Photo by Josué AS on Unsplash
It’s funny how “the whole world needs Jesus” becomes “well, not like that” the minute the world needs housing, schools, doctors, jobs, and neighbors in our backyard.
My grandparents went to Mexico in 1964 to open a children’s home. Nobody sent them a demographic report first.
Ted and Wanda Murray read their Bibles, felt something pull at them, and crossed the border to help raise other people’s children in San Luis Potosí. They didn’t have data. They didn’t even have an executive summary. All they had was a faith that said the people on the other side of that border were worth the lives they were prepared to invest, and they acted accordingly.
Casa Hogar de San Juan has been there ever since. My uncle Juan and Aunt Selene are the ones in charge now. Still full of kids that the white evangelical tradition my grandparents came from would recognize immediately as exactly the kind of people Jesus had in mind.
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I’ve been thinking about them a lot lately. Partly because a new report from the National Association of Evangelicals and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is warning that 1.3 million people could be torn from their families if current deportation policies continue. Partly because many of those people come from exactly the countries that white evangelical churches have spent generations trying to reach. And partly because I’m genuinely, honestly confused about the attitude I see in my fellow co-religionists.
If the mission was real, if those prayer cards on the refrigerator were more than decoration, if the Compassion International child sponsorships were more than savvy marketing, if the short-term mission trips were actually about human beings and not just the spiritual high of having gone somewhere, then what happens to that theology when the people we claimed to love from a distance show up and start asking for a bed, a job, a school, a doctor, a neighbor?
I grew up around people who took that mission seriously. I totally mean that without irony. These weren’t cynical people. They gave money they didn’t have to support missionaries in countries they’d never visit. They sent their kids on summer trips to build things, meet people, and come home changed. When someone returned from the field and stood up in church to talk about what God was doing in Guatemala or Nigeria or the Philippines, the room leaned in. The compassion was real. I figured this was what the church was for.
And the theology underneath it was clear enough: every person, everywhere, made in the image of God, was worth crossing any distance to reach. No exceptions. No asterisks. The ground was level at the foot of the cross, as they liked to say. And that meant the Guatemalan farmer and the Filipino fisherman and the Nigerian schoolteacher all mattered to God just as much as the people in the pews sending the offering.
I believed them. I still think they were genuinely compassionate.
So I’m trying to understand what happens to that theology when the people we used to “support” show up at the border.
Because the Guatemalan farmer’s children are there. The Filipino nurse is there. The Nigerian engineer is there. They didn’t wait for us to raise money, print matching T-shirts, and launch a mission trip to meet them there. Instead, they apparently messed everything up and just came to us here.
But somehow that changed everything.
Maybe it’s the direction of the travel or the loss of control. Maybe mercy feels easier when we get to be in charge of the itinerary and the passenger list.
But something about their arrival seems to have scrambled a theology that looked perfectly clear when our compassion was headed the other way, on its way out of the country.
I’ve been mulling this over, and I think I’m starting to see the shape of it, even if I can’t quite bring myself to say it out loud.
When we go to someone, we get to manage the encounter.
We get to decide when it starts and when it ends. We hold the resources, the passport, the return ticket. We get to stand in the benevolent light of being needed, which is a very different thing from being inconvenienced. We have something they lack, something they need, or at least that’s the story we tell ourselves. And the story lets us feel a certain way about ourselves, about God, and about the holy work supposedly happening between us.
But when someone comes to us, the whole arrangement gets flipped on its head, doesn’t it?
We don’t get to control the timing or plan the encounter. We can’t take pictures of their needs, pray over them, and leave them behind at the end of the week. They don’t disappear when the plane boards. They need housing, work, school, medicine, and neighbors. They need the kind of love that doesn’t fit neatly into a Moment for Mission slideshow.
So, I’m genuinely starting to wonder whether what we call a crisis at the border is really more of a crisis of our own discomfort.
Maybe the theology that felt so right when it was headed out of the country starts causing problems when we’re no longer the guests but the hosts.
Maybe the problem isn’t only documentation but distance, and who gets to control how much of it we need between us on a permanent basis.
Because the verses didn’t change. Leviticus 19 is still there. Matthew 25 is still there. The stranger is still the stranger. The image of God didn’t get revised.
My grandparents never seemed confused about any of this. They just went toward people in need. As far as I know, it never occurred to them to wait until people showed up with the right paperwork.
I’m glad evangelical leaders are finally saying out loud what the numbers have been saying for a long time: that 1.3 million people are at risk of being torn from their families, that many of them are Christians, and that the church won’t be able to pretend this is happening somewhere else to people of other faiths.
So, obviously, I’m glad somebody’s sounding the alarm. And I’m especially glad it’s being sounded from inside the house.
I just keep thinking about what it means that we need one.
My grandparents had their faith and a conviction that the people across the border were God’s children, which is to say, their people, full stop, no qualifications. They packed up and went to live and work as guests in someone else’s country. In the process of being welcomed there, they built something that’s still standing sixty years later, still full of kids, still held together by the belief that proximity to suffering isn’t so much a threat we’re trying to manage but a call we’re trying to answer.
That was evangelical theology once upon a time. Maybe it still is, somewhere underneath all of this.
I’m just trying to find it.
Tony Dixon
The Rev. Derek Penwell
The Rev. Derek Penwell is Senior Minister at Douglass Blvd Christian Churchin Louisville, Kentucky. This is a free post from his Substack blog, Heretic Adjacent. Click here to read the rest of his Substack .