For much of April, Scott Stearman will appear more like an international diplomat than a Baptist minister.
But that’s not altogether unusual for Stearman, senior pastor at Bayshore Baptist Church in Tampa, Fla., who also serves as the United Nations representative for the Baptist World Alliance and Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.
From April 10 to 22, he is participating in “Mission of Hope,” an ecumenical delegation to Malaysia and India tasked with advocating for the protection of Burmese refugees languishing in camps along those nations’ border with Burma. The team has a two-page spreadsheet of meetings with refugees, activists, local religious leaders, United Nations officials and high-ranking government representatives, including the U.S. ambassador to Malaysia.
“It’s pretty full,” Stearman said of the agenda arranged by a former U.S. State Department official working on behalf of the Oklahoma-based Zomi Burmese group sponsoring the expedition. “We are not there to be tourists but to be as effective as we can.”
The context of the project is the ongoing persecution of religious minorities by the genocidal military junta in Burma, which has killed thousands and displaced close to 1.5 million people. Many of the military’s victims have been targeted by the Buddhist regime for their Muslim and Christian identity, including many Baptists.
“The whole Burmese problem can be located in the hijacking of religion by Buddhists who are using what is a very peaceful religion to claim that Christians and Muslims are not truly Burmese, that they don’t belong in Burma because they are really colonizers,” he said.
The delegation will navigate sensitive religious, ethnic and cultural identities in all its encounters, Stearman added. “The part of our trip that will have an ecumenical and interfaith dimension will come when we meet with Baptists and Catholics on the ground, as well as people from the Hindu faith in India who are doing the work. And the folks doing the work in Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia) are predominantly Muslim.”
The group’s specific objectives include advocating for the protection of Zomi and other Burmese refugees from extortion, arbitrary arrest, detention and deportation, to urge India, Malaysia and the U.N. to streamline the process for granting Burmese refugee status, and to hasten humanitarian aid to these and other refugee groups. The group also is tasked with interviewing refugees about their challenges and to meet with NGOs focused on health care, education and humanitarian needs.
Stearman said the group also will visit some of the refugee camps to witness the ministry techniques being employed within them.
“There is a group of interfaith women working in the camps in Kuala Lumpur that are advocating for the women,” he said. “I am curious about that group and about the services being offered in the camps.”
But the work won’t end when the team returns to the U.S., he added. “Our goal when we come back will be to do some advocacy around (federal) appropriations and we’ll be pressing the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to make some changes in policy.”
Delegation members will press the federal government to increase diplomatic and economic pressure on the Burmese leaders, will urge the Biden administration to uphold promises to resettle more Burmese refugees from India, Malaysia and Thailand, and press the UNCHR to continue its international advocacy for Burmese refugees.
Stearman will get to put on his ministry hat briefly in Malaysia.
“I’ll be preaching at a Burmese church in Kuala Lumpur on Sunday after Easter. That’s at least one Baptist thing I’ll be doing. I will also meet with the pastor of the largest Baptist church in Malaysia to talk about that church’s response to the crisis and and get a sense of what Baptists are like in Malaysia.”
Related articles:
Baptist-led petition drive urges U.S. Congress to stop stalling on crisis in Myanmar
Two years after Myanmar coup, human suffering goes unnoticed
