Immigration can be an overwhelming topic. While political pundits on both sides of a policy debate tend to reduce the matter to a simple, black-and-white issue, the reality is that immigration is complex. There are economic, cultural and political ramifications to how we respond to the arrival of immigrants to our country. Christians also face theological and missiological ramifications in how to wrap our minds and our hearts around such a multifaceted reality that takes more effort than many in our society are willing to expend. Busy with plenty of other worthy causes and questions, many within our local churches prefer to leave it to others to wrestle with the challenging questions of how, as Christians, we should respond to immigration.
We do so at our own peril. Immigration is steadily changing the face of American evangelicalism. That’s an exciting development. There is enormous potential for the growth of the Church and the transformation of lives and entire communities. However, it also means churches who are not paying attention to the dynamics of immigration may one day find themselves irrelevant to the communities that surround them. By ignoring immigration, they will miss out on what missiologist and Asbury Theological Seminary president Dr. Timothy Tennent has called “the greatest hope for Christian renewal in North America.”
Our challenge to Christians who feel like they don’t know where to begin thinking about immigration would be to take a simple step to learn more. One great way to do so would be to attend a conference that will include a focus on immigration from a Christian perspective. We wanted to highlight three separate conferences coming up in the next six weeks you may want to consider attending.
On February 23, Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama will host the G92 South conference. Building on the momentum of the original G92 conference at Cedarville University last October, this day-long symposium takes its name from the ninety-two references to the word ger, the Hebrew word for an immigrant, in the Old Testament. This conference will seek to help form a biblical response to the immigration issue. Similar to the G92 conference in Cedarville, much of the focus will be placed on college students and the emerging generation of Christian leaders. As Alabama’s new toughest-in-the-nation state law has driven many church leaders in the state to ask some tough questions about how they should respond, the G92 South conference will also feature a track for pastors and church leaders. My colleague Jenny Yang and I will be speaking, along with Gabriel Salguero of the National Latino Evangelical Coalition, Lisa Sharon Harper (formerly of InterVarsity and now with Sojourners), Dr. Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, Dr. Osvaldo Padilla of Beeson Divinity School, Noel Castellanos of the Christian Community Development Association, and a number of local pastors. You can register for free below or online at www.g92conference.org.
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