Diaspora Missiology: Reflections on Reaching the Scattered Peoples of the World

Introduction 1

MICHAEL POCOCK

This book deals with what today is called diaspora missiology, an emerging discipline focusing on ministry to the millions of people who live and work in areas far from their birthplace. Missiology combines biblical and theological studies with insights from the social sciences including cultural anthropology, sociology, communication, and diagnostic tools. We should never let this discussion be coldly scientific, however, because we are dealing with human beings, marvelously made, but subject to many weaknesses and stresses. This is evident in the pictures we often see of people struggling for a better life. They move in a search of better opportunities, security, peace, education, or business. But to encounter the shalom that Scripture talks about, they need the God of peace in their lives.

Looking more like a soaked pile of clothes than a human being, he lies collapsed on the sands, waves lapping at his outstretched feet. He is alive, but barely. All the strength of his young life has been used up just to get here. Around him, other young men are staggering to their feet on land they have never trod before. Where is this happening? Who are these people? Is this the American side of the Rio Grande? The shores of Florida? The beaches of Italy or the Andaman Sea between Thailand and Malaysia where thousands of tribal people from Myanmar have desperately sought for some kind of relief in 2015?¹

No, but it could have been. Actually it was happening on the shores of the Canary Islands. The exhausted new arrivals had survived six hundred miles in a wooden boat on the open Atlantic. They are Subsaharianos, Sub-saharan Africans from Senegal, Mauritania, and Morocco. They were part of a desperate struggle to get to Spain and Europe. The Canary Islands are the closest Spanish territory. Over twenty thousand arrived in the islands during 2006. If they can stay and find work in Spain, they will send money home to help their families.

The governor of the Canary Islands was desperate. What should she do? The numbers were overwhelming their resources. What should the Spanish government do? Bring them to the Spanish mainland? Take them back to Africa and leave them on the shores? Like many other European governments and those of the United States and other countries receiving so many undocumented immigrants, Spain struggles to deal with the challenges to their administrative capabilities, their culture, and their values.

In Barcelona, Spain, Pastor Guillem Correa sits in his office at Solidarity Initiatives hard at work to help new arrivals like those above. He has organized a ministry that brings health, business, and housing professionals together to help new arrivals. They give orientation, health checkups, temporary housing, job training, employment, and spiritual guidance. While the government wrings its hands, pastors and churches moved by the love of Christ are already organized to help meet needs.² This became clear during the hurricane Katrina in the United States and Indonesian tsunami emergencies of 2005, the Japanese tsunami of 2011, and the powerfully destructive earthquakes in Nepal, 2015. African governments face similar human crises born of war, famine, AIDS, and unemployment. These governments need help. International assistance from private and faith-based initiatives and churches are often the most immediate, organized aid available.

A common phenomenon of our globalized era is that governments seemingly have less power to handle major emergencies than private and often faith-based initiatives. Not only that, but national boundaries have become increasingly irrelevant. Huge numbers of people, some 232 million, do not live in the countries of their birth. Many are desperate, undocumented migrants, legal refugees, or contract workers. Still others are global entrepreneurs capitalizing on growth opportunities in rapidly growing newer markets like China. While many in the United States worry about some 2 million (half documented and half undocumented) immigrants who arrive each year, contract workers in countries like Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and United Arab Emirates constitute more than 80 percent of the total population.³

Human migration is a phenomenon occurring throughout human existence. Joseph Henriques and I have documented this in Cultural Change and Your Church.⁴ But the process has greatly accelerated as a component of globalization. Douglas McConnell and I explained the impact of globalization and changing demographics on Christian ministry worldwide in The Changing Face of World Missions.⁵ There has been hardly a day in 2014 in which the Dallas Morning News has not contained an article dealing with migration issues. Pick up a copy of La Nacion or El Pais in Spain, the Manchester Guardian in Great Britain, or a major newspaper of almost any world-class city and one will find the same: migration is a constant concern. Migration solves the problems of many who immigrate to find safer conditions and meaningful employment, and it serves the needs of the countries to which they move. But the increased rate of migration also overwhelms and frightens many who have to deal with the consequences. This is true at the global level and in the United States.

It seems that God is orchestrating global migration with a view to blessing humanity, populating his creation, and drawing people to himself. The chapters in this book clearly show from the creation mandate in Genesis to the explanations of Paul in Acts 17, God meets individuals and nations in the midst of their journeys, alternately blessing, showing himself, protecting and sometimes disciplining his people through movement. We are all human beings made in the image of God, fearfully and wonderfully made, as the Psalmist says (139:14). Every person has unimaginable worth, whether he or she is a well-established citizen of a wealthy nation, or a seemingly powerless refugee, or a contract worker far from home. But human depravity mars what would otherwise be a delightful adventure, introducing difficulties, danger, exploitation, and loss.

Until recently, mission agencies and individual missionaries tended to regard displaced or migrating people as secondary to their chief object of reaching those who were indigenous to nations to which they felt called to minister. A missionary in France might have considered immigrant Muslims secondary to indigenous French people, but that began to change by the turn of the century. Now many agencies can see that diaspora peoples are indeed a legitimate focus of Christian missions, and that is evident from a number of world conferences addressing the needs. In 2014 the Evangelical Missiological Society made diaspora peoples the focus of its regional and national conferences. It quickly became evident that ministry to diaspora peoples is now on the front burner for Christian missions. This book is evidence of this awakening.

Christians should be in the vanguard of those who reach out in love to people on the move. As Christians themselves move, they should make disciples among all the nations. But individuals, churches, mission agencies, communities, or nations will fail to do the right thing unless we take time to understand migrating, or what we prefer to call diaspora peoples, and what God is telling us through Holy Scriptures. This book will help readers understand and respond to global diasporas in the ways God intended.

Diaspora Missions is not a comprehensive treatment of all the factors and kinds of people involved in diaspora missions; it is a selection of key issues which should aid us in understanding and interacting ministerially with the scattered peoples of the world.

1 Flight from Myanmar and Bangladesh leaves thousands adrift at sea. Jonathan Kaiman and Shashank Bengali. Los Angeles Times, May 20, 2015.

2 Rev. Guillem Correa is a Methodist pastor in Barcelona, Spain, and General Secretary of the Evangelical Council of Cataluna. He founded and directs Iniciatives Solidaries (Catalan)— www.iniciatives.entitatsbcn.net, www.actualidadevangelica.es (accessed March 22, 2012).

3 Human Rights Watch, I Already Bought You, www.hrw.org/zh-hans/node/129797/section/5 (accessed May 21, 2015).

4 Michael Pocock and Joseph Henriques, Cultural Change and Your Church (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2002).

5 Michael Pocock, Gailyn Van Rheenen, and Douglas McConnell, The Changing Face of World Missions (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005), chs. 1–2.

Introduction 2

ENOCH WAN

As an emerging topic for research and as an agenda for ministry application, diaspora missiology had a humble beginning with just a few published pieces as listed below:

• Enoch Wan, Mission among the Chinese Diaspora: A Case Study of Migration and Mission, Missiology 31, no. 1 (January 2003): 35–43.

• Enoch Wan, Diaspora Missiology, Occasional Bulletin of EMS (Spring 2007).

• The booklet The New People Next Door (Lausanne Occasional Paper 55), produced by the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization (2004), is a significant document in that it helped placing the topic of diaspora missiology on the global agenda of the church.

Since then diaspora missiology was covered at national and international conferences in Japan, Korea, Thailand, and South Africa prior to 2014 as shown in appendix 1. Research conducted recently and the resultant publications are listed in appendix 2. Personal efforts and sample publications can be found in appendix 3.

In 2014, diaspora missiology was the focus of the Evangelical Missiological Society both at regional and national levels, leading to the publication of the present volume, which is different from other recent publications on the same topic¹ for the following reasons:

a) it is a joint effort of experts in biblical, theological, and missiological studies;

b) it is a collection of juried papers from regional and national conferences of EMS in 2014;

c) it includes contributions from seminary professors, professional researchers, and practitioners;

d) the broad scope of phenomenological, theoretical, biblical, and strategic studies;

e) the logical organization in six parts as shown in the Contents; and

f) it includes a review of paths taken (see the last chapter), past efforts (see the three appendices), and a forecast of future development.

Diaspora missiology as a focus of missiological research and a contemporary strategy of Christian mission is promising due to the following factors: the changing landscape in Christian missions (i.e., the shifting of Christendom from the West to the rest, and from the Northern Hemisphere to the Southern Hemisphere,² increasing impact of globalization on Christian mission,³ the emergence of majority mission,⁴ and the ever-increasing size and scale of the phenomenon of diaspora.⁵ From the broad scope of Christian mission and in light of factors listed above, the present volume is a significant contribution to the ongoing studies on diaspora missiology.

1 Several recent publications are listed below:

Enoch Wan, ed., Diaspora Missiology: Theory, Methodology, and Practice, rev. ed. (Portland, OR: Institute of Diaspora Studies, 2014); J. D. Payne, Strangers Next Door: Immigration, Migration and Mission (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2012); Sadiri Tira, ed., The Human Tidal Wave (Manila: LifeChange, 2014); S. Hun Kim and Wonsuk Ma, eds., Korean Diaspora and Christian Mission (Oxford: Regnum Books International, 2011).

2 See extensive discussion in Wan, Diaspora Missiology (2014), chs. 2, 12.

3 Ryan Dunch, Beyond Cultural Imperialism: Cultural Theory, Christian Missions, and Global Modernity, History and Theory 41, no. 3 (October 2002): 301–25; Peter van der Veer, Conversion to Modernities: The Globalization of Christianity (Psychology Press, 1996); Joel Robbins, The Globalization of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity, Annual Review of Anthropology 33 (2004): 117–43; Donald M. Lewis, ed., Christianity Reborn: The Global Expansion of Evangelicalism in the Twentieth Century (Eerdmans, 2004); P. L. Wickeri, Mission from the Margins, International Review of Mission (2004), Wiley Online Library.

4 Enoch Wan and Michael Pocock, Missions from the Majority World: Progress, Challenges, and Case Studies, EMS 17 (Pasadena: William Carey Library, 2009).

5 See Wan, Diaspora Missiology (2014), chs. 2, 9, 10.

Part One:

The Current Phenomenon of Global Diasporas

Chapter One

Global Migration: Where Do We Stand?

MICHAEL POCOCK

ABSTRACT

The pace of global scattering of peoples beyond their original countries of birth has accelerated, creating opportunities for ministry both to and by Christians in this phenomenon. People in these diasporas and their families both benefit and are threatened by separation from family, culture, and country. Christian ministries that earlier regarded immigrants, refugees, international students, and nomads as peripheral to their foci increasingly direct their attention to these people as their primary focus.

____________________

As he opened the sixteenth annual Iberian-American Summit in Montevideo in November 2006, then–UN General Secretary Kofi Annan proclaimed: International migration is one of the greatest issues of this century … We have entered a new era of mobility.¹

This was not an overstatement. Developments since have proved him prophetic! Two hundred and thirty-two million people lived outside of their country of birth in 2013.² As we shall see, "migration is as old as the Bible, but it has accelerated to an amazing and often confusing extent. This chapter will help us understand the current levels of migration, the categories of people on the move, the direction in which migration flows, and the forces that influence this phenomenon.

We shall also look at the fears of Christians and non-Christians in receiving countries, and the reasons why an old book like the Bible can give us a framework for understanding human movement and God’s agenda in and through it. Understanding reduces fear. Discovering a purpose within a phenomenon like human migration prepares us to engage it rather than ignore or flee from it.

In speaking with the Greek philosophers in Athens, the Apostle Paul gave a classic explanation for why people are where they are, spread over the globe. At the conclusion he said, "In him [God] we live and move and have our being" (Acts 17:28, italics mine). Paul’s contention is that God is at work in human migration, and those that move, whether they know it or not, are under his providential, even salvific, care. In the same passage, Paul explains that God places people where they are to help them reach out to him and find him (Acts 17:26,27). This takes migration out of the world of mere economic, political, or environmental dynamics and puts it into a grander scheme of God’s design and purpose for humanity.

Around the world, Christians are waking up to the reality that the massive movement of peoples in migration presents an unprecedented opportunity for spreading the gospel. Among the hundreds of thousands on the move to find work or a better life are highly committed Christians. Many are effectively living a life that witnesses to the presence of Christ. Others would be more effective if they had some basic preparation in cross-cultural living and how to share the gospel and lead small group Bible studies, and in fact saw themselves as instruments in the Great Commission calling of the Lord Jesus Christ. They also need pastoral care to maintain their own spiritual vitality while they are away from home.

Both evangelicals and Catholics can clearly see this point. There are, for example, 10.5 million Filipinos serving as contract workers outside the Philippines who send home $21 billion a year to their families.³ Lorajoy Dimangondayao says of the Filipino diaspora workers:

With Filipinos found in almost every industry, at every level of management, and in every strata of society, Christian Filipinos are positioned to be effective witnesses for Jesus Christ wherever they are situated. Christian Filipinos recognize God’s providence in placing them in all corners of the globe to serve people of all sorts. They become like the Apostle Paul who became all things to all people … for the sake of the gospel.⁴

A Catholic symposium entitled Faith on the Move: Towards a Theology of Migration in Asia, was held in Quezon City, Philippines, in July 2006. Participants called for pastoral care for the thousands of Filipinos working abroad, but also showed we can get insight into how God works, and in fact how Jesus worked when we reflect on the situation of people on the move.⁵ This same conference examined victimization of migrants and family disintegration caused by migration. These are the kinds of problems, among many, needing reflection and action by Christian laypeople and missionaries today.

Global migration in the United States and around the world presents awesome possibilities and perplexing challenges. This chapter attempts to show how we can build on the opportunities while resolving the difficulties of global migration. The first order of business is to grasp the size and shape of this phenomenon. National Geographic, which focused an entire issue on migration, emphasizes the dramatic reality of migration:

Migration is big, dangerous, compelling. It’s Exodus, Ulysses, the Battle of Agincourt, Viking ships on the high seas bound for Iceland, slave ships and civil war, the secret movement of Jewish refugees through occupied lands during World War II. It is 60 million Europeans leaving home from the 16th to the 20th centuries. It is some 15 million Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims swept up in a tumultuous shuffle of citizens between India and Pakistan after the partition of the subcontinent in 1947… But it is much more than that. It is, as it has always been, the great adventure of human life. Migration … drove us to conquer the planet, shaped our societies, and promises to reshape them again.⁶

Migration to the United States

There were 40 million foreign-born people in the United States in 2010. The largest percentage, 53.3 percent, were from Latin America and the Caribbean, followed by 28 percent from Asia, 12 percent from Europe, and 7 percent from other regions of the world.⁷ Of these, approximately 12 million are unauthorized migrants. They include those who entered without valid documents and those who entered legally but overstayed the expiration date of their visas.⁸

The United States has been in an accelerated period of migration since 1965 when a new US Immigration Act was passed removing the national quota system that had been in place up to that time. From 1965, immigration, which had been predominantly European, changed. Significantly more Asians, Africans, and Latin Americans began moving to the United States. The foreign-born population now constitutes 13 percent of the population. Although the actual numbers are significantly greater than at other periods, foreign-born people have historically constituted greater percentages of the total population in 1890 (15 percent) and 1910 (14.7 percent).⁹ Immigrants increased by 57.4 percent between 1990 and 2000 alone.¹⁰

The arrival in the United States of approximately 1 million legal and 1.5 million unauthorized immigrants each year is a great concern to many and to the US government. The pressure is on to enforce existing measures against illegal migrants and to enact more effective legislation. This is happening at the national and local level. The US Congress in 2006, while failing to pass comprehensive reform legislation, did pass a measure to build a wall seven hundred miles along parts of the southern border with Mexico. Six hundred and fifty miles had been built by 2013. Volunteer Minutemen began patrolling certain border ranch lands.¹¹ Communities like Farmers Branch, Texas, passed laws forbidding landlords to rent housing to undocumented persons and have authorized police to routinely check the documents of any person they believe may be undocumented. Arizona passed and began implementation of similar laws. Most recently Texas governor Perry authorized one thousand National Guardsmen to help control the Texas border area. 85,131 unaccompanied minors have arrived on the Southwest U.S. border between October 2014 and June 2015.¹²

Americans are conflicted over what to do about migration, and, more particularly, unauthorized workers and their families. Columnist Steve Blow has likened our attitudes over immigration to the game Red Rover, where children form a chain, hand to hand, and challenge anyone on an opposing team to break through the chain. If they can, they become part of the chain.¹³ In similar fashion, Americans seem united in opposition to the entry of illegal migrants, but expect them to become part of society and that government and communities will provide many services to them once they are here. He and others have pointed out the plain fact that the United States needs the labor and benefits from the spending power of migrants, legal and illegal. The combined spending power of US Hispanics alone surpassed 1 trillion dollars in 2010 and is projected to be 1.5 trillion in 2015.¹⁴

Attitudes among Christian church people reflect national patterns. Some see undocumented migrants as a threat and as criminals who have broken the law to enter the country. At the same time, many other Christians believe that the history of God’s people in Scripture and its teaching about the treatment of aliens and the reality of America as a nation of immigrants compels us to deal graciously with those who so desperately want and need to be here.

The Global Picture of Migration

Americans often feel their country is the special object and attraction of the world’s immigrants, but migration is actually occurring at high levels to Canada, Europe, the Middle East Gulf states, and the more prosperous cities of Asia. The movement of the world’s peoples has been likened to weather patterns swirling constantly and forming changing patterns all over the planet.¹⁵ Movement is a constant feature of human life. Societies come into possession of particular areas and come to think of themselves as permanently in place. This may continue for lengthy periods, but eventually migratory forces will bring others into their territory or take themselves to other regions. We have dealt with the historical picture of migration patterns in other sources.¹⁶ Here we are looking at a snapshot of the situation today.

International migrants worldwide amounted to 232 million persons in 2013. About a third of these have moved from one developing country to another, and a third have moved from a developing country to a more developed country.¹⁷ Thirty-four percent of all migrants have moved to Europe, 23 percent to North America, 28 percent to Asia, 9 percent to Africa, 3 percent to Latin America, and 3 percent to Oceania.¹⁸

These figures reflect only international migration. Internal migration, generally from rural to urban areas, is also a major consideration. Urban centers everywhere in the developing world are surrounded by millions of such internal migrants. They are usually poor, yet hopeful. Mexico City grows by about eighty thousand each month. Nairobi, Kenya; Lagos, Nigeria; Beijing; and Kolkata are in similar situations. Movements on a grand scale are changing cities, countries, economies, and societies worldwide. These international and national changes constitute an immense challenge to governments and municipalities struggling to find jobs and form infrastructures to manage this wave of humanity. But human migration is not simply a challenge for governments, it has major implications and opportunities for Christian churches and missions.

Although international and internal migration bring problems to many in receiving nations and cities, migrants themselves are materially contributing to the growth, economy, and national life of the countries to which they go. The population of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and United Arab Emirates ranges from 48 percent to 80 percent nonnational.¹⁹ They are there with contracts to perform work desired by the host country.

Immigrant workers help solve not only their own economic challenges, they help their countries and families back home. Foreign workers remitted an estimated $500 billion to their home countries in 2013. This is a huge transfer of wealth amounting to the single major source of the gross domestic product in countries like the Philippines.²⁰ If we are concerned about international aid, surely this is one of the most effective forms, one that better than any other puts the assistance into the pockets of the actual families and communities in need.

Who Are Today’s Migrating Peoples?

Refugees

Globally, 35.8 million people are considered persons of concern, and 10.5 million are refugees according to the United Nations High Command for Refugees (UNHCR) worldwide.²¹ The definition of refugee status dates to 1951 when the UNHCR met to formulate the Conventions and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees. The definition is considered fundamental and operative today. A refugee is any person who, owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reason of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable, or owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country, or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or unwilling to return to it.²²

Refugees, then, are people who are migrating by coercion rooted usually in violence, war, and civil unrest. They may be fleeing the regime in Myanmar (415,000 in 2014), Somalia (1.3 million), or they may be Sudanese fleeing to Chad, where there are 632,000 at the time of this writing (2014). Worldwide, 28.8 million more are internally displaced people within their own country.²³

The immediate needs of refugees are food, shelter, and protection. In the long term they need relocation to a willing host country. Alternately they need repatriation to their own country if the situation permits, or to be integrated into the nation in which they have found immediate refuge. Refugees are routinely in temporary camps or centers for six to fifteen years before they are more permanently settled. Churches and individual Christians are a big assistance in helping refugees. In the United States, the Church World Service is one such group that coordinates resettlement. The UNHCR often works in partnership with church bodies or nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to resettle the approximately 38.7 million refugees it serves worldwide.

Christian denominations, individual churches, and families can play a key role in solving the dilemma of the world’s refugees. How to help will be discussed later.

Read more about refugees:

Church World Service, www.churchworldservice.org/resources.html. Refugee Council USA, www.refugeecouncilusa.org. United Nations High Commission on Refugees, www.unhcr.org.

Economically Active Migrants

The majority of people on the move worldwide are categorized by the International Labour Organization (ILO) as economically active. 214 million strong, they constitute the largest single block of migrant people. Economically active migrants are often contract workers who have an employment agreement with an interested party outside their country and government authorization from both their own country and the host country. Over 50 percent of these are women.²⁴ They may also be business entrepreneurs.

Unauthorized migrants are also economically active, but less well-tracked, precisely because they are undocumented or only partially so. They may have a passport but not the appropriate visa. In the United States, Border Crossing Cards are issued that permit primarily Mexican and Canadian citizens to enter and leave daily for work. Many overstay their permits. In 2012, estimates indicate a total of 11.7 million unauthorized immigrants in the United States.²⁵

As noted earlier, economically active immigrants, generate a great deal of money, part of which is spent in the country in which they work. US$500 billion worldwide is remitted