Locust-Eater Christians Host Asylum-Seekers in Suburban Indiana
A group of volunteers at a church work day help prepare the Welcome Home for its first residents during the fall of 2020.
How God used an RHPNA event to spark a crazy dream and bring it to reality.
After 14 years of international and domestic campus ministry, Tony Burrell found himself back in his home region of Northwest Indiana in 2014. With a burden to equip churches to support displaced people, he founded The Welcome Network (TWN). After a couple years, TWN had mobilized local church volunteers and soon became an approved site to receive refugee families for resettlement - just before the U.S. program was drastically minimized by President Trump in 2017. During that season of uncertainty, Tony and his wife attended an RHPNA event where Spirit-led connections were made that have since influenced many lives...
“When I went to the Roundtable in the fall of 2018, I didn't really expect anything would happen there. But my wife and I went, and we found a kinship with the people there. We didn’t realize the scope of what the church in NA is doing already with displaced people. So you feel like you’ve found family. When we went and worshiped together and heard people speaking, we felt like ‘oh, these are long-lost brothers and sisters.’”
At a table talk session, Tony met Jennifer Long from Casa Marianella , an asylum-seeker housing ministry in Austin, TX. He casually offered to help if there was any way he could. The next week, Jennifer emailed asking if TWN had room to house an asylum-seeking family from the DRC. Tony was surprised when a local pastor and her husband offered to host the family in their home.
“I felt that was all God-ordained, says Tony. “And that it was an answer to prayer about how we could continue to get the churches involved with displaced people.”
An asylum-seeking family arrives at the Welcome Home in January 2021
The Congolese family arrived on a Greyhound bus to Hammond, Indiana in the dead of winter. They were welcomed and hosted for 10 months before moving to another area. For TWN’s community of churches and volunteers, it was just the beginning.
CHURCH ENGAGEMENT
Over the next couple years, a handful of local families became hosts for asylum seeking families. One volunteer named Steve was compelled to a bold vision after hosting: he wanted to get local churches to pool resources, buy a home, and re-fit it for transitional asylum-seeker housing.
“I was maybe of little faith,” says Tony with a laugh. “I tried to kill Steve’s idea, but he wouldn’t take no for an answer. God has put these locust-eater Christians in our lives, kind of like John the Baptists — crazy people who have big dreams. All TWN really does is try to discern which of these dreams to be involved with.
By September of 2020, the dream was quickly becoming reality. Half a dozen churches had pooled money to buy a home in Lansing, IL. Volunteers went to work fixing it up, and in January 2021 the Welcome Home received its first family, with many others to come. Tony speaks of these events with a sense of wonder.
“Getting the funding arranged, getting their elders and missions teams and decision-makers on board — all that happened from January to August of 2020,” he says, “Right in the middle of COVID, when you’d expect these kinds of ideas might be on the back-burner. Instead these churches moved forward full-force with this. God has just been surprising me along the way.”
TWN has grown to a staff of eight with a core of thirty volunteers and 8-10 partner churches. They continue supporting asylum-seeking families sent from Austin and other areas of the U.S.
We are grateful for the Spirit-led connections through RHPNA that have contributed to this growth, fostered mutually transformative relationships, and extended temporary homes to displaced people as a reflection of the home God offers all of us through his Son.
You can help RHPNA foster more Spirit-led connections like this.