A shorter version of this piece was originally published at Leadership Journal where Tony is a regular contributor.
Author’s note: This article was directly influenced by the most recent New Wine conference titled “Immigration Reformation”.
I was a missionary for many years.
Many missionaries find writing newsletters home to be one of the more difficult parts of a missionary’s life. It can be difficult to find regular topics that will interest and inspire supporters back home.
I never had that problem.
I was raised in a wonderful Conservative Baptist Church in Oregon. I love my childhood church. They were consistently supportive of me and my church’s membership funded a large majority of my decade plus of missionary service.
They always loved my newsletters home.
They loved to read about my adventures. I worked in several “difficult access” countries: religiously difficult, politically difficult and economically difficult.
I wrote stories about the risks we took to fulfill our missionary calling. In many locations we had to find creative ways to get in and out of countries just to fulfill our work.
In one country, we were labeled “false believers.” The government would never give us a religious visa as missionaries, so we lived as “tourists.” To do this, we had to leave the country every couple of months and reenter by another border crossing in order to live as perpetual tourist. If creative, we could keep up this ploy for years.
In another country, missionaries had to invent other reasons for living there. Some took the status of “student.” Student visas were not highly scrutinized and even though we often “forgot” to enroll in classes, we felt justified because we were in fact “students of the culture”.
Many times I had to perform old fashioned smuggling of Christian materials. We found wonderfully creative ways to move large stacks of papers across hostile borders. The spaces behind the paneling of a car door, for instance, can hold a surprising amount of books and materials.
One time, one of my missionary friends lost her documentation while we were travelling. She lost it in a particularly ill-fated location, a forgotten corner of the world where it was nearly impossible to get documents replaced. After much praying and scheming we devised a plan. First we chose a poorly staffed border crossing over a little used mountain pass. We intentionally crammed our entire party, nearly a dozen people, into a single, fairly small vehicle. Our friend was placed in the back row in the center. The plan was to hand the bored and power-intoxicated border guards our entire stack of passports and hope that in the process of matching foreigners to documents, they might lose count (Don’t all Americans look alike?). It was a sweat-inducing and prayer-triggering thirty minutes of scrutiny. Then, at the very moment it seemed our ruse would be discovered, there was a sharp shout from the dilapidated security house. When the security force returned, agitated and confused, they simply abandoned the head-count and hastily waved our team through. That was one of our closer calls.
I have stolen across a country at war on a train. This country considered the USA to be a devil.
I have endured interrogations, bailed friends out of jail and executed plans to avoid secret police, all to insure that our missionary work could continue.
Like I said, the adventures were many and the newsletters were easy to write.
Back home in Oregon, my church seemed so proud of me. They praised me for my faith. They praised me for my courage. They found my stories inspiring. They cheered for every hurdle we overcame. They supported every creative solution to each political and legal problem.
How about you? Did you find yourself cheering when you read these stories, like my church back home? Do you find yourself supporting such acts of creativity and courage?
If so, then you have just cheered for an undocumented worker (immigrant). You have just supported someone who sneaks across borders in order to do a job that only exists on the borders’ other side. You have just embraced the courage of someone who breaks the law because they believe in a better world.
Now, you may feel that it is a cheap trick to equate missionary endeavors to American immigration policy. But we, the Church, need to be careful how we wield the categories of “illegal.” It would behoove our credibility to admit that we don’t play by consistent rules. When the church partakes in illegal practices we often defend it, champion it and advocate for it. When “others” partake in very similar illegal practices we use a very broad brush to paint them as unforgivably wrong.
To be sure, I am not saying the two circumstances are identical parallels. There are certainly correlated issues associated with the current US immigration debate. Here are a few: There is the perceived taking of US jobs by these sweat laborers and migrant workers. There is the complicated impact on US federal funds and services. And there is the purveyance of criminal activity as some undocumented immigrants provide the supply to America’s demand.
These correlated topics are issues of strong debate in innumerable locations around popular media, in legislative sessions and across dining room tables. However, for the sake of this one small article, I would like to ask my sisters and brothers in Christ to consider the ways that we inconsistently apply the term “illegal.” Also, could we consider that our passionate celebration of undocumented immigration by missionaries is fueled by applaudable desires (desires shared by all humankind): a better world, a better future and the proliferation of the blessings of God to all peoples.
Finally, I would like to ask, regardless of each person’s political position on US immigration policy, could we all strive for godly language? Words are important. Words have deep meaning, theological meaning. When we refer to a person as “illegal,” that is an identity statement. It is a theological statement. I believe sentences like—“We have to stop those illegals from crossing the border”—sorrows the heart of God. On the other hand, a behavior can be illegal. An act can be illegal. Even a habit can be illegal. But a person, a spiritual entity, a beloved creation of God, cannot be “illegal” in their identity. People are beautiful. They are eternally valuable.
C.S. Lewis said, “You have never met a mere human.” In that, he was sharing the idea that each human being (regardless of station or status) is so beautiful, so transcendent, so valuable that we should be dazzled, even enraptured by them.
Instead of “illegals” maybe we could start to refer to those travelers from the south as “Our undocumented neighbors.” In the story of the Good Samaritan, Jesus chooses to exemplify the “neighbor” as a foreigner on a journey. Let us heed C.S Lewis’ advice. Let us pray for our hearts’ transformation so we can live full of compassion for our every neighbor… the neighbor across the street and the neighbor across the planet.
