I’m sure you share my horror on the dreadful corrosive substance attack last week on a girl and her two young children. Our prayers remain with the three of them.
Abdul Ezedi, an Afghan national, has been named as a suspect by the police. It’s since been revealed he was granted UK asylum on his third attempt, after having been convicted of sex offences committed within the UK, and being placed on the sex offenders’ register.
There will in fact be a police investigation, and the general public are aware of only a few details.
However, for some politicians and far of the media, the priority has – strangely – not been about how the criminal justice system responds to – and indeed prevents – violence against women and kids.
Instead they’ve focused on Ezedi’s conversion to Christianity, and have sought to put the responsibility for his dreadful attack on the doors of the church – either for being naïve enough to be duped by ‘bogus’ conversions, or else for intentionally conspiring to maintain people within the UK after they don’t have any right to be here.
This has reignited a debate around whether the church needs to be opening its doors to asylum seekers and supporting them to search out Christ. I wrote about this in relation to the attempted terror attack in 2021 in Liverpool by one other Christian convert.
Firstly let’s make absolutely clear that it’s the Home Office and the courts, and never the church, who’re liable for accepting or rejecting asylum claims. Church leaders may provide evidence that somebody has recurrently attended and made a career of religion. But they don’t judge whether that faith is real, any greater than for a middle class family searching for to get their child into the local church school.
Declarations of conversion are rigorously tested by those considering asylum applications, and the bar is high. Indeed many real asylum seekers report an innate disbelief from the authorities surrounding faith claims.
And let’s also keep in mind that conversion to Christianity from one other faith mustn’t be seen as a straightforward option. There is commonly an enormous cost to the person. Converts could also be treated with hostility or rejected by other asylum seekers from their very own country – who could be the only people here that they know. Converts need to be very careful about sharing testimonies and could have to cover from their very own families, because the danger of retribution will be very real. I refer you to last week’s conversation with Gareth Wallace in regards to the persecution of Christians worldwide.
On top of this, members of their recent churches might imagine the shrill media commentary and reject them as fake believers.
So the risks for people are high. And the courts and Home Office must bear in mind the risks of harm towards a real convert being sent back to a rustic hostile to their recent faith.
The politicians and journalists who point the finger on the church surely know all this, though, so why is the church being so fiercely accused of “facilitating industrial-scale bogus asylum claims” (within the words of Suella Braverman)?
Of course there will likely be some fake conversions, and the church needs to be alert to the undeniable fact that people do attempt to game the system. But who aside from God can resolve who has genuinely accepted Christ of their hearts and who has not?
At the center of this debate is a tussle over what it means to be human.
God’s invitation is open to all – irrespective of where you come from or what you might have done. If we imagine that every human is made in God’s image, this implies each one among us is priceless to him. No exceptions.
And it implies that our human rights spring from this innate value. Freedom of faith or belief is a fundamental right. And so it’s an enormous contradiction to say on the one hand that we must always be a Christian country – with laws and traditions based on Christian values – but in addition to disclaim some people the protection of gospel-inspired humans rights laws, since it suits a political agenda.
Of course the church should proceed to proclaim the Christian faith and never be derailed by this row. Sharing Christ’s love and beauty is our foremost responsibility.
Jesus hung out with those that were rejected by his society – “tax collectors and sinners” – and so we must always expect his church to do the identical. We should rejoice that among the asylum seekers on the Bibi Stockholm barge are reported to need to turned to Christ with the support of local churches. If we lazily assume these are all fake, we deny the facility of the Gospel message.
If this latest development within the culture wars results in the church being urged to shut its doors to any group of individuals, that may amount to the church being directed to desert Christ’s Great Commission to “make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19). Gently but firmly I say that it is a direction that we cannot follow and still be considered faithful. Let’s as an alternative be daring and pray that more refugees will genuinely reply to the Gospel this 12 months.
