Can you welcome asylum seekers into church while still supporting hard-line immigration policies?

Deep in Leviticus, we find a command given to the Israelites: ‘When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not ill-treat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God’ (Leviticus 19.33–34, NIV). Is it unrealistic to apply that principle to Britain in 2024?

The Sunday morning after the 4 July General Election, my church’s young people sat on scattered beanbags in the youth room, drawing up blueprints for their ideal Christian country.

After my group had decided on a country name (‘England+’), and established the basics (no guns or drugs, environmental care, bans on non-Christians wearing crosses), I decided to stir the pot: ‘So what’s our policy on immigration?’ A few shy glances. ‘We’ll let them in, but let’s have really strict checks,’ one youth said. ‘But why let them in if we can’t even take care of our own people?’ countered another. ‘We have no jobs. We have no space!’

I pressed, 'What does the Bible say? Doesn’t it tell us to welcome the foreigner?’ And then came a thought that Christian voters have struggled with for decades, summed up by a 15-year-old: ‘Sure, welcoming the foreigner is biblical, but it’s not realistic.’

Is welcoming the foreigner unrealistic?

From a voter’s perspective, it’s not hard to understand what he meant. Compared to when Leviticus was written, we live in a radically different world. In Britain, the impact of immigration in recent years is causing some concern.

A lack of space for refugees among the growing, aging UK population is just one of several issues the nation is facing. Many believe that migration, and especially the refugee crisis, is the catalyst for rising housing prices, inflation, increased crime and unprecedented NHS waiting lists. For others, directly linking these issues with refugees is problematic.  After all, in the year to March 2024, 95,685 people were offered safe and legal routes to the UK, mainly from Ukraine and Hong Kong, while asylum applications in the UK accounted for a further 86,719 people. But well over a million people came to the UK for work, study, family or ‘other’ reasons.

Does the Bible have any light to shed on the way Christians should approach this question?

What the Bible says about refugees

God told his people to provide for foreigners (Leviticus 23.22) and even to welcome them into their communities: ‘Celebrate the Festival of Tabernacles for seven days after you have gathered the produce of your threshing-floor and your winepress. Be joyful at your festival – you, your sons and daughters, your male and female servants, and the Levites, the foreigners, the fatherless and the widows who live in your towns’(Deuteronomy 16.13–14).

In the New Testament, we discover that our own saviour was an asylum seeker. Mary and Joseph fled to Egypt to escape the cruelty of Herod soon after Jesus was born. When Jesus grew up, he was a champion of the poor and the marginalised. In fact, in John 4, he reveals his messianic secret to, of all people, a Samaritan woman, after purposefully trekking through Samaria when his disciples would have avoided it. As a result, the gospel is shared with foreigners while Jesus isn’t welcome in his own hometown (Mark 6.4).

The Bible doesn’t write our asylum policy for us – but it does teach us something about the attitude of mind and heart we should bring to the issue.

How Christians are responding today

In many ways, the British Church has responded loudly and clearly to what the Bible says about the stranger. Christians are giving refugees the Bible, providing them with aid, teaching them English, inviting them into their churches and, in many cases, their homes. While their convictions are clearly seen in how they treat refugees personally, for many there’s still a sense that we don’t really want so many of them here.

A recent report from Theos, a Christian think tank, shows that Christians in Britain want fewer asylum seekers to be allowed into the country – fewer, even, than people with no religion at all.

When the repeated command in Scripture is to welcome the foreigner, these statistics have to challenge us. Have we allowed the Bible to speak into our world today?

What to do when God’s word confounds us

It’s undeniable that we live in a radically different time and culture from Moses’ day. This reality has and will continue to put Christians in a difficult position as we grapple with what the Bible says in the context of the impact of migration on our society, and the particular issue of asylum seekers.

Having faith, however, in the face of a confusing word from God isn’t anything new.

Abraham was willing to sacrifice Isaac without understanding why God had told him to do that. Mary believed what Gabriel promised, even though she couldn’t fathom how it could be possible. These Bible people are our heroes because they obeyed God even when it didn’t make sense. They understood that as followers of God we aren’t called to be realistic, but faithful, for ‘Without faith it is impossible to please God’ (Hebrews 11.6, NIV).

What this tells us is that practical issues thrown up when needy people arrive on our shores – and these unquestionably exist – can’t be allowed to dictate our response as Christians. Of course we can’t ignore them, but neither should we tamely assume that because it might be difficult to solve a problem we shouldn’t even try. Very often, the Bible questions our common sense in the name of uncommon grace.

When God's word confounds us with ‘Welcome the foreigner’ or ‘Love your enemies’, we can't escape from the discomfort we feel by deeming those verses unrealistic and turning the page. Not every Christian will reach the same conclusion about how many asylum seekers our country ought to take, or how to control that number. But all of us are called to wrestle with these verses, perhaps in a similar way to how Jacob wrestled with God: determined not to let them go until they change us.

Churches are welcoming asylum seekers and refugees. You can support their work by putting the Bible in the hands of a new arrival today.

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Read more about why Iranians in particular are arriving here.