By Bob Allen
A Cooperative Baptist Fellowship pastor joined fellow clergy July 24 in a press conference on the U.S. Capitol Building lawn calling for broad immigration reform.
“We are not here to endorse any specific bill or any particular process,” Wendell Griffen, pastor of New Millennium Baptist Church in Little Rock, Ark., said in remarks prepared for the press conference sponsored by the Evangelical Immigration Table. Instead he urged members of Congress to ensure that reform includes “biblical principles and fundamental American values.”
Griffen, a Circuit Court judge and former member of the Arkansas Court of Appeals, said immigration measures should include a path to citizenship and border security that is both efficient and fair, while encouraging legal immigration in ways that support the U.S. economy.
He also said reform should ensure that families can stay together. “Many immigrant families are torn apart by deportation and by long backlogs to reunification,” Griffen said. “As evangelical leaders, we grieve with and for them. That’s why we urge Congress to make sure that immigration reform correct this harmful aspect of our present broken system.”
Griffen represented the Atlanta-based Fellowship at the press conference alongside other faith leaders including Russell Moore of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.
“We’re here today as a group of believers in Jesus Christ to let our elected officials know we are praying for them,” Moore said. “We have recognized that immigration reform is not just a political issue, it’s a personal issue, and we’re praying for justice and compassion, wisdom and mercy. We are speaking to the consciences of our lawmakers.”
The press conference preceded a bilingual worship service at the nearby Church of the Reformation. From there evangelical leaders fanned out across House office buildings to hold more than 90 meetings with their representatives and with House leaders, including many key Republicans.
Jim Wallis of Sojourners, a leader in the broad-based Evangelical Immigration Table that coordinated the Pray4Reform Day of Prayer and Action, said evangelicals have been “converted” on the immigration issue by the Scriptures, the witness of Hispanic brothers and sisters in Christ and “the future of the church.”
“They can’t deport the future of the church,” Wallis said. “So now we go to convert the Congress.”
Long involved in political advocacy, Wallis said politicians have a difficult time taking risks. “Today is the day to replace political fear with personal faith,” he admonished.
They like to go slow and take things step-by-step over a course of years, he said. “Time has run out,” Wallis said. “It’s time to do the right thing.”
“We want to convey a message of moral urgency,” Wallis said. “Keeping children with their parents for us is an issue of moral urgency. When people can’t get the critical health care they need or are afraid for their lives because they can’t go to the police, that is an issue, for us, of moral urgency. When we see … that how we respond to 11 million people is how we respond to Jesus himself, and we will be held accountable for how we respond, that is an issue of moral urgency.”