A native of Iraq, he was attending seminary in Egypt. He’d become convinced God was calling him into the ministry in part when a scholarship had unexpectedly been provided to attend Evangelical Theological Seminary in Cairo when he could otherwise not afford to go.
But a few months short of his graduation, the Egyptian authorities had told Salim to leave, unhappy that a Muslim prisoner with whom he had been working had decided to become a Christian. While he was doing humanitarian work rather than evangelism – providing food, medicine, and immigration assistance to prisoners from North Africa — refugees who had left their own impoverished homelands in search of a better life – the Egyptian authorities insisted he had to go. He was able to delay his departure long enough to graduate. But then, Salim had nowhere to go.
Friends told him it was too risky to come back to Iraq; churches were closing, Christians were being kidnapped or killed.
And, lacking a proper visa, no other country would take him in.
Fast-forward two years. In February 2009, after unexpectedly gaining a temporary visa to come to the United States and after a long struggle to gain permission to stay, Lake Huron Presbytery accepted Salim into membership, the first time the Presbyterian Church (U.SA.) has admitted an Iraqi pastor through a transfer of record. Now 33, he is working as an associate pastor at First Church in Bay City, Mich., and is studying part-time in a doctoral program at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago.
“Finally, I found my home,” Salim said. “I feel so grateful to my God and to all the people who worked for me.”
More to the story
This is not, however, just the story of one man’s journey. Across the PC(USA), other immigrant pastors are trying to find their way into leadership in the denomination, trying to resolve their own complicated immigration cases in order to serve congregations of people who have moved far away, and are searching for new spiritual homes.
At a meeting of immigrant pastors last fall, some spoke of trying to help people from their congregations who have tried to follow the rules, but whose immigration status still is uncertain. “They are groaning, they are crying for help,” one pastor said of his congregation.
And there are implications in each of these personal stories for the PC(USA) as a whole – particularly as an aging, mostly-white denomination tries to learn how to do God’s work in a remarkably multicultural world.
“It is a time to be open to immigrants, to be open to leaders who escape from other countries, who came here as refugees, as immigrants,” Salim said. “It will be really a great mission if we can be more open to having leaders from other worlds to serve in our Presbyterian churches. … How can we understand each other if we are not going to let the other ethnicities come serve in our church?”
Julia Thorne, a lawyer who is the manager for immigration issues for the PC(USA), urges congregations or presbyteries working with immigrant pastors who are not U.S. citizens or permanent residents to advise those pastors to contact her office early, so they can try to avoid troubles down the road.
“Each person’s case is different, so early analysis is helpful,” Thorne wrote recently, pointing out that both U.S. immigration law and Presbyterian polity are complex. She told the immigrant pastors last fall that the PC(USA) is losing some church leaders who would like to stay — including an Hispanic pastor who’d lived in the U.S. for so long that he had to teach his own children Spanish — because they could not resolve their immigration status quickly enough. Religious worker cases can be so detailed and complex that even some attorneys may not know all the ins-and-outs of such regulations, if they don’t specialize in such cases, Thorne said.
In Elizabeth Presbytery in New Jersey, “it seems like they had incredible backlogs” processing immigration cases once Homeland Security got involved, said Robert Foltz-Morrison, the executive presbyter.
An administrative assistant in his office just won her citizenship after an arduous process in which the immigration authorities three times lost her fingerprint records and three times required her to provide more. A pastor from South Africa got separated from his wife for three and a half years after she flew back home to attend to a daughter who was ill, and then was not allowed to return. It took years to get a waiver, and only then with the assistance of an elected official.
While many call for comprehensive immigration reform, Congress so far has been unable to reach agreement on what’s needed and to push such legislation through. In the meantime, “it seems like there’s a system that has absolutely no grace within it to say, ‘We did something wrong, we made a mistake,’” Foltz-Morrison
These situations also pose challenges for presbyteries and for congregations in communities experiencing demographic changes due to immigration.
The Presbytery of New Covenant in Texas has recently set up a task force to develop procedures “so that we can be consistent in how we deal with immigrant pastors who are coming to us from other cultures and sometimes other denominations,” said General Presbyter Mike Cole.
The circumstances can be complicated and challenging. For example, one immigrant pastor in Texas came from a denomination that required him to return to his home country for a time to maintain his ordination status. The pastor, not wanting to leave his family behind, refused, “so they have essentially defrocked him,” Cole said. “We’re just trying to figure out what we do with that.”
In other cases, leadership springs up from within an immigrant community — or from the idiosyncrasies of the refugee resettlement system.
Not long ago, for example, Cole got an e-mail from a pastor from the Middle East who had obtained a visa and told Cole, “he and his family were being given permission to leave their country and to come to Houston,” Cole said. “He’s looking for some guidance from us” in finding a pastoral role.
And in Houston, “the immigrant groups tend to clump or gather in the same areas of the city,” Cole said. “I don’t know if that’s word-of-mouth or how that happens. But there are areas of the city that are pretty much distinguished by being Taiwanese or Vietnamese or Latino,” which often leads to the emergence in those neighborhoods of new immigrant fellowships.
In many communities, immigrant pastors play a vital role in helping other immigrants find their way in a strange new land.
With immigration raids and deportations, which sometimes split up families, “there are just some really sad stories,” Foltz-Morrison explained. “I’m not saying there aren’t people who do criminal things and shouldn’t be in this country. But for the most part I don’t find them in our churches. Our churches are trying to be humane and gospel-oriented.”
And often, “the immigrant pastors themselves work at a level with people that many of our mainline, very established congregations don’t have to worry about,” he said. “We’re talking about finding people health care, finding people jobs, finding people affordable housing. They do this all week long, going to court with them if they have to. … It’s almost like a gospel story, where Jesus walked with people wherever they walked. They walk with people wherever they need to walk, down any road.”
Also, “some of this is 150-year-old mission coming back to fruition in our own country,” Foltz-Morrison said. “People who have been the product of Presbyterian mission are coming (to the U.S.), saying, ‘I want to go to a Presbyterian church.’ … It’s a wild ride. I wouldn’t trade it for anything, despite all the headaches.”
Seeks peace
In his ministry, now that he has permission to stay, Salim would like to integrate his experiences growing up as a minority Christian in a country smashed by war with life in his new, adopted home.
He has a passion for peacemaking — born in part from what he experienced as a child, living through the Iran-Iraq war. When he was five, the Iranian army began dropping bombs on Baghdad, where he was then living.
As a child, “it was something of a pleasure for me,” he said – the bombs to him looked like fireworks, although he could tell the adults were afraid. But to Salim “it was like a kind of decoration — Christmas in the sky.”
One day, however, he came home from nursery school and could not find his mother in the house. The Iranian planes began attacking “and I could not find my world, which was my mom, to hide me under her wings. And the bombs were so close, hearing the ambulance, hearing the people shouting. … The house was shaking, the sound of the bombs was so loud,” Salim said. “The windows of my house were breaking.”
From that moment on, he has understood the dangers of violence, has yearned for and worked for peace.
Later, as one of few Christians in his high school or college, he experienced persecution and ridicule from Muslim extremists. He was required to serve two years in military service for a dictatorial government he knew killed dissidents and protestors. He turned to the Bible, and began to feel a call towards the ministry.
Now in the United States, Salim wants to continue his commitment to peacemaking, in part by educating Americans about the political realities and history of Christianity in the Middle East.
Some Muslim extremists think “all the West are Christians” and call them infidels, Salim said. Some in the U.S. “think all who live in Islamic countries are Muslims, and all Muslims are terrorists.”
His journey in peacemaking, he thinks, is not yet over. There is more work to be done.
