Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

 

This is a most unusual prayer letter.  We are in a most unusual time.  I am going to ask you to pray with us as we stand with those precious among us, precious to God, who are being oppressed today in Arizona.  And consider standing alongside also.  There is a Proposition on November's ballot that directly affects some of the children of Neighborhood Ministries. Prop 300.

 

Neighborhood Ministries began in 1982 building friendships in the poor barrios of Phoenix.  Many friends were undocumented immigrants who had fled the civil wars of Central America. 

 

We were uninitiated.  We made assumptions about our new friends’ illegal status.  Our most famous failure was a time we paid for one young father to return home to get his papers in order.  He went home and was immediately shot.  He is alive today, only by the grace of God.

 

For the past 25 years it has been our privilege to know the stories behind our brothers and sisters undocumented status, and to suffer with those who live in the shadows.  These dear friends care for their families by being hard-working employees, many serve in the ministry.  We are naïve no more.

 

We met Claudia 19 years ago, when she was six.  Claudia was born in Mexico.  Her mother was looking for a new life in Phoenix.  The new life never happened.  When she tells her painful story, she talks about her “church”, her only safe haven.  Claudia has become a godly woman, a courageous overcomer.  She single-handedly put her child molesting step father in prison, has rescued many of her siblings, worked to get a good job and her GED.  She is an amazing mother of three, the sole breadwinner in the family, and has added college to her busy life.  Yet, there isn’t one day where she doesn’t look over her shoulder and wonder when and if “they” will find her.  She doesn't give up, she works hard and will proudly tell you she pays her taxes.  (Undocumented immigrants pay sales taxes and property taxes, many file W-2’s; some estimate that 6-7 billion dollars in our social security system come from our undocumented community – money that can never be claimed.) If Claudia was denied work, services, or even forced to leave this country, what would she do?  Where would she go?  Claudia has lived here her whole life. 

There is increasing emphasis on border enforcement.  What we have yet to hear from some of these proponents is a compassionate concern for the twelve million people already in the U.S., many of whom were brought here as young children.  Our undocumented friends have been abandoned; they live with an anti-immigrant/anti-Hispanic bias, are labeled criminals, with hardly anyone decrying this.  Most of my undocumented friends live in a perpetual state of fear. 

For 25 years, the Scriptures have been the foundation of our work among the poor in Phoenix.  The over 3000 passages of God’s heart for the poor guide us, correct us, inform our hearts.  How can we see what God sees without them?  Impossible!

 

So with the scriptures, and with relationships, we become aware of how God teaches us to respond:
 

And with the scriptures and with relationships, we become aware of our encounters with Jesus.

We are entering another year where we as a nation, city or state decide for justice, values, leadership, change.  How will we let the scriptures and God’s heart guide us?

We are dependent on the Lord for guidance in every matter of ministry, from how we operate financially, how we build programs, hire employees, do future planning and how we respond as public Christians in society.  Sometimes issues pick you, you don’t pick them.  Living and working in this community for 30 years, loving thousands of people, knowing real names, real stories builds for us a legacy of relationships that require a response when these loved ones are maligned.

I can't help but wonder if we should ask, like the lawyer in Luke 10, “who is my neighbor”?  Before Jesus responded with the famous  Good Samaritan story, he asked him, how do you READ the law? In other words, how do you HEAR it?  Has it penetrated your heart in such a way that you know what it is asking of you?  Are you interpreting it correctly, so that you can see your suffering “neighbor” lying on the road.  I am reminded of a  famous D.L. Moody quote: 
"The best way to show that a stick is crooked is not to argue about it or spend time denouncing it, but to lay a straight stick alongside it."  The scriptures are our straight stick.

Our undocumented brothers and sisters in Christ are suffering.  Many know someone who has died on our desert risking everything to find work, simple work like folding laundry, mowing yards, roofing, picking agriculture, washing dishes.  For children who have grown up here, it is just as terrible.  Though they speak English all the time, work hard in school, care for their brothers and sisters, go to church …  they are seen as other than, less than, and risk being denied the same opportunities as their classmates.  There is a Proposition on this year’s ballot that extinguishes the futures of these children.

Prop 300 is telling future college students DON'T BOTHER.  Maybe you graduated in the top 5% of your class (our Abraham) , are a model student in the honors program (our Alicia) , have been a Neighborhood Ministries Intern multiple summers evangelizing children and sharing Christ.  Prop 300 burdens these undocumented students who have lived in Arizona most of their lives (whose parents have been paying taxes alongside other hard working Arizona parents) with out of state tuition fees, easily prohibiting them from furthering their education.  Poor students can’t afford this.  Wealthy students barely can.

I look around at the hard work of two decades of ministry.  We have thrown out a big net called evangelism.  We believed Luke 4 and preached the gospel of the kingdom to the poor.  In our poor neighborhoods, a big net gathers in everyone, brown, black, white, Asian, Native American, English speaking, Spanish speaking, we are no respecter of persons.  And we fell in love with our neighbors.  Some have been immigrants, some undocumented.  And the scriptures informed our hearts and our actions, and we have served them.  Now today we advocate for them.  For they are in trouble.  And their suffering is getting worse. 

May God bless you as you prayerfully respond.  Love,  Kit