Pleading for Mercy Outside the White House
Dear friends,
My name is Joshua Sprinkle. This summer, I’ve been interning with World Relief, one of the organizations that leads the Evangelical Immigration Table. I’m also an undergrad at Wheaton College in Illinois, a member of the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities, another EIT leadership organization.
I confess: as an International Relations major, working in the White House has always been a bit of a dream of mine. This past week, I came close… two hundred feet from the door. From July 22nd to 24th, my office became Lafayette Park and my coworker, Iranian-American Pastor Ara Torosian.
Before meeting Pastor Ara, the most recent news I had heard about Iran was that the US had bombed it. Suddenly, however, the streets of Tehran weren’t some far-off geopolitical concept but a neighborhood that my new friend had lived in, preached in, and escaped from.
Pastor Ara, at one time a Bible-smuggling leader of the underground church in Iran, is now a naturalized citizen of the United States, courtesy of a refugee resettlement initiative that has historically offered refuge to particular religious minority groups called the Lautenberg Program. Now a pastor in Los Angeles, he had temporarily left his congregation to, as he put it: “practice the freedom of speech.”
This was his first trip to Washington DC, and his message was simple: “Let my people go.”(Exodus 5:1).
Over the past few months, two Christian families who came to America from Iran to escape persecution have been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), despite being lawfully present with pending asylum claims. One of the detained families included a four-year-old girl. In Iran, where they escaped from, it’s common practice for a pastor to call the congregants to cancel service for reasonable fear of being discovered. Tragically, Pastor Ara shared that he had begun doing the same thing in America, for fear of an immigration raid impacting other members of his congregation.
It was my job to help him tell their stories to staffers on Capitol Hill, coordinate interviews with reporters, and pray with him as he held signs, pleading for his people in front of the White House. He shared his story with WORLD and other media outlets. I was inspired by his courage every day: he never gave up hope, never gave up trying, and always prayed. We met with nearly as many pastors as we did government officials, and eventually our voices were heard.
In a triumph of advocacy and prayer, that four-year-old girl and her family were released from detention and went to church with Pastor Ara the next Sunday.
The experience gave me a new understanding of Paul’s description of the Christian life “as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing”(2 Corinthians 6:10). Because the work is never finished. There is still another family sitting in detention from Ara’s congregation, and news just broke about another immigrant evangelical pastor, a Church of the Nazarene pastor originally from Honduras, detained in Maryland last week.
These stories are varied and seem increasingly common, which is one reason that Evangelical Immigration Table leaders recently wrote a letter commending the principles of the Dignity Act, a bipartisan bill seeking to reform the asylum system – preserving due process for people like those in Ara’s congregation – and create a restitution-based legalization process that would help people like that Maryland pastor.
If you feel called to take a step of faith and advocate alongside us, you can use this easy tool. In any case, I hope you’ll join me in prayer for:
- Pastors and church members facing the possibility of detention or deportation, that God would provide for them and protect them.
- Governmental leaders, that they would heed the calls of church leaders to ensure that our laws and detention processes reflect each person’s God-given dignity.
- Children whose parents have been recently detained, or have been detained with their parents, that God would comfort them and provide for them.
In Christ,
Joshua Sprinkle
Advocacy and Policy Intern, World Relief
P.S. Pastor Ara is scheduled to be one of the speakers in Nashville on September 30 – along with other pastors and ministry leaders with a frontline perspective on how shifting immigration policies are impacting the church – at the annual “Evangelical Convening on Immigration“. Our Evangelical Convening on Immigration is intentionally timed to coincide with the Leading the Way convening coordinated by our partners at the National Immigration Forum. Please reserve your spot for the Evangelical Convening on Immigration by registering here (select “Evangelical Faith Leader” as your affiliation when prompted in the form). If you are interested, please also join our partners at the National Immigration Forum for the Courage to Lead award reception the evening Monday 29th and the general session on the morning of Tuesday 30th (you many only attend if you are registered for these events as well).
