WINSTON-SALEM — As Congress grapples to craft legislation that would overhaul the nation’s immigration laws, a group of Baptist ministers in North Carolina called on their state’s representatives April 2 to support “comprehensive, fair immigration reform” which “builds the common good.”
About 20 ministers affiliated with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of North Carolina gathered on the steps of First Baptist Church on Highland Avenue in Winston-Salem prepared, they said, “to support legislation that reflects our Christians values and builds the common good.”
North Carolina Baptist ministers called on congressional leaders to enact comprehensive immigration reform. (CBFNC photo by Aida Margaret Mitchell)
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“Our Scripture repeatedly calls us to care for the immigrants and strangers among us,” said Ka’thy Gore Chappell, the CBFNC’s leadership development coordinator. “As Christians, we know that Jesus Christ taught us in Mark 12 and Matthew 22 that the greatest commandment is to love God and the second is to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. Jesus taught that there is no greater commandment and that the entire law can be summed up in those words.”
“We are calling [legislative representatives] to uphold the rule of law and to care for the stranger among us,” said Glenn Pettiford, associate pastor at First Baptist Church. “The Bible speaks clearly and repeatedly to God’s concern for the immigrant, guiding the Christ-follower toward principles that we believe should inform both the interpersonal ways we interact with our immigrant neighbors and the public policies that we support.”
Scott Orr, pastor of Lindley Park Baptist Church in Greensboro, said the ministers “are driven by a moral obligation rooted deeply in our faith to address the needs of immigrants in our country. We are already working across the country to educate and mobilize our fellow Christians to support just immigration laws.”
They “stand ready to support legislation that reflects our Christian values and builds the common good,” Orr added.
Those Christian values would be reflected in legislation which provides a path to legal status or citizenship or both, said Brandon Hudson, pastor of Northwest Baptist Church in Winston-Salem. Reform legislation also would protect family unity, respect human dignity and the rule of law, guarantee secure borders and ensure fairness for taxpayers.
Deeply personal
“For us, this is not a political issue, but a deeply personal one,” said Fortino Ocampo, pastor of Centro Familiar Cristiano in Siler City, N.C. “Daily, ministers in our CBFNC Hispanic Network face checkpoints and racial profiling. Police officers who act as Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials camp outside their churches on Sunday morning to check IDs. Our Hispanic brothers and sisters risk splitting up their families to exercise an American value and a protection of the First Amendment — freedom of religion.”
A bipartisan group of eight influential U.S. senators is working on an immigration reform proposal that could address many of those issues, but the so-called “gang of eight” has not yet introduced a bill in the Senate, according to news reports.
Congress is in recess and most of its members are in their home districts, making the North Carolina ministers’ call timely, said Pettiford.
Linda Jones, CBFNC missions coordinator and a co-pastor at Via Faith Community in Winston-Salem, encouraged church leaders to accept a challenge to read daily biblical passages on immigration distributed by the Evangelical Immigration Table, an advocacy group.
“We then encourage them to contact their legislators and ask them to participate in the challenge and consider how their faith informs public policy,” Jones said.
Ryan Eller, a Baptist minister who is U.S. campaign director of change.org, a petition platform, said the Winston-Salem rally was “group of ministers — black, white and Latino coming together in solidarity to lift up our prophetic voice and do something even deeper — to stand with each other as neighbors for those who are sometimes pushed to the margins, pushed to the shadows and to call with one voice for comprehensive immigration reform which would be one step towards creating a more just system for those we are in relationship with and in communion with.”
Robert Dilday ([email protected]) is managing editor of the Religious Herald.