Refugee Resettlement a Beautiful, ‘God-Sized’ Challenge

Oakland Christian Reformed Church sits alone in a peaceful setting of slightly rolling farm fields in Hamilton, a few miles southwest of Holland, Mich. Many of its members are from the surrounding area.

Refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo live in crowded makeshift tent camps in Burundi; women have to walk miles for water; food is scarce and medical care uneven. Burundi is on the border with Congo, where fighting between several factions still rages.

A week or so before Easter, these two worlds came together when, after two years of prayer, patience, and preparation, the church in rural West Michigan welcomed an extended family of 10 Congolese refugees who had been living in a Burundi camp.

Several members of Oakland CRC were on hand at the Gerald R. Ford International Airport in Grand Rapids, Mich., waving signs of welcome, as the family stepped into this new world after leaving Africa only hours earlier.

The family soon piled into a 15-passenger van that the church had rented in order to transport them together to their new home, where a home-cooked Congolese meal awaited them.

“It is such a blessing to be God’s hands for this family,” said Pastor Vern Swieringa.

“We were all brought to tears when Lillian [the mother] told us later [through an interpreter] that her Pentecostal church in Burundi prayed, before they left the refugee camp, that God would take care of them and find a loving church family to welcome them to America. Then Lillian said we were the answer to the prayers of her church in Africa!”

While celebrating the work of Oakland CRC is in order, it’s also important to point out that many churches have increasingly found it difficult to cosponsor refugees, said Kate Kooyman, a pastor who works with the CRC’s Office of Social Justice (OSJ).

Over the past two years, the U.S. has cut the number of refugees it allows into the country by more than half while also closing the door on refugees from some countries altogether.

“We know more churches are interested are heeding the biblical call to welcome immigrants and strangers in cosponsoring refugee families,” said Kooyman. “But there simply aren't enough refugees entering the country for them all to have this opportunity.”

Last fall, the U.S. set the refugee admissions goal for this fiscal year at the historically low number of 45,000.

“But we are unlikely to reach even half that number,” said Kelsey Herbert, immigration mobilizer for OSJ, which partners with Bethany, based in Grand Rapids, to help resettle refugees for the denomination.

“The U.S. has only resettled just over 10,000 individuals so far, and we are [nearly] halfway through the fiscal year,” said Herbert.

“And it’s important to remember that this is all in the context of the world’s greatest refugee crisis — 22.5 million refugees who have fled their home countries because of life-threatening persecution,” said Herbert.

Although Hamilton CRC had been aware of the refugee crisis, said Swieringa, helping to resettle a family wasn’t high on their agenda. But then about two years ago, a member of Oakland’s outreach team saw a refugee family being welcomed at the airport by members of a local church on the news. He said, almost in passing, “I wonder if we could do that?”

The pastor replied, “We can certainly look into it.”

After connecting with Bethany Christian Services, Oakland members attended a breakfast that Bethany sponsored to talk about possible opportunities. Then Deb Hoekwater, the church and community engagement coordinator for Bethany, came to the church a couple of times to explain the process.

With the approval of the church council, said Swieringa, they eventually put their names on a list to cosponsor a refugee family.

But during this time the government restricted the U.S. refugee program, and “we had no idea how long it would take” — or even if the congregation would at some point lose interest.

About another year passed, and Oakland had no idea if and when they would ever cosponsor a family.

“This is where it gets interesting,” said Swieringa. “I spent the whole summer preaching through Henry Blackaby’s book, Experiencing God,” which speaks of how “God’s invitation for us to work with him always leads to a crisis of belief that requires faith and action because the assignment will have God-sized dimensions.”

That series brought the church to the Advent season, when they focused on God’s peaceable kingdom of justice mentioned in Isaiah 11:1-9.

Then “in the New Year, I preached a six-week series on The Treasure Principle based on Randy Alcorn’s book by the same name,” said Swieringa.

The main point of this series was joyful giving — you can’t take worldly blessings with you, said the pastor, “but you can send them on ahead. Again, justice was a theme that came up often in this series.”

Two years had passed by this time. And on the Friday before Swieringa planned to preach his last sermon on the Treasure Principle, Deb Hoekwater called and said that she had a family for Oakland, but it could make for a big challenge.

“Instead of a family of four or five, which is what we thought we could handle, she notified us that it was a family of 10 from Congo,” said Swieringa. “Two members of the family, they told us, are suffering from trauma.”

It was a tall order, but the members who had signed up two years earlier to volunteer, said Swieringa, “were sure that this was God’s plan and that the series of sermons that were preached over the past nine months had prepared us, God helping us, for this God-sized assignment.”

A church member was able to find a four-bedroom home, with an apartment close by, to house the family. The Congolese family consists of a widowed mother, Lillian; her four children, with the youngest being age 7; Lillian’s mother; and her sister’s four orphaned children.

“None of them speak English. They are a very sweet family, but they will require much assistance. It was obvious in my orientation session at the church after they had arrived that these volunteers are up to the task. They are amazing,” said Hoekwater.

Before the family arrived, church members stocked their cupboards with food and filled a wall of their basement with egg noodles, a staple for the Congolese, from a local ministry called Hungry for Christ, where Oakland CRC members have volunteered for years. They filled the family’s closets with warm clothes donated by members of the congregation.

“I can’t even begin to explain all the things that needed to come together for this to happen, but they have — and they continue to come together. We have seen that God is alive and at work and has invited us in to join in doing a work that is bigger than us,” said Swierenga.

Hoekwater recalls how after the homemade meal on that first day, “Pastor Vern and the church members showed them how to use some of their new household items, and then gathered the family, volunteers, and Bethany staff together for a prayer circle before leaving them for the night. It was truly a beautiful thing.”

To find out about Christian reformed Church refugee resettlement in Canada, go to World Renew.