by Inderjit Bhogal.
Loving, compassionate and welcoming responses to refugees arriving in the UK across the English Channel are lighting up ways to challenge hostility with protective hospitality. These include small and large church congregations, like Brighton and Hove Methodist Circuit, Nailsea Methodist Church and Chester Cathedral, that have in 2023 received the recognition of Church of Sanctuary. Their prophetic responses help to unpack a little of what may be defined as a “more excellent way” of love and compassion. Challenging hostility with hospitality.
The Church of Sanctuary award recognises proven commitments to learning about sanctuary issues, embedding practices of hospitality and inclusion, and encouraging others to do the same. The purpose is to do all we can to ensure that people seeking sanctuary among us have the protective hospitality in communities and cultures of welcome and safety.
This is a constructive example of standing up to racist rhetoric and behaviour around refugees, a faith-based response to the declared intention of our government to build a hostile environment here to deter refugees from coming to the UK.
An environment of hostility: stop the boats
The hostile environment includes the vilification of refugees crossing the English Channel in small boats, and the threat to send “illegal immigrants” to Rwanda.
Boats are not only prominent in politics. They are a metaphor of human life and struggles.
The logo of the World Council of Churches, and Churches Together in England, portrays the Church as a boat afloat on the ocean of the world with a mast in the form of a cross, symbolising faith and unity and the message of the ecumenical movement.
Sadly, many of the boats in the news and media currently are unseaworthy or capsized, broken or overturned, symbols of broken institutions that fail to protect people, life savers they claim to be but moral wrecks.
An overturned boat is a tragic image, but it also has a shape of a dome or a roof.
How can people have safe routes of travel, how can a boat become a symbol of safety again, being rescued, being saved? What part can churches play in this?
Churches have not always been the sanctuary they enshrine. How can they pay more attention to their motif, and uphold the sacredness of movement, safety, building sanctuary?
After all the word ecumenical has its roots in the Greek word oikumene meaning the whole inhabited earth, and embraces, shelters, protects all people. Roof and room for all.
There are different strategies being held before us in relation to boats carrying refugees seeking sanctuary across turbulent waters.
Scripture points to “a more excellent way” (1 Corinthians 12:31).
What does “a more excellent way” mean?
These words introduce 1 Corinthians 13, a beautiful Biblical poem. Its wisdom should not be confined to wedding ceremonies.
Its original intention was to give direction to small congregations struggling to discern their best gifts and their calling, how to use their gifts in situations of opposing views and deep conflicts, and prioritises love.
It asserts that without love all gifts are a sham, a show. Words – however angelic and well meaning – without love are hollow rhetoric, like “noisy gongs or clanging symbols” (verses 1-3).
It insists that love has to be incarnated, made real and visible. We have to express love. Love is revealed and recognised in kindness, patience, humility, self-giving, truthfulness, bearing with one another, keeping hope alive, faces up to all things in life (verses 4-7).
It affirms that love is eternal, not a short-term expression, it endures, never ends. Love outlasts. The Greek word used here is pipto meaning that love never stumbles and never trips up. No other gift is “complete”, no other gift lasts as love does, no other gift compares to love (verses 8-13).
We aim at love, grow towards it, however imperfect our efforts are. It is an ongoing, never-ending pathway. We aim at perfection, complete love into eternity (1 Corinthains 13:9-12).
Love is the “more excellent way”.
So, “pursue love” (1 Corinthians 14:1).
Wouldn’t it be great if social and political strategy was rooted in love, and that the wisdom of all people was used to work towards a more excellent way?
I offer a symbol of love, Church of Sanctuary.
Churches take pride in welcoming all. Many churches go beyond welcome and are thoroughly engaged with supporting refugees and people seeking sanctuary.
Acts of love are never erased, they strengthen the foundations and the pathways of love, for us and others – a lasting legacy.
Theology Everywhere 
Amen to this. Thank you Inderjit.
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Two people I know (one being a niece who lives on the south coast, and the family spends a lot of time sailing for pleasure) have a refugee living with them as family. That can be mutually enriching, though that level of involvement is not possible for most of us.
The house group I belong to is currently studying your book ‘Hospitality and Sanctuary for All’ with interest and concern.
There are activists among our congregation, and we can all do something to help to change popular perceptions. Brian Bilston’s poem ‘Refugees’ is now several years old, and has been joined by Paula Cleary’s ‘Look from a different angle’ in which she points out that whether from Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Celts, Romans, Normans or Scandinavians we are ALL descended from ‘People in boats’.
Keep going, Inderjit!
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Loving, compassionate and welcoming responses to refugees arriving in the UK across the English Channel are lighting up ways to challenge hostility with protective hospitality.- this is how we need to be towards all people, maybe especially refugees, thank you Inderjit, much wisdom as always
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Excellent article Inderjit. It puzzles me that some people, including some preachers, read “And now abideth faith, hope and charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity” (1 Cor 13:13) and still emphasise personal salvation, judgmentalism, right belief, personal piety, presence, contemplation, spiritual exercises, prayer, praise etc. I ask myself, where is the love? Without charity “I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal”. When I think about what goes on in my head, God invariable comes to mind, arises, becomes present to me, as I respond to the needs of others – actively engage in charity, loving and caring for all I meet or at least trying to!
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Thank you Inderjit for this and all your continuing activity in this sphere. I had the humbling experience recently of being invited to spend two days in the Brighton and Hove Circuit with Harvey Richardson, sharing with the people there on Saturday and leading worship and preaching on the Sunday. Your influence permeated that time. Grace and Peace, Andrew
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