MENA (MNN) – Fadi Sharaiha with the MENA Leadership Center is no stranger to refugees, and he knows how conversations about this group tend to go.
“Whenever we talk about refugees,” he says, “we talk about broken dreams. We talk about broken hearts.”
As believers, we know the one who transforms dreams and redeems hearts. So what happens when we join the conversation?
REFUGEE MINISTRY
The world is home to about forty million refugees, and nearly half of them originate from the MENA region. The team at MENA Leadership center sees this reality as a call to action.
“The task is to enable and build the capacity of the churches – the different ministries – on how to do refugee ministry properly,” Sharaiha says.
Earlier this month, the center hosted a conference focusing on trauma healing for refugees.
About 50 attendees from countries across the MENA region were given blueprints for building effective refugee ministries, including how to address and navigate trauma.
Those working in refugee ministry must factor in realities and challenges that are heavily dependent on geographical location. Resources, physical or spiritual, are not always abundant.
For example, as more than a million Sudanese flee the conflict in their homeland to neighboring Chad, Libya, and Egypt, believers in those countries are trying to assist the refugees.
Courtesy of Salah Darwish via Unsplash.
“So the churches in Egypt are trying to help, but we don’t have a good presence of Christians in Libya or Chad, and even if we do, this is a very much underground church,” Sharaiha says.
In other areas, such as Lebanon, it’s Syrian refugees who are in need. There, Lebanese believers face cultural differences and political uncertainty as they consider how best to serve the refugee population.
“They are people just like us living in North America or in Europe,” Sharaiha points out. “It’s very important to put a face to the number and remember that those are people who are created in God’s image, and God loves them.”
WHERE YOU COME IN
Please pray for the impact of the trauma healing course to continue far past the event. Pray also for the MENA Leadership Center team. If you are led to financially partner with the MENA Leadership Center, find more information about how to do so here.
“Remember that we are working in a very difficult area,” Sharaiha says. “We are maneuvering around very tough situations all over the regions and then trying to meet those needs.”
As he prays for and works with those impacted by wars and conflict, Sharaiha says he reminds himself: “This could be me.”
So let’s get the conversation going.
Let’s talk about how refugees are made in God’s image.
Let’s talk about how Jesus loves them.
Let’s talk about how Jesus died and rose for them.
And as the body of Christ, let’s lend our hearts and hands to help.
Above photo courtesy of Ricardo Gomez Angel via Unsplash. Featured photo courtesy of DJ Paine via Unsplash.
