Last weekend, I had the pleasure to participate in a conference on refugees and migration held by our member Union Chapel London part of the Free Churches Group. The event, entitled ‘Those Who Dream’ brought together both the theology and practice of working with and for refugees and migrants and how churches and diaconal work can be both a place of welcome and of advocacy. Much of the discussion was about how we have to stop speaking of a refugee crisis in Europe. It is not a crisis, it is not something we need to defend ourselves from. Rather, it is an impact of war and conflict. as well as increasing social and economic inequality. Alfredo Abad, President of our member Iglesia Evangélica Española, spoke about how what we were really facing in Europe was a crisis of solidarity, and Vassilios Meichanetsidis from our member Apostoli in Greece spoke about how context and history have both a positive and negative effect on how receiving communities respond.
It strikes me that it is too easy to talk of a crisis as something that affects us rather than recognizing the crisis that others are experiencing. I was challenged to rethink again about how we look at issues such as migration and refugees from the perspective of those who are looking for safety and who are escaping trauma. What I saw in this conference were many people willing to look at the situation in this other way – developing community responses that promote hospitality and integration rather than keeping new people at arm’s length.
Changing our perspective is the key for effective diaconal work – seeing things from others perspective, imagining how we would feel in the same situation, considering what we would want and need if we were in that situation. Perhaps as our political institutions continue to use the rhetoric of crisis we need to ask them what they would be looking for if the crisis was really theirs and not others?
Have a good weekend,
Heather