DELIVERING a baby in a hotel lobby was the last thing that two volunteers expected when they responded to a plea to welcome to a handful of recently evacuated Afghan refugees to the UK.
The volunteers were part of a national movement of Christians, churches, and charities from across the denominations working together through the Afghan Welcome coalition to support the 11000 refugees who are stuck in temporary accommodation in hotels and motels around the UK.
Mother and baby eventually got to a hospital, and are doing well. Their story is one of many: all over the country lives are being affected by volunteers who turn up to chat, to answer questions about life in the UK, and to offer practical help.
Another baby born in emergency accommodation far from home in the middle of a political crisis, Jesus was a refugee for his earliest and most vulnerable years. The Christmas story also highlights those who went out of their way to welcome him, from local farmers to wealthy international travellers.
This theme of welcome and hospitality, refuge, immigration, and asylum is not a footnote, but runs through the canon of scripture. When Jesus is born, he is the child refugee; then, as a man, he becomes the homeless guest, the great welcomer of outsiders. Even as Christ dies, he welcomes a criminal into paradise.
As he ascends after his resurrection, he goes to prepare room in his Father’s house for those who will trust him. We see a glimpse of this heavenly hospitality in Revelation, where God is pictured hosting a banquet for all the nations.
The Church has had 2000 years of wrestling with hospitality, both theologically and practically, not always showing hospitality to strangers as we are called to do, or opening our homes and our communities to those whom Jesus died to save.
Historic failings, however, do not negate our God-given mandate to play a part in welcoming outsiders, migrants, and refugees. This mandate, together with the Churches’ intellectual and social capital, is needed now more than ever.
Currently, one in every 95 people on our planet is displaced, having fled home as a result of conflict or persecution. This amounts to more than 26 million refugees worldwide, half under the age of 18. Millions more have been denied a nationality and lack access to education, health care, employment, and freedom of religion.
FOR much of autumn 2021, immigration was a front-page headline in the national press. Although many are calling on the Government to make a safer route for people fleeing to the UK (News, 3 December), there is in some of our media arguably also a growing narrative that dehumanises asylum-seekers.
Immigration seems to be on its way to becoming yet another polarising issue in our society. The Government’s Nationality and Borders Bill, which gives legislative expression to the Government policies outlined in the “New Plan for Immigration”, is trying to make it a criminal offence knowingly to arrive in the UK without permission, and to speed up the removal of illegal immigrants (News, 17 September).
Critics of the Bill believe that it crosses a line in terms of ethical responsibility, and ignores human-rights law and the potential economic benefits to the country of immigration. They are also concerned that those who seek to help migrants could be criminalised, too, and that the plan to return failed asylum-seekers to any safe country that they passed through is unworkable.
Nevertheless, the Government maintains that the Bill will provide a fairer system and a deterrent to traffickers, and will make the Channel-crossing route unviable.
So far, despite the Government’s stance, the number of refugees desperate enough to try to cross the Channel has increased drastically. Rising from 300 in 2019 and 8000 in 2020, by November of this year more than 25,000 people had attempted the route.
Despite the increase in small-boat crossings this year, there have been fewer asylum-seekers attempting to enter the country by other routes. So the total number of people claiming asylum in the UK in the year ending in June was 31,115. This is four per cent fewer than the previous year.
THERE are Christians on both sides of the debate about how to manage our borders. Some condemn the Government’s measures as inhumane; others agree that tighter controls would prevent human trafficking and deaths. I believe that we can draw the two sides together with a Christian understanding of hospitality.
Sixteen years ago, my wife and I became foster carers. I was concerned initially about the risks and costs: the practical and emotional ways in which a child coming from a difficult background would affect my three birth children, the need we would have to adapt the house, the expenses that would incur, the huge potential for heartache.
But understanding the needs of the children in care and, crucially, meeting many of them changed my mind. We were able to increase our capacity beyond that which we had ever thought possible.
At some point, we had to accept that we could not take in any more children without losing the structural and relational integrity of our household, and without taking away the security that the children in our care needed. In the same way, I believe, some border controls can actually help us to offer hospitality effectively. I also believe, however, that our nation has much more scope than it might imagine to offer hospitality to people who are fleeing war, famine, and terror.
Those people who say that our country is too poor, or too full, to welcome more refugees should reconsider the demographics of our nation, the resources with which we have been blessed, and the life stories of people seeking asylum.
Wherever we are on the political spectrum, all Christians are called to practise hospitality with those in need in our neighbourhoods, nation, and world. The Church in the UK has significant opportunity to show that hospitality, and welcome to refugees, asylum-seekers, and immigrants.
To help increase our understanding of, and capacity and reputation for, hospitality, a new initiative, “The Hospitality Pledge”, will begin in 2022. It challenges Christians to take steps towards greater personal hospitality, to speak with, rather than about, those who have fled to the UK for asylum.
As we begin to experience the power of welcome, and help those most in need of hospitality in our communities, we can effect a powerful counter-narrative. I believe that, together, we, the Church, can expand our national imagination when it comes to asylum-seekers and our commitment to welcoming more refugees.
EARLIER this year, I received a call from a civil servant at the Home Office, who asked me what kind of geographical coverage I could help with when it came to welcoming refugees. I was able to assure them there were churches in every city, town, and village in the UK.
I was confident that, wherever refugee families were settled, I could find Christian believers who wanted to live out their calling to love God and love their neighbour.
I was able to tell him that the Church has expertise because it has been caring for people in need for the past 2000 years. Moreover, the Church has buildings all around the country that could be made available for hospitality, assessment, and training courses.
It has been 50 years since Windrush, and the Church and the nation are still reaping the negative consequences of our failure to welcome those migrating to the UK from the Caribbean. The Church now has the opportunity to do things very differently.
It was particularly exciting to see the Church take a different stance in this past year, as more than 750 individual churches stepped up to offer many migrants arriving from Hong Kong and Afghanistan practical, spiritual, and emotional support.
I have spoken to many individual Christians who have formed relationships with refugees this year. Some of them had taken Afghan families out on trips to local sights, accompanied them to football games, and just spent time talking and listening to them.
One church pastor helped two children to find medical help for untreated bullet wounds in their legs. I know of several foster carers who have opened their homes to unaccompanied asylum-seeking children.
I met a woman who had come from Hong Kong and received such a warm welcome from the Church that she was first to volunteer to help an Afghan family as they settled in the UK. I know an eight-year-old girl who raised money to get winter clothes for children her age who are facing their first winter in the UK.
I have spoken to people who have started coming to church regularly because they have seen that faith is real and relevant, and they have experienced the love of God. Months of relational investment and sacrificial service are bearing fruit.
Grace can always be exploited, compassion abused, and generosity squandered. Sometimes, our hospitality will be thrown back in our faces. Sadly, there will always be a few who perform terrible atrocities on our soil. None of this should cause us to withdraw our hospitality.
When God the Father sent his Son into the world that first Christmas, it could not have been more costly. God knew full well that his grace would be rejected, and that Jesus would die on a cross at human hands. But he went ahead anyway, because he so desperately wants the whole world to be invited to sit together with him at his banqueting table.
Perhaps you could rethink who is invited to sit around your table this Christmas. Would you consider inviting one more — perhaps one who has never before spent Christmas in the UK?
Dr Krish Kandiah is a commissioner on the Archbishops’ Commission for Children and the Family. He is the director of Afghan Welcome (afghanwelcome.org) and UKHK.org. He tweets at @krishk