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Refugee Resettlement

The Bible tells us that God is pleased when we help the poor and welcome the alien.

The United States and Canada receive thousands of refugees every year. Many come with little money and few contacts, and the help you and your church give them can surely change a life.

World Relief has worked to help resettle more than 160,000 refugees in the past twenty years. They work in partnership with local churches and offer services in the U.S. and abroad.

Canadian Lutheran World Relief has been active in relief and resettlement since 1946. Their web site has practical information on preparing for sponsorship.

New World Outlook, the Mission Magazine of the United Methodist Church, has an issue on-line dedicated to Refugees and Migration.

In his book, The Changing Face of the Church: From American to Global, Tom Nees shares his own experience:

Following the Vietnam War, our family agreed to sponsor a refugee family from South Vietnam. I remember well the day in 1975 when my wife and I took our four children, ages 6 to 13, to Washington National Airport to welcome our new friends, a Vietnamese family—father and mother and their six children, ages 2 to 14—who had been flown to us from their temporary shelter at an Arkansas military base. In the rush of resettlement following the war, there was not much paperwork and no preparation. We had no idea what to expect. We just agreed that we wanted to help a homeless refugee family and would make the adjustments necessary to live together in the rather large parsonage provided us by Washington First Church of the Nazarene.

The father was a former officer in the South Vietnamese navy. He spoke enough broken English to translate for all of us. For our family it was an exciting, expanding experience which ended all too soon when we were able to help them find work and a decent, even if humble, place to live.

As we look back, we realize that we didn't have to go to Vietnam to learn about the war or Southeast Asia. Through their experiences we learned about a country we have yet to visit. We learned to appreciate their traditions, their values, their loyalty to family, and even their Christian faith as practiced quite differently from our own.

And we became their gateway to America. We introduced them to our neighbors, enrolled the children in schools, led them through the supermarkets and shopping malls, assisted them in applying for jobs and housing, and invited them to church. In all these experiences and more, both families were changed.

Tom Nee's book, The Changing Face of the Church: From American to Global, addresses these issues.

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