Saturday, October 27, 2018

Continuation and Conclusion: Enhancing Work with Refugees




Introduction

With this final chapter of learning how to hear from God where He wants you to join Him at work and how to begin a faith-based ministry, we will learn about steps each organization must consider after the first month or year of the ministry organization’s life. These steps are evaluation, adaptation, continuation, expansion, and discontinuation. After remarks on these phases, a conclusion to this project will be made.

Summation of Chapters

In previous articles, we learned the most important part of any faith-based organization is prayer, staying in intimate contact with God, the Giver of the vision for the ministry program. Before, during, and after each stage of creating and enacting the ministry, prayer must enwrap the participants, recipients, resources, and leadership. No changes or removals of any part of the ministry should occur without intentionally seeking God’s will. Recall each stage of the inception process with the below summaries.

Stage One-Getting to Know the Refugees

Besides prayer, the most important element of a faith-based ministry, for refugee work, is getting to know the refugees. This stage requires
  • ·         Seeking the need of the refugee groups in your city,
  • ·         Speaking to them, building trust with them
  • ·         Asking their perception of their needs
  • ·         Your noticing of their needs
  •        Asking general questions about a good day and time for the refugee group to meet for ministry
  • ·         Determining who are the gatekeeper, leader, activist, and caretaker of the refugee group
  • ·         Researching the refugee’s people group and national histories
  • ·         Putting yourself in their shoes.

Stage Two-Founding a Faith-based Ministry

After getting to know the refugees, the next stage for working with refugees is founding a faith-based ministry. What does it entail to set up the organization’s structure? Along with prayer throughout the process, this stage requires:
  • ·         Deciding if the organization will be an NGO or NPO
  • ·         Recalling the vision God gave you, then creating the mission statement
  • ·         Setting long and short-term goals and objectives based on the help you will give refugees
  • ·         Determining what services the faith-based ministry will offer such as English classes, skills training, peace-building and integration between refugees and the community, emergency material relief, marches and learning-sharing dialogues between refugee leaders, ministry leaders, and community leaders including the government, orientation sessions to teach about refugee rights and access to services, psycho-social assessments of refugees, job training, and counselling services
  • ·         Looking within the Christian community for resources to help meet the refugees’ perceptions of their greatest needs, their practical needs, and spiritual and emotional needs.

Stage Three-Connecting

The third stage of beginning a faith-based ministry to refugees is connecting. This stage involves meeting people in the community and working with them. It includes casting vision to them, so they will accept the new ministry program and want to join it. There are several reasons for connecting. These include:
  • ·         To get volunteers
  • ·         To get funding
  • ·         To enlarge the ministry
  • ·         To get added expertise
  • ·         To advocate about refugees in the community, city/town, state, province, and country

While working in this stage, you will learn of and visit, call, or email community leaders, professionals, and businesses who can help the people with the aim of developing relationships for the future to help refugees. These connections could lead to volunteers joining the ministry team, getting partners, and gaining more funding sources. While doing this stage, you will want to visit or interview other NGOs and NPOs like A21, World Relief, USAID, churches, homeless shelters, UNHCR, a refugee center, etc. to see how they work. You might need their help, input, or connections while working with refugees. While you are connecting with these organizations, advocacy for refugees begins and continues in the community with the help of legal advocates, government, immigration businesses, teachers, doctors, principals, other mission organizations, etc.

Stage Four-On Your Mark

When the earlier stages are complete, you are ready to begin doing the practical things to get the faith-based organization for refugees started. These include
  • ·         Praying
  • ·         Finding a venue
  • ·         Acquiring resources for the ministry through NGOs/NPOs, corporations, churches, small companies, UNHCR, etc.
  • ·         Buying supplies for the ministry-stationery, books, food, blankets, copies of lessons or intake sheets, etc.
  • ·         Finding volunteers-workers, prayer supporters, experts
  • ·         Advertising the ministry to refugee via flyers, word of mouth through the refugee community leaders, and notices on boards in the community
  • ·         Advertising the ministry to the community to get their acceptance of the refugees and their help with the ministry to the refugees
  • ·         Praying

Stage Five-Being and Doing

You have done all the background work, connected with potential partners and community leaders, talked with and become acquainted with the refugees in the community, established the ministry program as either an NGO or NPO, and set up the mission statement, goals, and objectives. Now is the time to begin the actual ministry to refugees. This stage has six parts.
  • ·         Prayer-begin the day of ministry with prayer and continue it throughout the day
  • ·         Prepare-lessons, clothes closet, food pantry, rules, policies, and train the volunteers
  • ·         Present-open the doors and do intake with each refugee treating everyone as a created child of God.
  • ·         Assess-at the end of the day, week, and year, assess what went well, what did not go well, and where adjustments and expansion of ministries can occur
  • ·         Adjust-adjust the ministry as determined by the assessment.
  • ·         Prayer-close the day, week, month, and year with prayer. Pay careful attention to each worker to determine if they are getting overwhelmed so you can talk to them and pray with and for them.

Evaluation and Adaptation

Stage five teaches evaluation and adaptation as part of day one’s work. The leader of the ministry should do it at the end of the first weeks, month, and year to ensure the help needed by the refugee is being provided. It helps the leaders and other workers decide if the perceived and expressed needs are the real needs and if they are being met by the ministry. Evaluation and adaption are a continuing cycle of any positively impacting organization. Whether the ministry is one week, one year, or ten years old, evaluation and adaptation should occur.

Expansion, Continuation, and Discontinuation

Because of regular assessments of needs, funds, and partners, the leaders of the faith-based ministry to refugees could see the necessity and viability of expanding the ministries to refugees. A ministry that only offered English classes can now offer food or clothing assistance. Where before they could just help with used clothes, the ministry leaders see an opportunity to teach the refugee how to write a resume (curriculum vitae), and how to look for and interview for a job. Expansion assumes the refugee ministry will continue. Keeping things stable also assumes the ministry will continue.

Situations exist where a ministry needs to be discontinued. Possibly it was an added-on ministry to meet felt needs, but when put into practice, the need was not great enough to warrant using resources. Other situations may exist where the ministry should be discontinued. Reasons for this could be the refugee population dwindled because they returned to their home countries, the venue was not convenient to refugee habitation sites, the ministry’s reputation fell and refugees, volunteers, and funders no longer wanted to work with the ministry. The other reason a faith-based refugee ministry should cease to exist is when God says it should. We cannot fully comprehend the reason God tells us to do or not do something, but we must always obey and then seek His will for other areas in which He wants us to serve.

Conclusion

Wherever you are in the process of obeying God by serving Him in ministry, prayer is always paramount. Through prayer you grow closer to God, can hear more clearly from Him, receive the conviction and courage to act on His vision for you at the time, and gain strength, direction, and motivation to do what He asks of you. Without prayer interweaving and enwrapping a ministry, it will unravel. The weave will fail, the colors will bleed, and true support, encouragement, training, and help will not happen.

God created each person. He loves everyone whether they are from our own country or one 30 hours away by plane. God loves each person no matter what their religion or culture and wants everyone to come to know His as their Lord and Savior. Peter stated it this way in 2 Peter 3:9, “The Lord is not slow about His promise, as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance.” John also spoke of Jesus dying for all people in John 3:16, “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.” God’s gift of salvation and eternal life with Him is for everyone who believes. God loves every person, even the aliens/refugees.

Before we became Christians, we alienated ourselves from God because of our sin and rebelliousness. Yet, He did not want that to be. God provided the perfect sacrifice through the death of His Holy Son, Jesus Christ. No other sacrifice for sins was needed after it. If God loved us that much before He formed us in our mother’s wombs, even though we alienated ourselves from Him, then we, as Christians, should love those who are alien to us. God taught this to the Israelites in the Old Testament and Jesus taught it to the people of the New Testament. In Leviticus 19:34, Moses told the Israelites what God commanded him. He said, “The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt; I am the Lord your God.” In Deuteronomy 10:19, God reminded the Israelites they once lived as aliens in Egypt. Moses said it this way. “So show your love for the alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.” Jeremiah recorded in Jeremiah 22:3,

“Thus says the Lord, ‘Do justice and righteousness, and deliver from the hand of the oppressor him who has been robbed. And do no wrong or violence to the resident alien, the fatherless, and the widow, nor shed innocent blood in this place [Judah, the place of God, as is our hearts the place of God].’” [NASB]

Other key passages in the Old Testament about aliens/sojourners in the community include Deuteronomy 14:29, 24:14, & 17-21, 26:12-13, and 27:19.

In the New Testament, the Jesus translated for the Jewish lawyer commandments Moses taught the Israelites. The lawyer tried to trick Jesus by asking how he can inherit eternal life. Jesus answered him with a question, “What is written in the Law?” The lawyer replied stating the first and second greatest commandments. He said in Luke 10:27, “You shall love the Lord your God will all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus told the lawyer he answered correctly, now do it and live. The lawyer, being trained in debate, wanted to justify himself (most likely because he had not loved his neighbor). He asked Jesus in verse twenty-nine, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus replied with a parable, a story with a meaning. The parable is of the good Samaritan in Luke 10:30-35. After telling the story, Jesus asked the lawyer in verse thirty-six, “Who proved to be a neighbor to the beaten man?” The lawyer replied with truth in verse thirty-seven saying, “The one who showed mercy toward him.” Jesus commanded him, “Go and do the same.” Works earn no one salvation, but works are evidence of a person’s salvation and proof of a life showing the love of salvation.

Whether you call refugees and asylum-seekers neighbors, aliens, or sojourners, God commands us all, believers and unbelievers, to care for them because He created and loves them. As Christians, this mandate is even stronger. We show our love for God by our obedience to Him. John taught this in 1 John 5:3 when he wrote, “For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments; and His commandments are not burdensome.” He also taught this in John 14:15. In this verse John recorded Jesus saying, “If you love Me, you will keep My commandments.” Jesus brought it closer to home when in Matthew 7:12 He said, “So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this in the Law and the Prophets.”

We, Christian and non-Christian, have God’s natural and written laws, and the moral laws instilled in our consciences. They should lead us to care for refugees and asylum-seekers. Along with the instilled conscience and God’s written laws, we have the God-given capacity for compassion, love, and care. Within each of us, we know the right thing to do-care for the aliens/refugees and asylum-seekers.

With this understanding, we must decide with the free will God gave each person if we will obey this internal and written mandate to care for the oppressed, widowed, poor, orphaned, and alien. We must decide if we will weave our weft threads on the loom with the refugees and asylum-seekers warp threads to make a beautiful tapestry with God. This tapestry woven together is stronger than the individual, singular weft threads or warp threads. With this woven tapestry, “we” and “them” become “us” that supports, encourages, helps, teaches, feeds, and walks alongside as the family God envisioned humanity to be. We each get to choose to be woven by God into the beautiful tapestry of community and love. This is chosen woven-ness. You get to choose; God does not force you. If you choose not to weave into the lives of others in your community, you force the gifts God gave you to stagnate or extinguish. You become the weaker person in the community because you do not have the strength of the whole community, only your own. Will you choose to be woven by God into His tapestry of a compassionate and loving humanity?

Joshua said in Joshua 24:15, “As for me and my house, we will serve the LORD.”

We can change that for this project and say when we choose to obey God in His mission to the refugees and asylum-seekers,

“As for me and my house, we will (weave) with the Lord.”