Refugees wait for buses at a train station in Croatia, hoping to move closer to safety and stability.
With the ongoing plight of Syrian refugees making headlines around the world, more and more Presbyterians are asking how their churches can help support refugees and sponsor them to come to Canada.
Rob Shropshire, Presbyterian World Service & Development’s refugee coordinator, said during the first few weeks of September he saw “a big spike in interest” in refugee sponsorship.
Most of the phone calls and emails have been coming from groups that are still exploring the idea. But there are already 12 Presbyterian churches and two presbyteries in various stages of the refugee sponsorship process. Together they’re seeking to sponsor a total of 105 refugees from 11 countries.
The Pickering presbytery is one of those groups. Their sponsorship of Syrian refugees began last spring when the presbytery’s mission and outreach committee and an Arabic-speaking mission began wondering if there was work they could do together.
Rev. Ibrahim Wahby is an Egyptian-Canadian pastor and founder of the Life in Christ (LinC) ministry. He launched the Arabic mission in 2012 and today holds worship in three locations each week—two in different areas of Toronto and one in Cambridge.
He said the sponsorship really began with prayer. His congregation, which includes people born in a number of countries including Syria, prayed frequently for members of families still in the region.
“When we start to pray, I got this idea to support some families,” he said. “I went back to the congregation, they encouraged me, so we took the next step. I went to the presbytery, to the mission committee … and I shared my heart about the people who are in crisis overseas. And thank God the presbytery got the idea, supported the idea, endorsed it. The whole idea started like that.”
To sponsor a refugee family, a church group needs to raise sufficient funds to prove they can support them for one year. For a family of four, that’s in the range of $25,000-$30,000.
“We went to the presbytery and said, ‘Okay, here’s what we need: $27,000 or thereabouts. Could you start going to your congregations and seeing what we could raise?'” said Rev. Jeremy Bellsmith, who was then convener of the mission and outreach committee. “Well, within a few months over $130,000 had been raised.”
According to Liz Stark, an elder at Fallingbrook, Toronto, and a member of the committee, of the 25 churches in the presbytery 14 or so held fundraisers to raise money for the sponsorship.
“I think very much it has been a presbytery-wide initiative and each church has contributed,” she said.
Having beaten their initial fundraising goal almost five times over, the presbytery agreed to sponsor five families instead of one.
But raising money is only one part of a long and often tedious process. “The learning curve, believe me, has been really steep,” Stark said.
She and Fouad Helal, a member of the LinC ministry, worked together to fill out the refugee application forms. The five families represent 18 people in total, and all adults—including children over 19—must have their own application form. That meant filling out forms for 10 people.
A year after raising the funds necessary to sponsor the refugee families, the applications for two of the families had been submitted. At press time two were very close to being done and one was still in process.
“It’s almost humiliating when you have churches that step forward keen to sponsor … and then it can take months and months to prepare the applications because the government has been so rigorous in terms of insisting that the very complex applications are filled out correctly and consistently,” said Shropshire, PWS&D’s refugee coordinator.
Long wait times for refugees and sponsors and bureaucratic red tape are some of the issues many organizations have been calling for the government to address in the face of the current crisis.
Several major social justice groups, including the Canadian Council for Refugees and Amnesty International, jointly released a set of recommendations that include allocating more resources to speed up the processing of refugee applications, implementing measures to make it easier for Syrians to come to Canada if they already have family members living in the country, and smoothing the way for groups to privately sponsor refugees. (You can find all the recommendations at ccrweb.ca).
The organizations also called for the government to fund the resettlement of at least 10,000 Syrian refugees this year over and above the number of refugees Canada normally resettles.
The Canadian government has pledged to accept 10,000 Syrian refugees by September 2016, but most are expected to be supported by private sponsors like church groups.
On Sept. 19, Immigration Minister Chris Alexander announced the government would designate Syrians who have fled their homes as “prima facie refugees,” meaning they would no longer need to go through the long process of proving they qualify as refugees before they could be sponsored to Canada. He also announced the government would be increasing staffing at its application processing centre in Winnipeg and in visa offices abroad, and would seek to ensure the majority of current and future Syrian and Iraqi refugee applications are processed within six months.
There are more than 4 million Syrian refugees, many living below the poverty line, most of them in five countries: Turkey (1.9 million), Lebanon (1.2 million), Jordan (650,000), Iraq (almost 250,000) and Egypt (over 130,000). According to the UNHCR, 400,000 of them are in need of resettlement.
In early September, the Moderator of the 2015 General Assembly wrote a letter to the prime minister urging the government to “do more to respond” to the plight of Syrian refugees.
“The Church is concerned that Canada is not playing its traditional role in responding to UNHCR resettlement appeals, and thus is not fulfilling its international responsibilities,” Rev. Karen Horst wrote on behalf of the PCC. “Rather, the government is putting too much of the onus of the Canadian response on to private sponsors.”
The letter was the result of a recommendation passed by General Assembly in June that asked the Moderator and members of the church to write to the government “urging that the number of government-sponsored refugees be increased to, at a minimum, match the number of privately sponsored refugees.”
The assembly also asked the Moderator to urge the government to “increase its annual contribution to the United Nations High Commissioner for
Refugees.” This request was also included in Horst’s letter to the prime minister.
Canada has been providing record amounts to the UNHCR to assist refugees in the region, Shropshire noted, though in mid-September the UN’s international appeal was only 40 per cent funded. Providing funding for refugees and internally displaced persons is also a vital part of responding to the crisis. More than half of Syria’s population has been displaced by the conflict.
“Part of the reason people are doing a secondary migration into Europe from Turkey is that the situation in Turkey is so bleak for refugees and the sheer numbers that are there,” said Shropshire. “The living conditions are bad and there’s no hope for the future.”
“Refugee resettlement is not the only solution to the problem, and no one is saying it’s the only solution,” he said. “But at the same time, there’s no immanent solution in Syria either.” There’s no expectation that people who have fled the country will be able to return, and no peace process to suggest the conflict could be over any time soon. “And in the meantime refugees need some kind of hope for a solution.”
Huda Kandalaft, director of Christian development at St. Andrew’s, Ottawa, has family living as displaced persons in Syria and others in Jordan and Lebanon. Their homes were destroyed and for four years they have been renting small apartments in villages.
“Their savings have ended after four years of paying rent—high rent,” she said. “Prices have tripled. The dollar is now—in the beginning of the event it used to be 50 Syrian pounds to a dollar, now it’s 180. So you can imagine how these people who are jobless now, who are paying rent in a village near a minor city, who can’t go back to their home because it’s destroyed, how long they can last?”
Her congregation has sponsored several refugees in recent years, and this year is sponsoring a Syrian family.
PWS&D has also been responding, working through its partnerships with ACT Alliance and the Canadian Foodgrains Bank. For every dollar donated to PWS&D for its work with Syrian refugees before Dec. 31st, the Canadian government is contributing one dollar to its Syria Emergency Relief Fund.
“It’s our call as a church primarily to care for our neighbours, not just those who are in our local community but also around the world,” said Kandalaft. “And as we watch the news and listen to stories coming and headlines everyday we cannot just shut our eyes.”
To learn more about refugee sponsorship visit presbyterian.ca/pwsd.
