Immigrant Neighbors Among Us does not provide any easy answers to this contentious public debate, but rather, it aims to equip Christian clergy, educators, and lay leaders with the knowledge of how to engage the conversation within a biblical and theological framework.
When it is the church that adopts this framework, is that our very real and compelling obligation to the widow and orphan (and our laudably passionate concern for them) can lead us to unwittingly collapse the divine perspective into the political one. If, on a formal level, we engage in advocacy that disregards the value of words, what impact will we reap in our daily advocacy of the power of the Word?
Participants in DACA—for all their model behavior—do not access hardly any social programs available to U.S. citizens. They are persons in limbo, living in the only country they have known, having literally arrived under the supervision of their parents, and now asked to leave that country, expelled into a country they do not know.
Every one of the people sworn in that day was there because he or she sought freedom, and security, and greater well-being. Like my relative had admonished me, I had done my best to thrive here. I had accomplished, and overcome, and risen up.
God continues to bring people and situations into my life to reveal to me that I still play insiders and outsiders. Yet if Jesus submitted himself to a woman who was a religious and national outsider and allowed her experience of the world to reshape his reality, remembering his mission to bring redemption to everyone, who am I to believe I’ll ever be beyond it?
The primary reason why advocacy for immigration reform is a marathon is because it will require a change in minds and hearts of many Anglos in our region and our political representatives, which is a slow process.
