‘The most unsafe place for an immigrant ... is inside of an evangelical church’ | Opinion
“The most unsafe place for an immigrant in the United States is inside of an evangelical church.”
A woman said that to me, and as a pastor, it was a major wake up call. Because the church is meant to be the place where the fearful are welcomed, where the love of Jesus Christ is made visible to the world. That’s what we’re called to be — and it’s what we can be.
Her story sent me on a journey to lead my church in actively answering God’s call to love our immigrant neighbors.
She worked on the cleaning staff in a retail district where our church is situated.
For months, I could see she was carrying something heavy, but she wasn’t ready to talk, and I wasn’t going to push. We just built a friendship the slow, ordinary way.
Then one day she looked at me and said, “You’re the first person I’m ever telling this to. I am a follower of Jesus. And I am here undocumented.”
She said she didn’t know why she felt like she could tell me. But there it was — the weight of doing life alone, in secret, hidden, just trying to raise her kids.
We became great friends after that. She came to our house for Thanksgiving, and she told us it was the first time in 10 years that her family had shared a meal in the United States with someone other than an undocumented person.
Over time, I learned more of her story.
At 14 years old, she was kidnapped from a small town in Mexico by a drug cartel and smuggled into the United States to become the wife of one of their men.
She told me that growing up where she did, you learn early that there’s no escaping something like that — so you submit to it before it gets worse.
Eventually, the man discovered he could fast-track his own citizenship by marrying an American citizen. So he left her and their children undocumented, with nothing.
In addition to being left alone to raise her children, she also faced extortion.
At work, she’d hear every month that her pay was being reduced, even though her hours never changed.
The threat was always the same: We can call ICE. We can turn you in.
Later, when she needed her car repaired, she was told she could either pay double — because she had no driver’s license and was undocumented — or do sexual acts.
The message was clear: We know your status, and we can turn you over to authorities.
Different faces. The same threat.
What makes it so crushing is that she has no path for her to protect herself. She’s been so far removed from her family in Mexico that going back would be starting over in a foreign land — and a dangerous one at that.
And there’s no legal process available to her to set the record straight, to corroborate her story, to do anything for herself or her children.
That has left her exposed in every direction. It perpetuates a state of fear that most of us will never understand.
So when I told her she was welcome at our church — that this was her family, God’s family — she didn’t respond the way I expected. She was unmoved. That’s when she said it:
“The most unsafe place for an immigrant in the United States is inside of an evangelical church.”
Her words forced me to wrestle, more seriously than I ever had before, with what the Bible actually says about the foreigner. And what I found wasn’t complicated. God is abundantly clear: Treat the foreigner as the native born among you (Leviticus 19:33–34).
That’s not a footnote. It’s a command.
As a nation, America is largely unfamiliar with what it means to be uprooted or become a foreigner completely reliant on the compassion of another country. Israel knew what it meant to be uprooted, to be vulnerable. And God never let them forget that, when he told them to love the stranger.
I’m not here to offer a political platform. I pray for our leaders — presidents, governors, mayors — that they would have hearts of compassion, and even more than that, I pray that we would see real progress.
My challenge, to myself and to anyone willing to hear it, is simple: Take one step. Because if we take one step toward our immigrant neighbor today and another step next week, collectively over the years we will see real change in our communities.
That’s what this woman taught me. Just take a step toward your neighbor.
— Nathan Paulus is a pastor, church planter and ministry leader based in Wichita, Kansas. He is the founding and lead pastor of Radiant Church, which he and his family helped start in 2015. He also serves as a prison advisor for Alpha USA and as deputy director of a ministry center he co-founded in Kenya.
