Minnesota bishop establishes fund to help church serve immigrants, fill federal funding gaps

[Episcopal News Service] Minnesota Bishop Craig Loya has established a new migrant support fund and has asked diocesan congregations to take a special collection on March 2 to add to its initial gift of $10,000.

Loya created the fund, he told Episcopal News Service, because the diocese has seven congregations where immigrants are the majority of members, and another two where immigrants are a sizable minority. Four are predominantly Latino, but all of them include people who have arrived in Minnesota from around the world.

“We are richly blessed by this diversity,” he said.

But in a time when recent immigrants are the target of what he called hateful rhetoric and unjust policies, “we really feel as a diocese that we have to provide a response,” he said.

Loya thinks the fund can be helpful in two main ways: providing money to congregations’ existing or new initiatives that serve recent immigrants, especially if they need to expand those efforts; and partnering with other organizations to help fill the gaps that will result from cuts to federal funding under President Donald Trump.

Specifics are still in flux, Loya said, as changing circumstances affect where the need is greatest, but he knows the need will be enormous. And just because there is a limited amount the diocese can do “doesn’t let us off the hook to do what we can,” he said

With Episcopal Migration Ministries winding down its core operations after the Trump administration halted federal funding for refugee services, Loya said that now is “a moment for us to recommit to the stranger among us with the love God extends to every human being.”

Since announcing the fund’s creation on Feb. 6, more than 100 individuals have made personal contributions, he said, and he also has been contacted by ecumenical colleagues in the state to see if there was a way they could either partner with the fund or start one of their own.

Loya’s commitment to the fund, and meeting the needs behind it, springs from what he describes as the Christian community’s dual vocation of witness and resistance – “witnessing to God’s vision for beloved community in the world, witnessing to the power of God’s love and God’s coming kingdom in the world; and resisting the way in which the forces of evil in a broken world are always breaking down the creatures of God.”

A model for how Christians can speak up in challenging times, he said, comes from the comments Washington Bishop Marianne Budde addressed to President Donald Trump in the Jan. 21 Service of Prayer for the Nation at Washington National Cathedral. Her words were “brave, convicted, clear, gentle, humble and loving,” Loya said.

He also supports the action of The Episcopal Church in joining the lawsuit against the Trump administration for allowing immigration officers to target churches and other “sensitive” places for arrests as part of the president’s promised crackdown on legal and illegal immigration.

“There is probably no clearer moral imperative in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures than the call to care for the stranger and the foreigner in our midst,” Loya said. “We are given that call because when we were estranged from God, God met us with embrace rather than exclusion.”

Loya also acknowledged that while his primary motivation for serving immigrants in his diocese comes simply from being a follower of Jesus, as a third-generation Mexican American it feels personal. “When I see photos of some of the people in the early deportation efforts, I see my grandmother, my aunts, my uncles, my cousins,” he said. He added that for Christians, “what affects one of us affects all of us.”

In addition to announcing the migrant support fund, Loya’s message also encouraged support for the diocese’s migration caucus, a group of clergy and lay people who have been meeting online for several months to help congregations better understand what is happening with immigration and how they can assist. He noted a series of resources the caucus has gathered.

As bishop, Loya also called on Minnesotans to pray as a way to ground their work and advocacy, and he offered a special prayer that he asked to be used as the end of the Prayers of the People every Sunday until Easter Day:

O God, who embraced us with perfect love and made us your people when we were yet strangers to you: be present with all refugees, immigrants, and displaced people throughout the world; may they know the consolation of your presence, and the liberating power of your love. Then give us grace, we pray, to extend ever wider your embrace in a world of exclusion, until all your children are knit together as beloved family in the perfect love that is your very heart, through Jesus Christ our Lord, who was displaced among us, and who now lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

— Melodie Woerman is an Episcopal News Service freelance reporter based in Kansas.