Churches are doing an unlimited amount to welcome people recent to this country and to enable them to integrate. But how will we know that after we don’t examine it within the media? That’s where Theos is available in with groundbreaking research that the federal government is reading without delay.
Theos is a London-based think tank that explores the role of Christianity in public life, and it’s a part of the Bible Society family. Theos sent a researcher, George Lapshynov, across the country to go to all types of various churches, checking out what they’re doing with refugees and whether what we hear within the media is true.
You can also read the outcomes of this unique project within the report From Strangers to Neighbours: The Church and the Integration of Refugees. This is the primary substantial report of its kind, revealing that churches will not be only welcoming people recent to this country but helping them integrate into British life and grow to be a blessing to the communities they’ve arrived in.
The media is flawed concerning the Church
‘Churches have been vilified within the media, repeatedly, over a few years,’ says George, explaining his personal motivation for starting this project. ‘I knew, anecdotally, that the Church was doing good things, welcoming all types of asylum seekers and refugees, Christian or not. But there was no research into this.
‘There are church leaders working time beyond regulation attempting to help individual asylum seekers, taking them to appointments. I began volunteering in welcome centres, through my church, in 2022 when the wave of Ukrainians arrived, because I speak Ukrainian.’
George’s church in London is Russian, but with people escaping war, half the congregation is now Ukrainian. So his church has grow to be a spot where Ukrainians and Russians worship God together and pray continually for peace.
‘The Homes for Ukraine scheme was arrange through Christians,’ George says. ‘Krish Kandiah pitched it to the federal government and called every body he knew in every church within the UK to attempt to get 10,000 people to supply a house to a Ukrainian refugee, and inside 24 hours he had 20,000.’
Parliament echoed the media
Where is that great work of churches within the media? George began work just after the Bishop of Chelmsford, Guli Francis-Dehqani, was called by Parliament to offer evidence to the Home Affairs Select Committee. Bishop Guli, who was born in Iran and escaped persecution there as a young person, told the Church Times afterwards: ‘It felt like an imbalanced panel: and it felt like that they had include their minds made up, wanting to attack and trip up the Church of England.’
At this stage, the sensation in politics was similar to within the media. Bishop Guli said further: ‘I even have a priority that each one this negative rhetoric – which shouldn’t be based, much of it, on an important deal of credible evidence – goes to be damaging to the lifetime of a few of our faithful church communities, who try to supply support and pastoral care to actually vulnerable people.’
It was a confusing situation with two contradictory abuses allegedly happening on an especially wide scale. The media talked concerning the Church profiting from vulnerable refugees, pressuring them to convert, while at the identical time claiming asylum seekers were abusing the welcome of churches to acquire their permission to remain within the country.
‘There was no evidence of this,’ George says, ‘but all the massive newspapers, even those I believed is likely to be more sympathetic to the Church, were very vocal about it. The BBC’s reporting also seemed quite biased against the Church.’
Finding the evidence was an enormous struggle
In fact, the evidence supported the Church and its amazing work – it might just prove very difficult to pay money for. Nobody had managed to place it together before Theos sent George out to do it, and it searched for some time as if George won’t give you the option to either. The damage that Bishop Guli had warned was being done to church communities made it very difficult for George to seek out anyone within the Church willing to speak about their work with asylum seekers.
‘I used to be getting a bit nervous,’ he says. ‘Church leaders went into hiding. They’d say, “We refuse interviews. We refuse to let journalists on the church premises.” They wouldn’t even discuss with Theos, despite Theos being a friendly figure.’
George struggled through the summer of last yr, eventually by the top of it getting senior leaders in various denominations to steer local church leaders that it might be value contributing to this research by Theos. Then he travelled to places like Cardiff, Liverpool and Glasgow, not simply to interview pastors but to see and take part in the work of churches welcoming, serving and helping to integrate refugees.
The publication of the report was partly funded by the MB Reckitt trust and the Susanna Wesley foundation, however the research itself wasn’t funded. There was no travel budget. ‘I used my very own church network,’ George says, ‘and it seems that through friends or acquaintances of friends I knew someone in every city within the UK who was willing to accommodate me.
‘I stayed once with a friend but all the opposite times it was people I didn’t know personally. I had never met them before and there they were welcoming me, feeding me, housing me for every week at a time. It was quite humbling to be on this vulnerable position of being welcomed. I wouldn’t stretch it so far as to say I used to be like an asylum seeker myself, but within the acknowledgements within the report I thanked all those people, and I wrote, “because I used to be a stranger and also you took me in”.’
The truth is the Church enables integration
What George discovered, and what you’ll examine within the report, is that the work of churches with recent arrivals goes much further than the welcome, and it actually isn’t a conveyor belt to refugee status as is typically alleged. It’s true that Christians welcome strangers as a form of love response, commanded by Scripture and enabled by the Holy Spirit. And after all they go further than that, recognising as Jesus taught that the foreigner in need is their neighbour. But fundamental to all of this can be a recognition of the necessity to help refugees integrate into British society.
‘It was even higher than I expected,’ George says. ‘I believed churches offered a pleasant environment with a tea and biscuits, perhaps some social services like a food bank. But in just about every church I visited, people were working very productively towards integration.
‘And I expected it to be the more historically British churches who were good at integration. Diaspora churches, I believed, won’t be so good at that because they have an inclination to create enclaves. But I used to be surprised to seek out that they’re really, really good at integrating. The Chinese and Ukrainian and Coptic churches I visited within the UK are making extra conscious efforts to be useful of their cities and positive assets to society.
‘I saw asylum seekers who were really feeling a part of the community, feeling like they were at home here, which made them wish to be British, it made them wish to be useful to British society. Their churches were encouraging them to volunteer, to enhance their English skills. Churches are creating opportunities for asylum seekers to satisfy local people, because otherwise they sit in a hotel for years with very, only a few opportunities to interact positively with locals.’
Churches are unique because they welcome and support refugees without formally being a charity (even in the event that they have charitable arms like food and clothing banks). An asylum seeker attends a church service like several other member of the church. They don’t come because the one in need, the beneficiary, to be served by the unusual members of the church as benefactors.
‘In most of the churches,’ George says, ‘asylum seekers were giving to the church members. They were cooking for them, painting partitions or doing gardening on their very own initiative because they desired to say thanks to the church community. Church leaders and church members told me that they were actually uncomfortable about this since it reversed the roles. If you’re an asylum seeker, there are virtually no settings in society where you’ll be able to do that, where you’re within the position to supply something to someone.’
Politicians now have the evidence
George spent months visiting churches to see the work in motion after which months more writing all of it down. The work was reviewed by colleagues at Theos and by academics externally. Although intended for publication earlier within the spring, it wasn’t ready until June, when Refugee Week happens to fall. So the timing ultimately was perfect. ‘It was God-ordained,’ George said.
‘We launched the report in Parliament with the assistance of the Woolf Institute. We had Bishop Guli, who sits within the House of Lords, in addition to academics, charities like Welcome Churches, and representatives of Reform Judaism. The Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government, which plays a key role in resettling, housing and integrating refugees were very interested.
‘The Minister for Faith, Communities and Resettlement, Lord Khan, was pretty satisfied. One of his senior advisers told me that is the precise piece of research they were waiting for to be able to allow the religion team throughout the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government to work more closely with the refugee resettlement team. This is the evidence they needed to incorporate a faith element throughout the resettlement work.’
But there’s been no interest from the media. ‘We contacted all the foremost news outlets and no person was interested. But, despite not getting widespread interest, we were successful chatting with the proper people in Parliament, within the Government. This is a excellent opportunity for the Government to work positively with churches, and so they appear to be seizing it.’
George can have one other opportunity to talk with a minister in autumn when he attends a roundtable chaired by Dame Angela Eagle, the Minister of State for Border Security and Asylum. He hopes the report will encourage a change in government policy enabling higher integration and recognising the role of churches. He also desires to encourage more collaboration between churches and refugee charities, which have tended to avoid churches despite the amazing extent of their work.
Why is integration so necessary?
George says: ‘If you simply begin to make people a part of British society once they’ve spent years in a hotel, that’s too late. You’ve missed those crucial early years.
‘Imagine you’re an asylum seeker. You arrive within the UK, you get put right into a hotel and you’re underfed. I spoke to asylum seekers who’ve diagnoses of malnutrition. They were higher fed in Eritrea! They were malnourished, that they had mould of their food. Because of a paperwork error, they didn’t have access to their subsistence money so that they couldn’t even take the bus anywhere.
‘And that’s your first impression of every little thing. You’ve spent years living in a hotel, not likely meeting anyone, not learning English since the waiting lists are incredibly long for the English classes. When you finally get leave to stay, you get kicked out into society, you grow to be homeless, jobless, and that’s your impression of Britain. So we want to work very early, not only on teaching them through a category what are British values, but enabling them to interact with local people.’
That’s what the Church has been doing. Will you pray that this report inspires a constructive change in policy and encourages refugee charities to work closely with churches to extend their impact?
You can discover more here about Bible Society’s Refugee Appeal.
James Howard-Smith is a author for Bible Society.
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