Monday 22 June 2009

Catholics, Protestants and Romanians

I went to church last Tuesday night to help with a clean up of the garden and grounds. When I got there they told me that we weren't gardening anymore, we were hosting. Turns out there were about 20 Romanian Roma families crashing for the night in our sanctuary.

A few days before several homes of Romanian families had stones thrown through their windows. Other reports mention white supremacist literature, guns, threats. It got to the point where they didn't feel safe in their homes, so they camped out at one, deemed a safe house, until community members caught on and called City Church.

It was amazing to see the church move so quickly. Within an hour there was tea, coffee, sandwiches and a video on for the kids. We spent the evening playing with children, chatting with teens and listening to women who were just distraught. It was heartbreaking, and I felt so grateful to be there. It's been big news lately, international news even (google City Church and Romanians).

I think there's a lot to be said about the situation. A youth worker from the area where the families live talked about how the young people there are raised to protect their homes from Catholics. How then, should they respond when another population moves in? Sectarianism may (slowly) be starting to melt, but in it's place comes Racism, in full force. It's not just about Catholics and Protestants anymore. It's those and Chinese and Polish and Romanian.

As for our church, one of the blessings is that we were there. Things were able to move so quickly because the church community was available. The clean up was originally scheduled for the week before, and then pushed back a week. Pretty fantastic that we showed up to pitch in and got to play a part in a much bigger story. The emails and encouragement that our church leadership received was astounding. I got all teary eyed reading the print outs of letters and emails from believers, friends, strangers and atheists. People were impressed to see an act of kindness from a church. On the one hand, how sad that Christian kindness is such a news story. On the other hand, bring on the glory to God.

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