NorCalUrban

Found this at the Sojourners website. There seems to be much concern lately over the people being referred to as "illegal immigrants." Let's define our terms: "Immigrant" - somebody who has come to a country and settled there. "Illegal" - forbidden by law. Concern about illegal immigrants has a familiar ring to us Native Americans. We have been empathizing with those concerns for over half a millennium. Let's see ...Were the first immigrants to America illegal? By every definition - yes! But perhaps if they had a good reason it makes their trespass less offensive. What of their motives? The stated intent of some of the earliest European settlers in America was first to establish military superiority over the inhabitants and then "civilize" them by assimilating them into their form of government and converting them to a foreign religion. Such was the case in the earliest American colonies: From the First Charter of Virginia, April 10, 160...

Dr. Canales wrote an excellant piece at the Out of Ur Blog. Here's an excerpt: Throughout our history there have been times when non-Christians see through our hypocrisy. They recognize that not everyone is truly welcome in our churches. These are times when we’ve worried about being politically right when we should be focused on being biblically correct. The root of American evangelical hypocrisy is smugness; a historical inability to understand God’s unfailing mercies for the immigrant, his unfailing love for the poor among us. If our sense of worth is measured by privatized religion and political culture—from our color, to our work ethic, to the neighborhoods we live and worship in—we remain independent of God and self-sufficiently smug. Christ cannot help us. We are not being his church. So the question I ask myself, and pose to every pastor, is: Shall I build a church that isolates us from immigrants, or should I embrace God’s story of welcome? It is easy to raise a church w...