've got to flee is a very common story in the world today. Like unfortunately that relives itself over and over and over again and going to a place where you're not going to necessarily know the language or the culture and, and some people might welcome you, but other people might ask you why you're stealing their job as a carpenter. Like there's. Those stories are not, I mean it rhymes with the biblical story that Jesus experienced. So I think that Jesus very clearly from the, the words of scripture in Matthew chapter two, had to flee a well founded fear of persecution and go to a different place as a child, at a minimum, should shape how his followers today would respond to people, millions of people, tens of millions of people in this country and in other parts of the world who have gone through very similar circumstances.
[00:50:51] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean it goes back to what you said at the beginning of trying to explain to us, you know, the differences between people that are fleeing. Like they're not wanting to leave. So it's not like it's an easy journey, you know, I mean even we just picture like at Christmas time, you know, oh, there's Mary sitting on a donkey and Joseph's walking and everything's just like chill. There's no wild animals, there's no thieves, there's no like, it's just they're not
[00:51:12] Speaker B: running from the people trying to kill them behind them, you know, like it's very serene. And the reality is we, we. I mean I've joked about this when I speak, but I think I took this theological observation from my daughter Zipporah, who as a three year old noticed our nativity scene, which she loved to play with and act out the Christmas story with, didn't have the King Herod figurine. She's like, we're missing somebody here. And I was like, yeah, we never put him in the story, you know, why it would ruin Christmas. Like that's not like we don't want to dwell on a tyrannical governmental leader coming and killing children. Like in the Catholic tradition they have the Feast of the Holy Innocents where they actually intentionally after Christmas and they still can enjoy the miracle of the Incarnation, but they're reflecting on the tragedy that was right alongside. I mean it is and it's in the scripture. There's Rachel weeping for her children who are no more. Like that is right alongside good tidings. Of great joy and that.
That mingling of joy and sorrow and horror, but also hope is part of the human experience, is part of the biblical story, and it is. It is being relived today for tens of millions of people who've been forced to flee from their homes. And God invites his church filled by the Holy Spirit to enter into that, to be the people who, you know, we don't know if there was people in Egypt who welcomed the holy family when they got there, but I hope there was.
You know, it's treating others the way we would want to be treated if we were in the same circumstances.
[00:52:38] Speaker A: Matthew, that removal of King Herod imagery is going to stick with me because I feel like it is such a perfect illustration of what we see right now. Right. And so I think there is a lot of people. We'll just talk. The church generally for a second is saying, like, no, we're just going to take out the. The King Herod. We're going to take out the horror. We're going to take out the issue because we don't want to look at it because it makes us uncomfortable, and we'd rather focus on, you know, happy things. So before we get to what people can individually do as a. As the church, what can we do to support and to assist?
[00:53:11] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I think the first place I would love for the church to start is by having this conversation. Maybe that's doing a book study on seeking refuge. Maybe it's preaching a sermon on, you know, what's Jesus? Refugee. You don't even have to conclusively answer that. Or, you know, you can go to literally dozens of other stories in the old New Testament with people fleeing persecution and crossing a border and going to live in another place. Like this is a part of the biblical story. So to me, it's rather scandalous that less than a quarter of evangelical Christians, at least, think about this primarily as an issue from their faith, from the Bible, from there. I think there's. I mean, one of the things I love about World Relief is we don't just welcome refugees and serve immigrants on behalf of the church, but in partnership with the church. So we're not in every community, but we're in a lot of communities around the United States, and we have resources even for those who are beyond, you know, where we have a local office to help. Help with that discipleship process first and foremost. But then very practically think about how do you reach out to the refugees and the. And the other immigrants who may be in your community? How do you show them the love of Jesus in practical ways?
And then I'd say a third thing is, you know, it's. I think especially right now, when the government is stepping back so dramatically.
I mean, refugees just lost access. Refugees who are lawfully present but have not yet been able to get their green cards, they're, in that process, have lost access to food stamps across the United States. I mean, that is a huge issue if you're a family of six. You know, even though you're both parents working, if you're working at 14, $15 an hour and paying rent, those food stamps were like they were keeping you. Your. Your bellies filled for your kids. So there's a huge opportunity for churches and individuals within them to step up with their finances as well. I mean, this is also a biblical idea. In the Old Testament, when in Deuteronomy 24, when the Israelites were to bring forward their. Their. Their offerings, it was for the priests and the Levites and also for the orphan and the widow and the foreigner. And I think we sometimes forget. I mean, I'm all for supporting the church, and I want my pastor to have a good salary, but sometimes we skip over, like, God was very explicit about caring for those who are vulnerable with our own resources as well.
And then the last thing I would say is advocacy, which I saved for last because it's controversial and, you know, scares people. But what I don't mean by advocacy is, go vote for Republicans. Go vote for Democrats. You will never hear world really say that we're not a partisan organization, but we do actually tell Republicans and Democrats and independents and anybody else who will listen to us that these are the policies that we think would work better based on the values of our Christian faith.
And again, without claiming the scriptures give you a perfect solution to this. Like, I don't. There's not a number of refugees that should come to the United States in any given year. That's in the words of the Bible.
But frankly, like I thought, when it was set at 125,000 two years ago, that was a fairly reasonable number at a time when there are 40 million refugees in the world, a very small share. But it was actually in the interest of the United States to have people filling jobs in the economy at a time when food costs are rising because we don't have workers.
It was also allowed us to let people from a number of different countries of origin who had fled persecution, you know, really affirm our commitments to the values of religious liberty and human rights.
And that's only possible if the government creates that possibility. In 2026, refugee resettlement has been completely shut down. The only exception at this point has been for white South Africans who have not actually fled their country, so they don't meet the traditional international legal definition of refugee.
To be clear, I like white South Africans. I would love for more of them to come to the United States. I'm generally pro legal immigration.
But we're really concerned that the refugee resettlement program is not being used for people who meet the traditional definition of a refugee. For persecuted Christians, for people persecuted because they serve the US Military in Afghanistan and are now at risk for people who have fled a war in a place like Sudan or the Democratic Republic of Congo or Ukraine, all of which are context where we work at World Relief. And I would say that's the last thing I would say in terms of advocacy is it's advocate for people to be able to come here. But also, even in high times, the vast majority of people are not going to become able to come here. So also advocates for things like, you know, very basic access to food and medication that will save lives around the world and can stop diseases from growing in places like the Democratic Republic of Congo and potentially crossing borders as well.
[00:57:24] Speaker A: Yeah, so many good ideas. Matthew, last question for you. And we're going to make it a little bit more personal for the listeners. Okay. Because the podcast is called Becoming Church. How can the people listening become the church of the people around them? Maybe. Maybe specifically to people that they've been taught to fear.
[00:57:41] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, this sounds a little, like, cliche, but I think sometimes it's as simple as, like, open your eyes. I've had people who are like, oh, we don't have refugees in my neighborhood. And I was like, maybe not, but you might be surprised. And maybe you're about five minutes away from them. You know, like, you don't have to go that far.
And what you might mean is, I don't know those people. And that's probably true, but you might know them. You know, when you're ordering food at a restaurant, maybe you need to go to a different restaurant that you haven't gone to before and take the time to talk to the. The waiter or the waitress, the person behind the counter.
Maybe it's, you know, you talk to your Uber driver or your Lyft driver instead of just setting the, like, I'm on quiet mode, put my headphones in and ask. So, you know, not an interrogative way. This can make them uncomfortable. Like, where are you from, like, oh, what was that?
[00:58:28] Speaker A: Be a person.
[00:58:29] Speaker B: Yeah. Like, have a conversation. Be empathetic. I know that's that word gets people in trouble, but I think it's actually. We're told in Scripture to.
To do to others as you'd have them do to you. You can't do that if you don't understand what they have gone through. And I think, you know, we can help facilitate that in World Relief. Like, if. Like, I wouldn't even know where to start. Great. We'll, like, train you and we'll connect you to, you know, a team from your church to help come alongside a particular family that's still in the process of adjustment and integration and learning the language. And there will be cultural misunderstandings. There will be language barriers. Although I will say I've been doing this for 20 years. We didn't used to have a device in our pocket that translated in real time. Like, it's actually gotten easier than, you know, even 20 years ago. It's amazing what you communicate just with, like, a smile and, like, some hand gestures. So I would start there. And, you know, my experience is that will drive you back to the Bible. You'll realize, like, oh, how do I think about this? As a Christian, I'm supposed to love my neighbor. What does that mean?
And our hope is seeking refuge will point you to lots of biblical principles that will help spur your thinking. It will also, like, as you get to know people, you wonder, wait, why is their sister stuck in this refugee camp? They were scheduled for a settlement, and then it was canceled. But why? That's so mean. That's so, like, heartless. Why is that the policy? Why does it have to be the policy? And what can I do to change it? And that's where I think we can be stewards of the gift those of us who are US Citizens have in our democratic form of government.
That is actually an opportunity not just to make sure that I get the most from the government and reduce my taxes. Like, that's all good and fair, but also to look out for those who are the most vulnerable in our own society and around the world. And there's lots of people in that category, I think, but it includes refugees, for sure.
[01:00:11] Speaker A: Yeah.
I love that you just kind of ended with a challenge of getting people to think and ask questions and ask why? Because that's really kind of the heart behind this whole show, is I want people to.
[01:00:20] Speaker B: To.
[01:00:20] Speaker A: I want them to be inspired, and I want them to learn, but I also want them to start asking these questions and just going like, well, why are things the way that they are? So I love that. Thank you, Matthew. I will link up the book. I will also link up just World Relief so if people want to go find resources or find a local chapter to them so they can get training or whatever.
Thank you so much for being here.
[01:00:42] Speaker B: Thank you, Kristen. We appreciate you having us. Having me
[01:00:47] Speaker A: asking why things are the way they are is the first step. Asking how you can help change it is the next one. World Relief has fantastic resources, tools and even more education on their website. Seeking Refuge is also a fantastic resource for biblically informed answers to those good questions. I'm also going to point you toward women of welcome and I encourage the ladies listening to join one of the local chapters that are popping up across the country.
I lead one here in Charlotte and I would love to have you join us. The link to get involved no matter where you live is in the show notes. Until next time. Thanks so much for listening and keep becoming the church to the people around you.
