What does First B Jackson teach about refugees?
Drawn from the messages where it was actually addressed: the words said from the front, the passages taught, and where to hear the whole thing.
At First B Jackson, the teaching on refugees and the movement of peoples starts not with politics but with the Bible's own storyline. In the 2017 message "Scattered for a Purpose," church planter and cross-cultural missionary Ken McEwen walked through Scripture from Genesis to Acts to show that the scattering of people across the earth has always been part of God's design and purpose. Drawing from Acts 17, he pointed out that God has determined the pre-appointed times and boundaries of peoples' dwellings so that they might seek the Lord. That means the arrival of displaced people in any community is not a problem to manage but an opportunity that God has arranged.
Ken traced this pattern through figure after figure in the Bible: Abraham, Joseph, Moses, Ruth, Daniel, each one displaced and each one used by God for purposes that reached far beyond their own story. He also showed that fear and suspicion of newcomers is nothing new in America, pulling out political cartoons from 1851 and photographs from the 1940s and 1950s to show that the same anxieties surfaced over German, Irish, and Japanese immigrants, and over Black Americans. The emotions people feel today are the same ones people have felt in every generation, and the same arguments have been made before.
In the 2016 ministry report from Norris Williams, the congregation heard how that biblical reality is playing out on the ground right now. Norris described how an insurance salesman named Bassam has seen over a thousand Syrian refugee families come to faith through simple Discovery Bible Studies, and how a Syrian refugee woman set a goal to start 50 new discovery groups in a year and hit it by February. First B Jackson's teaching on this topic holds these two things together: God has always moved people with a redemptive purpose behind it, and ordinary believers who engage their new neighbors with Scripture are seeing that purpose fulfilled.
Taught from Acts 17:26-27 · Acts 11:19 · Acts 8:1 · John 15:8 · Genesis 1:28
The passage taught · Acts 11:19
19 They therefore who were scattered abroad by the oppression that arose about Stephen traveled as far as Phoenicia, Cyprus, and Antioch, speaking the word to no one except to Jews only.
World English Bible
The messages that teach on it
- November 12, 2017 Scattered for a Purpose Ken and Lori McEwen share how God uses the global scattering of people for redemptive purposes, and what that means for Christians loving their neighbors.
- September 25, 2016 Bear Much Fruit Missionary Norris Williams shares how disciple-making movements are bringing thousands of Muslims and refugees to faith in Christ across the Middle East and Africa.
Mentioned along the way
- September 25, 2016 Bear Much Fruit Norris Williams shares how ordinary believers across the Middle East and Africa are multiplying disciples and planting thousands of churches through simple, obedient faith.