HELPING the Church to reply to “an age of migration” and pay greater than lip service to its claim to welcome migrants is the duty of a latest Church Mission Society (CMS) centre.
The society’s centre for mission and migration, Acts11 Centre, will seek to equip Christian communities to reply to migrants and encourage them to inform their stories.
Although the Church often spoke as if it welcomed migrants to the UK, the fact was very different, CMS’s diaspora leader, Dr Harvey Kwiyani, said. “The Church’s voice is lifted as much as welcome, but then, if you go into some spaces, the welcome doesn’t really translate into motion. We still hear of individuals being told that the church to 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 higher at grasping the necessity to succeed in out to migrants: the Assemblies of God churches within the UK were encouraging migrant church leaders to plant latest churches, Dr Kwiyani said.
The centre will initially operate virtually to assist churches to embrace mission amid rising migration, prepare Christian migrants to pass on their stories and faith, and to supply 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 within the UK, as within the United States and elsewhere, Dr Kwiyani said. “Anti-migrant sentiments run deep — and Christians take part in them without fascinated by it.
“The has been a marked difference in way migrants from Ukraine were treated in comparison with migrants from the Middle East. For Protestants particularly, people get hung up on the Church being for individuals who appear like them and talk like them.
“Europeans don’t consider themselves as migrants. A UK Christian might move to Kenya and call themselves an expat; if a Kenyan Christian moves to the UK, they’re called an immigrant. We wish to help Europeans understand themselves as migrants.”
The centre’s opening shall be a conference exploring theological and missiological issues related to migration, next Thursday and Friday, on the CMS offices in Oxford.
