How can your local churches effectively engage with immigrants and refugees in their cities?
Face it, our cities and towns are seeing more diversity among people groups than ever before. Churches can step up to the plate and engage immigrants and refugees, but it requires more than just adding a program. It will require integrating people into a church community where faith is lived out and not just taught.
How can this be accomplished?
If we follow a discipleship model, we will need to build trust initially. Having worked with immigrants and refugees from central and south Asia, we have seen that trust is critical to a foundational relationship. Trust can be built when our actions match our words.
Many immigrants and refugees carry with them cultural mistrust of institutions. When a local church consistently shows up with practical care and genuine friendship, spiritual conversations happen more naturally and authentically.
Here is a good rule of thumb: speak Jesus to your new friends from the very start!
It’s tempting to create separate “immigrant ministries,” but long-term discipleship works best when people are part of the broader church body. That may mean bilingual services, mixed small groups, or mentorship pairings across cultures. To be most effective, it is important to bring cultural communities together in various ways.
One-on-one or small group discipleship tends to be far more effective than lecture-style teaching, especially across language or cultural barriers. Sharing meals, stories, and life experiences often opens the door to deeper spiritual growth. We have experienced the sweetest and most God-centered conversations with our central and South Asia friends when we are seated on the floor of their homes, sharing a meal!
For many immigrants, issues like work stress, legal uncertainty, or family separation are front and center. Discipleship that ignores those realities can feel disconnected. Helping people see how faith speaks into those struggles makes it more tangible and relevant. When God brings new families into our lives, much of what we do revolves around their children’s school, medical care, etc. Being with an immigrant parent who is registering their child for school not only demonstrates our love for them, but it also reflects the love of Jesus.
Language barriers, cultural differences, and life instability can slow things down. But slower often means deeper. Our western culture is very linear when it comes to time; it is not the same for many of our immigrant friends. It would do us well to understand that the relationship takes priority over time. Churches that stay patient tend to see more lasting transformation.
These are just a few of the ways we can engage effectively with our immigrant and refugee friends for the gospel. Scripture gives us multiple examples of how we are to treat “strangers and aliens”.
Moses’ words to Israel before entering Canaan,
“He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the foreigner residing among you, giving them food and clothing. And you are to love those who are foreigners, for you yourselves were foreigners in Egypt.” (Deuteronomy 10:18–19)
All people are described as God’s image bearers.
“So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them.” (Genesis 1:27–28)
Refugees may be culturally different from those in their community, but there is beauty, harmony, and unity in difference. In these verses, we see that God himself has inspired the diversity of the earth, and that one day we will worship him alongside people of every tribe and tongue.
“After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb . . . And they cried out in a loud voice: ‘Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb.’” (Revelation 7:9–10)
We have been blessed to see God use both immigrants and refugees in advancing the Kingdom of Heaven here in the United States. We want to encourage you, as a local church, to consider how God can use you, as a congregation, to reach those “strangers and aliens” God has placed in your life.
