HELPING the Church to respond to “an age of migration” and pay more than lip service to its claim to welcome migrants is the task of a new Church Mission Society (CMS) centre.
The society’s centre for mission and migration, Acts11 Centre, will seek to equip Christian communities to respond to migrants and encourage them to tell their stories.
Although the Church often spoke as if it welcomed migrants to the UK, the reality was very different, CMS’s diaspora leader, Dr Harvey Kwiyani, said. “The Church’s voice is lifted up to welcome, but then, when you go into some spaces, the welcome doesn’t really translate into action. We still hear of people being told that the church for your people meets down the road, or elsewhere.
“Our key goal to empower the Church to be more hospitable to strangers, and for Christian migrants to share what God has given them.”
Other Christian denominations had been better at grasping the need to reach out to migrants: the Assemblies of God churches in the UK were encouraging migrant church leaders to plant new churches, Dr Kwiyani said.
The centre will initially operate virtually to help churches to embrace mission amid rising migration, prepare Christian migrants to pass on their stories and faith, and to offer resources, courses, and conferences on global witness and migration.
There are estimated to be about 281 million international migrants: 3.6 per cent of the world’s population.
The recent riots had demonstrated the rise of Christian nationalism in the UK, as in the United States and elsewhere, Dr Kwiyani said. “Anti-migrant sentiments run deep — and Christians participate in them without thinking about it.
“The has been a marked difference in way migrants from Ukraine were treated compared to migrants from the Middle East. For Protestants particularly, people get hung up on the Church being for people who look like them and talk like them.
“Europeans do not think of themselves as migrants. A UK Christian might move to Kenya and call themselves an expat; if a Kenyan Christian moves to the UK, they are called an immigrant. We want to help Europeans understand themselves as migrants.”
The centre’s opening will be a conference exploring theological and missiological issues related to migration, next Thursday and Friday, at the CMS offices in Oxford.