by Aaron Edwards, That Good Fight
A Plea for Clearer Thinking and Bolder Speaking
Does it matter how Christians think about the western immigration crisis?
It wasn’t that long ago that I didn’t think much about mass immigration from a Christian perspective. This is not because I wasn’t aware of it, nor even that I was for it. Like many British people, I basically held a quiet disagreement with it, and as a Christian, due in part to the remnants of pietism, I was led to think it would be “inappropriate” to talk too much about something that was not explicitly tied to the Gospel.
That’s why, a couple of years ago, when Andy Bannister, my co-podcaster for Pod of the Gaps, suggested we do an episode on “What’s Gone Wrong With Immigration?”, I wasn’t too sure at first, and took some persuading. Is this really something the Church ought to talk about, I wondered? Do we really want pastors preaching about it? Wouldn’t we be overstepping our own Christian “boundaries” by talking too much about it when there are already so many issues we get in trouble for speaking about?
These are not invalid questions, but they ultimately belong to an approach to mission which stops short of actually wanting society to change for the better. If these are issues that affect people in your nation, such people are going to find voices to speak into it anyway. Why shouldn’t those people be Christians?