When an alien lives with you in your land, do not mistreat him.  The alien living with you must be treated as one of your native-born.  Love his as yourself, for you were aliens in Egypt.  I am the LORD your God.  Leviticus 19:33, NIV

            When the long-awaited day came, I found myself in the Dominican Republic, dialing the operator, excitedly telling her the number I needed in New York.

Would Germania be there?  After so many delays and details, would the whole terrible ordeal be over?  What if no one met them?  What if an unexpected problem arose?

            A patient voice seemed to say, “You are not God.  I am.  And I am able to take care of my people.”  And then, just as my heart stopped racing, she answered.

            “Germania!”  I cried.  “Como estas?  Donde estas?

            How glad I was to find the whole family in the United States, complete, united.  This time they had come from Ecuador legally – with that precious green card.  The last time…

            But let me go back, way back, because in my learning to minister in Christ’s name to newly immigrated Americans, this is not the beginning.  It is not the beginning at all.

Flashback

            In 1957, I went to Latin America for what was to be a lifetime of missionary service.  I wondered at the commissioning service if it would really be a lifetime.  But when they asked, “Are you willing to serve the Lord in Ecuador for the rest of your life if God wills?” I said yes.  I did want to be in God’s will.

            So they laid hands on me.  And before I knew it, I was aboard an eleven-hour flight in a prop plane, headed for San Jose, Costa Rica, where I would prepare to tell people in other lands about Christ.

            Dad, however, was sure I’d been hoodwinked, deceived by some institution out to make money at my expense.

            Mother was tightlipped, unable to comprehend why a daughter with two degrees needed to make such an unearthly commitment.  How could I add yet another worry to those of a father with eight children, working long and hard for some degree of material security?

            In their search for Easy Street, dad and mom had listened often to the rantings of relatives irate over the size of their family.  Eight children – why in the world?  Couldn’t my father look back and realize what his own parents had gone through – seventeen children and much grief! 

Some of dad’s brothers and sisters had died at childbirth, others of childhood illnesses.  And dad’s own father died of pneumonia at forty-one.  Left alone, dad’s mother had had to put some of the children into orphanages.  Uncle Joe and Uncle Bernie still carry deep scares from the uncaring institutional treatment they’d endured.

Dad

            My father’s father – my grandfather, Fitzallen Benjamin – had come to the United States from England.  Here he married Nana, a German-Jewish Fraulein who spoke German and Yiddish proficiently.  They lived together in New York, sharing the agonies, struggles and poverty of immigrants.

            Grandfather ran a newspaper outlet on the corner of Simpson and Westchester in the Bronx.  Today, the area is largely Hispanic.

            Dad still remembers helping at the newsstand, which Nana continued to run after grandfather died.  Dad helped carry the papers that the news trucks dumped.  He and his brothers helped peddle the papers on the street.

            Aunt Margo, who goes by the name of Aunt Chickie, was the only sister.  She held the fort at home – cooking, cleaning, ironing, sewing.

            Five of dad’s brothers – Cecil, Alvin, Elvin, Holland and Benedict – plus his sister Margo Jadwiga, all changed or modified their names in adulthood.  Dad, whose name was Justin Cyril, was one of the few who did not.  But his nickname was Judge.

            With only five years of schooling, dad had to work at whatever he could.  After he married mom, he hired himself out as an apprentice auto mechanic.  Mom, noticing his ability in tinkering with cars, encouraged him, though the five dollars a week he received was very limited income.

            All his working life, dad pushed for something better.  First a mechanic’s job.  Then a move up from category C to B to A.  Then a foremanship in a trucking concern on Twelfth Avenue.

            Then, with the financial help of an Italian friend, dad opened a Shell station on Long Island.  Dad was out of the city at last, with his own business.  Everything would now be upward mobility – a decent car, a house of his own, the best tools, money to enlarge his stamp collection, time for bowling clubs, even some savings. 

            Dad still held that old-fashioned notion that his sons would work with him, regardless of how he treated them.  But dad did not know how to father his children with discipline and love.

            One by one, the four boys declared their independence and left.  You couldn’t reason with dad.  It was always a painful flurry of emotion and conflict.

Mom

            Mom, too, had her struggles.  Like dad, she’d had a difficult childhood.  Her Polish immigrant parents had come to America together.  They hardly knew each other when they were married on the boat.  It had been an arranged marriage.  Grandmother was only sixteen, and her mother wanted to protect her from a shipful of immigrants.

            For the rest of her life, grandmother resented having to marry Wladislaw Insadowski.  She could neither love nor accept him.

            Yet they lived and worked together to acquire a better life.  Grandmother was a housekeeper; grandfather a gardener.  Through careful saving, they were able to buy houses in Maspeth and Greenpoint, two of New York’s Polish ghettos.

            Because of unresolved conflicts with her mother, her husband and her two children, grandmother gradually lost touch with reality.  It was hard for her to forgive my mother (her daughter) for marrying a non-Pole and for not teaching her children the Polish language.      

I remember going with grandmother to Polish-American meetings, meetings so pink they were almost red.  At the time, I was puzzled by her strong love of the fatherland, the pull of her own language and culture.

            Finally, at eighty, grandmother bought a condominium in Warsaw.  When she moved, she took with her the Polish Bible I had bought her.  She is still there today.

Immigrant

            But it was in Latin America that I went through my own problems of being an immigrant.

            Even today, I can’t see a foreigner without recalling my painful year in Costa Rica when I was learning Spanish and trying to adapt to a new set of norms and values.  There were so few letters from home, so many emotional and psychological jolts.

            Every day I went out to use the new language.  But I did so with many fears and fantasies about what people were saying and thinking.  It wasn’t long before I, a forthright, decisive Christian with lots of initiative and push, became paralyzed and perplexed – almost paranoid.

            One day, after a long and inexplicable crying spell, I went to the doctor.  His diagnosis of “culture shock” distressed me.  I didn’t want or need the tranquilizers and rest he prescribed.  Or did I?

            I wrote to the mission board, telling them I was having a nervous collapse.  Maybe they should not send me to Ecuador.  They wired saying I should proceed.  So I proceeded, and it helped.  Arriving at my place, receiving some tender, loving care from fellow missionaries, and getting a definite assignment – all of these helped me begin the passage of culture.

The Bright Side

            My immigrant experiences were not all negative.  My teachers at the language institute were ticos – Costa Ricans.  I enjoyed the class.

            I joined a choir at a small church so that I could sing in Spanish and have informal relationships.  I also had a close non-Christian friend, a grammar-school teacher named Noemi.  It was a challenge to try to talk with her in Spanish and to memorize poetry in Spanish for her benefit.

            In Ecuador I felt a constant pull toward the poor.  I was teaching Bible and church history at a seminary and living with the women students.  I was responsible for Christian education assignments for the women.  That frequently involved establishing children’s classes in poor neighborhoods around the rapidly expanding, dirty port city of Quito.

            Often I took a launch across the river to the small barrio of twenty thousand people, now joined to Quito by a bridge.  Most of the residents had come from the interior, seeking new opportunities.  Jobs were at a premium.  Almost half of the men were unemployed.  Some of the children who lived near the railroad had no clothing at all, even at ten and eleven years of age.  Most residents lived in extended families, and worked hard to keep starvation from the door.

            They had little to keep themselves alive – no education, no skills, no housing.  United Brands, which had a facility in the area for exporting its Chiquita bananas, pulled out.  The social and economic instability of the area, it said, created too much hostility and unrest.

            The Allience for Progress, the U.S. relief plan for emerging nations in Latin America, never touched the masses.  They had a ridiculous policy of working only through government channels, so the money was greedily devoured by opportunists.  When the U.S. ambassador made an indirect reference to what was happening, he was asked to leave the country in twenty-four hours.

Middle-Class Blues

            To escape this poverty, Lastena, an enterprising young woman from my church, begged me to take her into my home as a maid.  At first I resisted.  “After all,” I said, “you need to be home with your children.”

            I changed my mind when a doctor in Guayaquil called and told me that one of Lastena’s children was dying of malnutrition.  I quickly hired her.  Was she to stay home so she could watch her children starve to death?

            My middle-class national neighbors were upset.  I paid her too much – ten dollars a month.  And I let her take leftover food home to her children.  But her husband’s small income of fifteen dollars a month was never going to meet their needs.  Later, in fact, he lost his job with United Brands and was out of work for four years.  Small wonder he ran away from the situation.

            The canasta de amor, the basket of love at the church, became more significant to me, as it already was to the other women.  Each week, the canasta de amor was filled with small items – perhaps some rice, beans, fruit, vegetables, eggs or sugar – whatever one could bring.

            At first I thought the women’s fellowship ought to be more spiritually oriented.  But the women of the church insisted that sewing, visiting, helping homes with needs, and sharing in common ought to be a regular part of the program along with Bible teaching and singing.

            When they suggested selling clothing cheaply at the church every three to six months, I thought it sounded to much like a business.  They knew it was the only way to get clothing to those who needed it, while getting enough to back to start another year.

            At Christmas one year, our youth group decided to raise fifty dollars to buy clothing for the children on the other side of the tracks who were poorer still.  Mom sent me ten dollars to put into the pot.  She was beginning to realize what we were doing.  The young people eventually raised fifty dollars, and the women sewed the clothing.  I was amazed at how far they were able to stretch the money.

            We had a Christmas celebration on the day the clothing was to be distributed.  The abandoned schoolhouse, with its rotting planks that often gave way under your feet, was filled to overflowing.  Many parents came.  During the Christmas hymns, recitations and message, they waited expectantly for the reward of one piece of clothing per child.

            During the distribution, however, patience gave way to anxiety.  Many parents were afraid there would not be enough.  Indeed, there never was enough.  Bedlam broke out as they lurched forward, tying to grab clothing for their children.

            I was angry at their rudeness and frustration because we missed some of the most faithful children.  I was also upset because I knew our large endeavor had only been a drop in the bucket.  I went home vowing never to get involved in this kind of thing again. 

But the next year was better.  Each month we made lists of needy families we had visited.  And we didn’t worry about whether or not they were Christian’s.  Later our little church was visited by some of the recipients.  We rejoiced that the little we could do was at least building good will in the community.

Simple Economics

            Even more important than community good will were the conversations I had with professional friends at the large central church in Quito – doctors, lawyers, teachers.  They promised more help and assistance.

            A wealthy, protected young wife with whom I had a Bible study each week was afraid to visit the barrio with me.  But she spoke to her mother about the needs.  Although they were sure all this poverty was due to irresponsible drinking, they began making lovely dresses, pants and shirts for our use.  And the senoritas of the large Sunday school class I taught at the central church began collecting funds from their jobs, homes and bosses.

            I began to see that God wanted all of his family – and more – to be involved.  By the time I returned to New York in 1968, these lines of help had become much more visible.  More people from all classes of the society were reaching out to help and be helped.  Surely this was the natural and proper response of God’s church to the deteriorating economic situation.  You cannot separate social concerns and evangelism.

            I also realized, while I was in Ecuador, that I could not live in isolation from the world around me.  I moved out of the seminary compound into an apartment in the middle of town.  And I began entering into the lives of my students in an informal way.  As a result, three of the women – Alida, Holanda and Germania – became my spiritual daughters.

            Alida’s mother fell from the operating table while giving birth.  She died from the concussion, and the child died shortly thereafter.  I will never forget her mother’s deformed face and the all-night wake at the church.  The hospital released the body, knowing that the family was too poor to demand justice.  When you were one of the masses, you didn’t make waves.

            Germania’s mother had also died in childbirth.  Her death, however, had been of natural complications.  Holand’s mother was alive, but hadn’t wanted to see her in years.

            Of the three, my favorite was Germania.  When she was not ministering in another city or visiting with her relatives, she usually stayed in my apartment.  In fact, she married from my home, and I served as mother and madrina (godmother) at the wedding.  It had indeed been joyous to see Carlos and Germania, both outstanding students from the seminary, joined together in God’s providence.

New York, New York

            Little did I realize then how God would continue to bring Carlos and Germania into my life.  (Yes, it was this same Germania who, as I mentioned earlier, I had called excitedly from the Dominican Republic.)

            In 1970, Carlos came to New York City in search of a better living.  He was the first of ten children.  For many years his mother had struggled to keep the family together by working as a seamstress.  His father, overwhelmed with a sense of futility in his role as father and provider, had become an alcoholic.  And Carlos found the increasing financial responsibilities for his family an unbearable burden.

            After seminary, Carlos had begun a promising ministry in the city of Gyayaquil.  The salary, however, had been below his mother’s expectations – and way below the needs of his extended family.

            While I was still in Ecuador, I would visit Carlos and Germania at least once a week.  Always I would find their small home filled with visiting family and relatives.  The visits were anything but brief.  Some stayed to finish their schooling.  Others stayed hoping to find a job.  Others stayed simply because that was a little better than that of their own families.

            Finally, Carlos could stand the pressure no more.  Germania wrote to me in New York City of his impending arrival.

            I’ll never forget the night Carlos arrived.  The temperature had dropped to eight degrees.  I took him and overcoat and a scarf.  I didn’t bother to bring a hat because, for newly arrive immigrants, hats are too drastic a change from the dress code of the tropics.  They simply won’t wear them.

            Since I had no car, we had to wait forty-five minutes in the freezing cold for a bus, then the subway.  Finally, we arrived at Raul’s already crowded apartment.  It seemed like the same old story:  another city, another host, another crowded situation.  Yet I felt glad that he had come, that he might live in New York where we could renew our friendship.

Looking for Work

            We began job searching.  At first, Carlos worked for Tony Lopez, the Puerto Rican manager of a Christian bookstore in the Times Square area.  I know Tony would tolerate the strange time-consciousness of an arriving Latin American, but the pay and the hours soon proved inadequate.

            Carlos began looking for work elsewhere.  He tried several factories but found it hard to understand why he could be fired for not arriving exactly on the hour.

            The worst problem of all was his having a visitor’s visa.  I had warned him that only a resident’s visa would be acceptable.  But my warnings were not taken seriously.  After all, in Ecuador, paperwork and bureaucracy always had its price.  Everyone knew many Ecuadorians had gone to the U.S. with only a visitor’s visa – and were still there.

            Yet we had to face harsh reality.  Everywhere Carlos went, he was asked about his nationality and status.  Because he was a Christian, Carlos wouldn’t lie, but tried to explain that he would correct the problem soon.

            But factory owners knew that correcting the problem involved a long, involved process of filing many papers, returning to the country of origin for medical examinations, and gaining approval under existing quota and job-opening systems.  It could take three years or more, if he made it back at all.

            Carlos had other facts to face as well.  He could get work illegally – well below the minimum wage and without medical or pension benefits.  But to do so was to risk being caught by the immigration authorities.  Apprehension would require a thousand-dollar bond, just to get out of jail.  Then he’d have to leave the country within a month or lose the money.

            Many immigrants, of course, simply pay the money and move to another part of the country to try again.  Unfortunately, this makes them feel like criminals, fugitives from justice.

            But morally speaking, which is more important:  sending money home to keep your needy family alive or going back to an impossible economic situation without any hope of remedy?  This is a real dilemma for many immigrant believers.  And it is not surprising that many illegal aliens can be found in urban churches throughout the United States, people caught in a bind, struggling to do what is right.

Community Spirit

            When Carlos arrived, my middle-class church was in the process of moving to a “better” neighborhood.  But it agreed to let a small number of us, mostly Hispanics, stay on in the old building until it was sold.

            Secretly I prayed that our newly formed immigrant congregation would want Carlos as its pastor and that he would be willing to serve.  Six weeks after he arrived, the congregation issued the invitation – for the grand total of twenty dollars a week.

            At the time, the congregation consisted largely of neighborhood children from the Times Square area and a few adults from Puerto Rico and Ecuador.  But with a new pastor in place, we began visiting in the neighborhood more earnestly.  More relatives began to appear.  Friends came from places of work and from other countries.  We began to have meals together, spending the whole day on Sundays at church.  The sense of community was strong and binding.

            I had spent eleven years in Guayaquil and had gone to the airport at all hours of the night to see my friends off to the United States.  It had not dawned on me than that their destination was the same as that of my own grandparents – and that their experiences would be much the same.

            Increasingly I began spending my time with these new residents of New York City.  Their situations were often difficult.  Sometimes a husband or wife had come alone to earn money and prepare the way for the rest of the family.  But terrible things could happen as a result of the prolonged waiting.

            Moral failures were one result.  Not because love or desire for one’s family had lessened but because humane desire had too long been deferred.

            One husband discovered that his wife had sinned against him while trying to get enough money to send for him and the children.  He couldn’t understand her loneliness, and he wouldn’t forgive her.  In fact, he treated her so badly that she had an emotional breakdown.

            It was at our immigrant church, through the Word of God, that this wife found Christ’s forgiveness – and self-forgiveness.  We were never able to help her husband, though he did allow the children to come to our fellowship.

People

            Another Christian man’s wife began an illicit relationship in Ecuador while she was waiting to come to the United States.  Her husband, active in a Hispanic church in New York City, was counseled to forgive her and to bring her and her children to New York.  Today they are reconciled through the power of the gospel.

            Still another man came into the United States on a visitor’s visa.  His wife Elena arrived two years later, without the government knowing of their relationship.  Six months after her arrival, however, he was caught by immigration authorities and returned to Ecuador.  She stayed on to help him return.

            The second time, he traveled overland through Mexico.  But various attempts to cross the border failed.  Finally he found a woman who offered him a home.  And with his wife in New York and his children in Ecuador, he began a new family in Mexico.

            Elena’s parents in Ecuador urged her to stay in New York and to send enough money to keep them and her children alive.  During this period some friends invited her to our church where she accepted Christ.  Elena is now working with lawyers to establish her residency and is working on her high-school equivalency at our Spanish Bible Institute.  For three years she has seen neither her parents nor her children.  She stays in the crowded apartment of one of her cousins, sleeping in the living room.

            And there’s Oscar, Germania’s cousin and one of my favorite people.  He arrived at their apartment soon after they had finally come to New York as a family.  He attended our church and became a Christian too.

            Shortly thereafter, he married a woman from Ecuador, whom he had led to the Lord.  But after only six months of marriage, the immigration authorities picked him up.

            Friends at the church scraped up the thousand-dollar bond to get him out of jail.  Oscar then decided to go back to Ecuador while his wife Gladys stayed on in New York.  She was expecting a baby, and at that time, if your baby was born in America, you could establish residency.

            The church took care of Gladys while Oscar returned to Ecuador.  She had her baby, and as soon as the paperwork could be completed, she went back to Ecuador until they were able to return together.  They’re here now – not only with their family but with Oscar’s mother, father and three brothers.  They’re all working hard to pay off the cost of the trips.

Strangers in the Land

            When I hear the middle-class gentry out in suburbia-land talk about “illegal aliens,” it rips me apart.  I know they don’t know what’s going on.  How much they need to know!

            Fortunately, God’s churches have been helping and serving many of these strangers in the land.  It’s amazing to me how our churches can so often sustain so many nationalities and still hold together.

            You see, while Spanish people do have a common language, they also have many countries, each with its own idiomatic expressions and cultural patterns.  Hispanic people can hurt each other’s feelings very easily.

            More than that, adjoining countries often have hostile feelings toward each other.  Historically, for example, Ecuadorians have hated Peruvians for “stealing” some of their Amazon territories.  Many other countries have a history of similar conflicts.

            Even here in New York, new reasons for hostility emerge.  Cubans often get better jobs than Puerto Ricans, and that make the Puerto Ricans mad.  The Cubans, of course, have often come with several things going for them – education, a middle-class mentality and a stronger degree of whiteness.  (Yes, in our racist society, cultural passage includes language, education and color.)

            Puerto Ricans also tend to resent newly arriving Latin Americans, because these new immigrants are often willing to take jobs at lower rates, thereby replacing the Puerto Ricans from the job market.

            Another sad phenomenon is the tension in the city between the Blacks and Hispanics.  Blacks, too, are often displaced in the employment scramble.  An immigrant, you see, cannot legally be on welfare.  So Blacks and Puerto Ricans are often shoved into the welfare system of a planned economy which never intended to provide jobs for every body.

            Without the church the hostilities and difficulties would be overwhelming.  But our churches amaze me.  Latin Americans, Puerto Ricans and Blacks have learned to live and work side by side.

            One wonderful custom in many Hispanics churches is to celebrate el dia de la raza.  That’s Columbus Day, but in Latin American it’s called the Day of the Races.  And it functions as a time for all kinds of people to get together and enjoy each other.

            In our church, we celebrated el dia de la raza by asking people from each country or tradition to bring their own foods and records and typical garments.  We have a grand show, with people of all these nationalities venting their repressed emotions about the countries they have come from.  Then, in the end, we come together to sing and talk about our new world.

What I’ve Learned

            Now that I’ve taken you back to the beginning and brought you up to the present, let me share some things I’ve learned through my work with immigrants.

            First, caring Christians must continually examine their goals in life.  Our goals cannot be simply those that our culture would like to impose upon us.  We have to fight for that.

            My fight was partly with my family.  Yet today, after years of tension, I find that my parents respect me more for having stood my ground.  They love me more, not less, for that.

            Another thing I have had to fight is materialism.  A few years ago, when I lost my job at Brooklyn College, I realized that my desire to be a recognized professional earning a decent amount of money had become too big a thing for me.  And this despite having thoroughly enjoyed eleven years on the mission field at seventy-five dollars a month!

            The devil is powerful.  The love of money is powerful.  I challenge you to buck the system.

            Second, we have to watch our lifestyle.  Every once in a while I tell myself, “Keep it simple, stupid.”

            I live with two Chinese women from Hong Kong, both of them real characters.  The thing I like most about living with them is that they continually remind me of what I don’t need.  “You know, Barbara,” they say, “this is a nice apartment.  Don’t get any more junk.”

            Sometimes they come to me and say, “So-and-so doesn’t have anything to cook with right now.  Couldn’t we give away a few of our things?”  Here I have slowly tried to accumulate some useful things, asking for a pot for my birthday and a skillet for Christmas – and there they go.  “Keep it simple, stupid,” I remind myself.

            The truth is most of us don’t need half the stuff we have.  When you go to stores, ask the Lord to help you refrain from buying when you shouldn’t.  Better yet, don’t go to stores!

            The best way to keep it simple is to look constantly at the world around us.  It’s hard to spend money on yourself when you see people in need.

            Third, we must remember God’s mandate to take the gospel to the poor.  Yes, I know that other classes need to hear the gospel too.  But it is not our task to call people to go to the middle class.  They’ll go; don’t worry.  It’s not our concern whether someone is ministering in the upper regions.  Someone will do it; don’t worry.

            The challenge today, as always, is to make the gospel live for the poor.  Yet so many of us don’t want to do that.  We don’t want to go to the cities and face the alienation, oppression and difficulty.

            But this country won’t be turned around until the church in its testimony and actions turns back to the city.  It will not be turned around until the church says with sincerity and conviction, “I will minister to the hungry and the poor and the strangers and the widows and the orphans.”

            Jesus came bringing the gospel to the poor.  So look around you.  No matter where you live, you will find alienated people.  I don’t care if they’re pink or green or white or yellow or black.  Reach out in love.  That’s what the gospel is all about.

            Fourth, we need to share what we’re doing with others.  Talk to your family, other people, churches, anyone you can.  One of the ways we give movement to the work of the Holy Spirit is by spreading the word.

            My parents strongly opposed my being a missionary.  But because of what I told them about Ecuador, they began sending down a little money – not for me, but for the poor.  And now that I’m back in New York City, they give me all their used clothing, which I give with dignity to friends who need it.  So share with your families and your friends your changed lifestyle and your new ways of thinking.  Do it right, do it kindly – without pressuring.

            Whenever you see a need that you can’t meet, ask those who have money to give it to you.  I never ask money for myself, but I’ll ask for others anytime.  The rich people in this country have to learn to share the wealth; we need a much more equal distribution.  It’s time we started pushing some of these people around.  We must motivate them to help people help themselves.

            Fifth, Christian churches must become centers of action.  We need to exercise a stronger prophetic voice to our culture, speaking up against the sins and shortcomings of our society.  When I read the Old Testament, I become convinced that our churches need to be addressing the president, the Congress, and all those in high places.  The prophets spoke out loudly and plainly.  We must too – more than we do.

            We can’t just sit and mutter, “But they’ll call me a liberal.”  Let them call you a liberal – let them call you a Communist if they have to – but speak up!  I believe there’s a real moral majority out there that will hear us and respond.

            One of the things I hope we’ll speak out about is the matter of illegal aliens.  Here’s a whole class of people who have become criminals.  Our system must find a way to deal with this problem it has created.  We will have to struggle with it just as we struggled with slavery.  And the task of the church is to see that the problem is dealt with justly, sensitively.  Surely we can help our nation see these people as God sees them – and as God saw us only a few generations ago.

The Tables Are Turned

            Missions have run full circle.  Many of the believers I knew in New York were converts from mission work in Ecuador.  Now they have come back to evangelize.

            The same thing is happening in the cities across the continent, among Chinese, Koreans, Filipinos and West Indians.  Missions and evangelism are crossing cultures all over the place.

            We as the church have to ask the Lord to unite these forces, to bring us together as one people.  Pray that God will do great and mighty things in the cities of the whole world.

BARBARA BENJAMIN ARCHILLA is a native of New York and at this writing was working  as an Inter-Varsity staff there specializing in ministries to minority and international students.  You can read about her teaching experience at Brooklyn College in her book, The Impossible Community (IVP).

Copyright Information:
Reprinted from HIS magazine, November 1981 issue.