Introduction
With this
final chapter of learning how to hear from God where He wants you to join Him
at work and how to begin a faith-based ministry, we will learn about steps each
organization must consider after the first month or year of the ministry organization’s
life. These steps are evaluation, adaptation, continuation, expansion, and
discontinuation. After remarks on these phases, a conclusion to this project
will be made.
Summation of Chapters
In previous
articles, we learned the most important part of any faith-based organization is
prayer, staying in intimate contact with God, the Giver of the vision for the
ministry program. Before, during, and after each stage of creating and enacting
the ministry, prayer must enwrap the participants, recipients, resources, and
leadership. No changes or removals of any part of the ministry should occur
without intentionally seeking God’s will. Recall each stage of the inception process
with the below summaries.
Stage One-Getting to Know the Refugees
Besides
prayer, the most important element of a faith-based ministry, for refugee work,
is getting to know the refugees. This stage requires
- · Seeking the need of the refugee groups in your city,
- · Speaking to them, building trust with them
- · Asking their perception of their needs
- · Your noticing of their needs
- Asking general questions about a good day and time for the refugee group to meet for ministry
- · Determining who are the gatekeeper, leader, activist, and caretaker of the refugee group
- · Researching the refugee’s people group and national histories
- · Putting yourself in their shoes.
Stage Two-Founding a Faith-based Ministry
After
getting to know the refugees, the next stage for working with refugees is
founding a faith-based ministry. What does it entail to set up the
organization’s structure? Along with prayer throughout the process, this stage
requires:
- · Deciding if the organization will be an NGO or NPO
- · Recalling the vision God gave you, then creating the mission statement
- · Setting long and short-term goals and objectives based on the help you will give refugees
- · Determining what services the faith-based ministry will offer such as English classes, skills training, peace-building and integration between refugees and the community, emergency material relief, marches and learning-sharing dialogues between refugee leaders, ministry leaders, and community leaders including the government, orientation sessions to teach about refugee rights and access to services, psycho-social assessments of refugees, job training, and counselling services
- · Looking within the Christian community for resources to help meet the refugees’ perceptions of their greatest needs, their practical needs, and spiritual and emotional needs.
Stage Three-Connecting
The third
stage of beginning a faith-based ministry to refugees is connecting. This stage
involves meeting people in the community and working with them. It includes
casting vision to them, so they will accept the new ministry program and want
to join it. There are several reasons for connecting. These include:
- · To get volunteers
- · To get funding
- · To enlarge the ministry
- · To get added expertise
- · To advocate about refugees in the community, city/town, state, province, and country
While
working in this stage, you will learn of and visit, call, or email community
leaders, professionals, and businesses who can help the people with the aim of
developing relationships for the future to help refugees. These connections could
lead to volunteers joining the ministry team, getting partners, and gaining more
funding sources. While doing this stage, you will want to visit or interview
other NGOs and NPOs like A21, World Relief, USAID, churches, homeless shelters,
UNHCR, a refugee center, etc. to see how they work. You might need their help, input,
or connections while working with refugees. While you are connecting with these
organizations, advocacy for refugees begins and continues in the community with
the help of legal advocates, government, immigration businesses, teachers,
doctors, principals, other mission organizations, etc.
Stage Four-On Your Mark
When the earlier
stages are complete, you are ready to begin doing the practical things to get
the faith-based organization for refugees started. These include
- · Praying
- · Finding a venue
- · Acquiring resources for the ministry through NGOs/NPOs, corporations, churches, small companies, UNHCR, etc.
- · Buying supplies for the ministry-stationery, books, food, blankets, copies of lessons or intake sheets, etc.
- · Finding volunteers-workers, prayer supporters, experts
- · Advertising the ministry to refugee via flyers, word of mouth through the refugee community leaders, and notices on boards in the community
- · Advertising the ministry to the community to get their acceptance of the refugees and their help with the ministry to the refugees
- · Praying
Stage Five-Being and Doing
You have
done all the background work, connected with potential partners and community
leaders, talked with and become acquainted with the refugees in the community,
established the ministry program as either an NGO or NPO, and set up the
mission statement, goals, and objectives. Now is the time to begin the actual
ministry to refugees. This stage has six parts.
- · Prayer-begin the day of ministry with prayer and continue it throughout the day
- · Prepare-lessons, clothes closet, food pantry, rules, policies, and train the volunteers
- · Present-open the doors and do intake with each refugee treating everyone as a created child of God.
- · Assess-at the end of the day, week, and year, assess what went well, what did not go well, and where adjustments and expansion of ministries can occur
- · Adjust-adjust the ministry as determined by the assessment.
- · Prayer-close the day, week, month, and year with prayer. Pay careful attention to each worker to determine if they are getting overwhelmed so you can talk to them and pray with and for them.
Evaluation and Adaptation
Stage five
teaches evaluation and adaptation as part of day one’s work. The leader of the
ministry should do it at the end of the first weeks, month, and year to ensure
the help needed by the refugee is being provided. It helps the leaders and
other workers decide if the perceived and expressed needs are the real needs and
if they are being met by the ministry. Evaluation and adaption are a continuing
cycle of any positively impacting organization. Whether the ministry is one
week, one year, or ten years old, evaluation and adaptation should occur.
Expansion, Continuation, and Discontinuation
Because of
regular assessments of needs, funds, and partners, the leaders of the
faith-based ministry to refugees could see the necessity and viability of
expanding the ministries to refugees. A ministry that only offered English
classes can now offer food or clothing assistance. Where before they could just
help with used clothes, the ministry leaders see an opportunity to teach the
refugee how to write a resume (curriculum vitae), and how to look for and
interview for a job. Expansion assumes the refugee ministry will continue. Keeping
things stable also assumes the ministry will continue.
Situations
exist where a ministry needs to be discontinued. Possibly it was an added-on
ministry to meet felt needs, but when put into practice, the need was not great
enough to warrant using resources. Other situations may exist where the
ministry should be discontinued. Reasons for this could be the refugee
population dwindled because they returned to their home countries, the venue was
not convenient to refugee habitation sites, the ministry’s reputation fell and
refugees, volunteers, and funders no longer wanted to work with the ministry. The
other reason a faith-based refugee ministry should cease to exist is when God
says it should. We cannot fully comprehend the reason God tells us to do or not
do something, but we must always obey and then seek His will for other areas in
which He wants us to serve.
Conclusion
Wherever
you are in the process of obeying God by serving Him in ministry, prayer is
always paramount. Through prayer you grow closer to God, can hear more clearly
from Him, receive the conviction and courage to act on His vision for you at
the time, and gain strength, direction, and motivation to do what He asks of
you. Without prayer interweaving and enwrapping a ministry, it will unravel.
The weave will fail, the colors will bleed, and true support, encouragement,
training, and help will not happen.
God created
each person. He loves everyone whether they are from our own country or one 30
hours away by plane. God loves each person no matter what their religion or
culture and wants everyone to come to know His as their Lord and Savior. Peter
stated it this way in 2 Peter 3:9, “The Lord is not slow about His
promise, as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing for any
to perish but for all to come to repentance.” John also spoke of Jesus dying for
all people in John 3:16, “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only
begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal
life.” God’s gift of salvation and eternal life with Him is for everyone who
believes. God loves every person, even the aliens/refugees.
Before we became Christians, we alienated ourselves from God
because of our sin and rebelliousness. Yet, He did not want that to be. God
provided the perfect sacrifice through the death of His Holy Son, Jesus Christ.
No other sacrifice for sins was needed after it. If God loved us that much before
He formed us in our mother’s wombs, even though we alienated ourselves from
Him, then we, as Christians, should love those who are alien to us. God taught
this to the Israelites in the Old Testament and Jesus taught it to the people
of the New Testament. In Leviticus 19:34, Moses told the Israelites what God
commanded him. He said, “The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as
the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were
aliens in the land of Egypt; I am the Lord your God.” In Deuteronomy
10:19, God reminded the Israelites they once lived as aliens in Egypt. Moses
said it this way. “So show your love for the
alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.” Jeremiah recorded in
Jeremiah 22:3,
“Thus says the Lord, ‘Do justice and righteousness, and deliver from the hand of the oppressor him who has been robbed. And do no wrong or violence to the resident alien, the fatherless, and the widow, nor shed innocent blood in this place [Judah, the place of God, as is our hearts the place of God].’” [NASB]
Other key passages in
the Old Testament about aliens/sojourners in the community include Deuteronomy
14:29, 24:14, & 17-21, 26:12-13, and 27:19.
In the New Testament, the Jesus translated for the Jewish
lawyer commandments Moses taught the Israelites. The lawyer tried to trick
Jesus by asking how he can inherit eternal life. Jesus answered him with a
question, “What is written in the Law?” The lawyer replied stating the first and
second greatest commandments. He said in Luke 10:27, “You shall love the Lord
your God will all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength
and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus told the lawyer
he answered correctly, now do it and live. The lawyer, being trained in debate,
wanted to justify himself (most likely because he had not loved his neighbor).
He asked Jesus in verse twenty-nine, “And who is my neighbor?” Jesus replied
with a parable, a story with a meaning. The parable is of the good Samaritan in
Luke 10:30-35. After telling the story, Jesus asked the lawyer in verse
thirty-six, “Who proved to be a neighbor to the beaten man?” The lawyer replied
with truth in verse thirty-seven saying, “The one who showed mercy toward him.”
Jesus commanded him, “Go and do the same.” Works earn no one salvation, but
works are evidence of a person’s salvation and proof of a life showing the love
of salvation.
Whether you call refugees and asylum-seekers neighbors,
aliens, or sojourners, God commands us all, believers and unbelievers, to care for
them because He created and loves them. As Christians, this mandate is even
stronger. We show our love for God by our obedience to Him. John taught this in
1 John 5:3 when he wrote, “For this is the love of God, that we keep His
commandments; and His commandments are not burdensome.” He also taught this in
John 14:15. In this verse John recorded Jesus saying, “If you love Me, you will
keep My commandments.” Jesus brought it closer to home when in Matthew 7:12 He
said, “So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for
this in the Law and the Prophets.”
We, Christian and non-Christian, have God’s natural and
written laws, and the moral laws instilled in our consciences. They should lead
us to care for refugees and asylum-seekers. Along with the instilled conscience
and God’s written laws, we have the God-given capacity for compassion, love, and
care. Within each of us, we know the right thing to do-care for the
aliens/refugees and asylum-seekers.
With this understanding, we must decide with the free will
God gave each person if we will obey this internal and written mandate to care for
the oppressed, widowed, poor, orphaned, and alien. We must decide if we will
weave our weft threads on the loom with the refugees and asylum-seekers warp
threads to make a beautiful tapestry with God. This tapestry woven together is
stronger than the individual, singular weft threads or warp threads. With this
woven tapestry, “we” and “them” become “us” that supports, encourages, helps,
teaches, feeds, and walks alongside as the family God envisioned humanity to
be. We each get to choose to be woven by God into the beautiful tapestry of community
and love. This is chosen woven-ness.
You get to choose; God does not force you. If you choose not to weave into the
lives of others in your community, you force the gifts God gave you to stagnate
or extinguish. You become the weaker person in the community because you do not
have the strength of the whole community, only your own. Will you choose to be
woven by God into His tapestry of a compassionate and loving humanity?
Joshua said in Joshua 24:15, “As for me and my house, we will serve the LORD.”
We can change that for this project and say when we choose
to obey God in His mission to the refugees and asylum-seekers,
“As for me and my house, we will (weave) with the Lord.”
