Anglican-Lutheran Society

Transcription

1 Anglican-Lutheran Society Annual General Meeting, 17th March, 2018 Asylum Seekers, Refugees and Migrants and the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland The Rev Vesa Häkkinen, Department for International Relations in the Office for Global Mission, ELCF I am very pleased to be here. Jaakko Rusama has told me a lot about the Anglican-Lutheran Society and I was delighted to accept your invitation to this meeting. I was born in a small town called Kouvola in South-East Finland about 60 miles from the border with Russia. It is known as a dark and ugly town in Finland and there are lots of jokes about the place. For example, if you buy your child a colouring book of Kouvola what colours do you need? And the answer is fifty shades of grey! Nevertheless, Kouvola is very important for me. Although I left there in my twenties and I have never wanted to go back, my roots are there. I was born and raised there, and it was not until my thirties that I realised that I always refer everything that happens to me back to my childhood and adolescence in Kouvola. I was baptised there and became an active member of the congregation, and I think that is why I have my position in my Church. I learned to love the Bible, I learned to love mission, and many things that happened in Kouvola in my youth led me into God s work and to being sent out to deal with things that are part of the international responsibility of the Church. When I was preparing this presentation I had a problem over the kinds of things I should talk about. I hope there are not too many of them. I would like to start with a few notes on the history of Finland. You can see here the first border of Finland in This was the first attempt to regulate the border and was signed by the King of Sweden, as Finland was part of Sweden at that time, and the King of Novgorod, later called Russia. And an interesting fact is that today more than 90% of our population lives in that area. 75% of the surface of what is now Finland is under the forests, and we have 160,000 lakes, so we are not very crowded, not even in Helsinki which is the biggest city. Second, I refer to the policy of our government regarding IDPs (Internally Displaced People) from Karelia. After the Second World War Finland had to hand the grey areas here to the Soviet Union, and more than 400,000 people were evacuated from these areas. There were also some from the northern part of Finland. The government adopted a particular policy towards these IDPs and researchers have said that it was a kind of miracle to be able to resettle these 400,000 people in less than five years. Researchers suggest that there are two main reasons for that. First, all the IDPs arrived to new homesteads. Second, every village community was relocated as a whole and the locations were chosen so that the immigrants would find in their new places very similar agriculture and economic conditions to their old

2 homes across the border. The yellow areas on the map are the places where the villages were located and the people were resettled. Later some moved to northern Finland but today most Karelians are still living in these areas. The third note on our history is that there are estimated to have been 1.6 million emigrants in four generations who have moved from Finland all over the world. There were two great waves of emigration. The first was at the turn of the twentieth century when many Finns moved to the USA and to Australia. The second was in the 1960s when most of the emigrants moved to Sweden. Both of these waves took place because people were searching for better living conditions. This is something that people remember now when others have come knocking on our doors searching for better conditions. It is not easy to leave your country and for a long time after the Second World War Finland was actually a country that did not attract immigrants. Our society was quite closed, we only spoke Finnish and Swedish, and neither is really an international language. But very slowly foreign language speakers began to arrive in Finland. I met my first African-looking man when I was in my twenties, in the streets of Helsinki. It was at the end of the 1970s that I really became aware of the refugees. In the media there were discussions about the so-called Vietnamese boat people who were resettled in different parts of Finland. Their story is actually quite encouraging because they have really found their place in our society. Today our government has an immigration policy that could be described as quite strict. Finland, in the European Union, firmly opposes responsibilitysharing, and favours strict border control. Finland presents itself as expert on border management activities, supports Frontex, the European Frontier Agency, and favours strengthening the role of Frontex. In reality this means that we should close the borders and let only those people come that we are willing to accept. This position has been arrived at largely as a reaction to the thousands of asylum seekers that arrived.

3 In 2015 the situation changed very rapidly. Most of the asylum seekers came via Sweden, either by crossing the sea or by bus through northern Sweden and northern Finland. But there is a special place where there are two towns which are really just one town, shown with the white spot on the map. The Swedish town, Haparanda, and the Finnish town, Tornio, straddle the border and share a common bus station. There the border is open and you can drive, bicycle or walk through it and nobody asks any questions. Suddenly buses full of asylum seekers began to appear and people started to wonder what to do with them. The Finns were very slow to accept asylum seekers and refugees and although responsibility for them rested with the Finnish Immigration Service in cooperation with the Finnish Red Cross, it was churches and volunteers from congregations that gave them support. It is my belief that without the support of these church volunteers the Immigration Service would not have been able to cope. This picture is from Tornio and these two ladies are diaconal workers in that area and they took great responsibility for organising the arrival of the asylum seekers there. But there have been strong voices demanding that policies be tightened and that the borders be strengthened and the refugees repatriated. One example of the politics of our government is that it no longer matters if a refugee comes from a certain area where the men of the family have been killed or there is a lot of violence. If that refugee cannot show that he has been personally persecuted or is under the threat of violence, the Immigration Service can send him back. They say that if it is not safe where he was he can move to another part of his country where it is safe. European Churches, and our Finnish Churches among them, have sought to create more safe routes for refugees and asylum seekers so that they do not need to worry about being turned back in this way. When asylum seekers arrived many people felt it to be an opportunity where their hearts, hands and feet could engage with the work to be done. The number of volunteers grew in an extraordinary way but after a while the risk of burn-out among the volunteers became evident and little by little people started to say, OK, we have been working for months. Will this never end? Will there always be more and more asylum seekers? What will we do with them? So something our Church Council has done is to provide guidelines for congregations that also include instructions about health and safety. We tried to explain to people that they must take care

4 of their volunteers, and the congregations as employers must take care of their workers. We created a website with material in different languages to be used by the volunteers and ministers as well as the asylum seekers themselves. There are short films about health care in Finland, about your rights as an asylum seeker, how to prepare yourself for the asylum interview, and also recommendations and advice for the volunteers on how to work with people who come from a different culture and are of a different religion. All this time one challenge has been the local atmosphere. The people in Finland have been quite sharply divided in their attitude towards asylum seekers. The same divisions can be found in the congregations and among our parishioners. Many asylum seekers have found the Christian churches to be places of safety, and many show an interest in Christianity. The Church of Finland recognises the tradition of the church as a place of sanctuary and in March 2016 our Archbishop, Kari Mäkinen, promised that our Church would protect refugees whose requests for asylum were being rejected by the authorities and, as a result, some people resigned their membership of the Church. But in general I would say that the atmosphere in congregations towards asylum seekers was and is mainly positive. When in September 2015 asylum seekers started to arrive the response of the Churches in Finland was quite unanimous. There may be two reasons for that. First, the Churches understood that welcome to strangers is very well based in the Bible and in the life of our Saviour as well as in the life of the Early Church. The second reason may be that according to Christian charity people must not be discriminated against; no matter whether you are a Christian, a Muslim or a Buddhist, you are in the image of God, you are precious to God, and that is how we should welcome you. In the very beginning one important task for congregations was organising public discussions about the situation, meetings to provide information where people s concerns and questions were heard, and sometimes these events served as recruitment opportunities because after discussion and conversations emphasis could be put on volunteering, and this really happened sometimes. Tents of the church camps, and other church buildings were used as emergency housing and also camp facilities were used as reception centres. The volunteers collected food, hygiene packages and so on. They helped the asylum seekers to understand our winter (!), and many congregations organised open meetings with something to eat where people could get to meet each other and get to know each other. In these meetings very many relations were built up and many of these relationships continue even though the asylum seeker may have got a negative decision and have been sent back to their own countries. As I said, the Finnish authorities and the Red Cross Chapters would not have managed the situation without the help of the congregations and the volunteers in the parishes. One example of that is the Red Cross Chapters in South-West Finland awarded recognition to the Porvoo Diocese s congregations because they had been so active in providing volunteers and materials for the Red Cross so that the refugees could be cared for.

5 One special case concerning volunteers was quite widely told in our newspapers and on TV. And elderly woman named Linéa hired an asylum seeker named Ali, a Muslim man by the way, to be her personal assistant. Linéa asked Ali if it is OK if they go to the church every Sunday and every Monday to the congregational club. Ali responded, Of course, these are the gifts from God. Both Linéa and Ali have been very happy with this arrangement, but the problem is that Ali is under the threat of being sent back to Afghanistan. In this next picture you see the diocesan officers of the Office for Global Mission visiting the Finnish Immigration Service. We had a long discussion with them about asylum seekers and about how the Immigration Service makes their decisions, and especially about the assessment of faith. It has been quite a difficult question in Finland. This was the first group that made a public petition for our parishioners and parish councils about asylum seekers. They wrote a petition where they referred to the Book of Acts and the story of the ship that was transporting Paul that was wrecked (Acts 28) when Luke writes, The native people showed us unusual kindness. Since it had begun to rain and it was cold they kindled a fire and welcomed all of us around it. This was in the first petition made by our Church bodies. Also the bishops started to talk about the situation and they encouraged their congregations to take an active role and to exert the principle of Christian neighbourliness and of indiscriminate help for those seeking protection. And Kari Mäkkinen, the Archbishop, said. The government of Finland should take more refugees than the minimum mandated share. Here are the bishops from Northern Europe; the Bishop of Oulu, Samuel Salmi, Metropolitan Elia of the Finnish Orthodox Church and the Bishop of Luleå in the Church of Sweden. They also made a petition saying, We call on everyone in Northern Europe to be kind to refugees when they come to our area. At the same time we vote to continue the relief work the Churches organisations and private people have launched. They also referred to Jesus words, I was a stranger and you welcome me.

6 One interesting phase was when the Pentecostal Church of Finland started to offer training for their people. It was necessary because in the early days some of their congregations started to baptise people in a very quick way which led to some problems. The training was of a very high level and one of the bases for their theology was interesting, and I quote, A hundred years ago the Salvation Army created a model of salvation which contained a warning; a person whose life is in chaos has difficulty in making decisions in matters that require a great deal of commitment, and one such decisions is faith. So they emphasise that there should be an open reception of asylum seekers, allowing them to recall their own roots, and meeting their immediate needs. William Booth (the founder of the Salvation Army) said, What is the use of preaching the Gospel to men whose whole attention is concentrated upon a mad, desperate struggle to keep themselves alive? Many individuals and groups have held discussions with the Finnish Immigration Service, and there has been quite a lot of public discussion about some of the decisions made by that Service. Little by little things have begun to change. One of the newspapers reported that in 2017 the administrative courts altered a record number of asylum decisions made by the Immigration Service and that the Service has now changed its policy towards decision-making. Here is a photo of what appears to be a normal public swimming pool. It is in fact the place where a small number of Christians, who had gathered round their own leader and formed an association, started to baptise people with little or no teaching at all. There have even been some individuals who have claimed to be pastors who have baptised people in exchange for money. It is not surprising therefore that officials are suspicious when an asylum seeker comes and says, I have papers showing that I have been baptised! and produces four papers from four different pastors or associations! Of course, there has also been quite a lot of tension in Finnish society because we have not been used to people coming from abroad who are active in their religion which is non-christian. Every time asylum seekers have made trouble the newspapers have been very quick to say they have done this and this and this. When in August 2017 an asylum seeker stabbed ten people in Turku the diocese contacted the religious leaders in that area and organised the local congregations to come to the cathedral. There the Archbishop was present along with the local Imam and Rabbi and followers of various religions, all together in common prayer. But this was only possible because the relations and contacts had been established beforehand. The Bishop of Turku has been very active in promoting these kinds of relationships.

7 I would say that, all in all, the Churches in Finland have been commendable both practically and in advocating, and this has brought the Churches and other religions closer together at a practical level. And I would like to summarise the theological justification in five points: 1. The Old and New Testament testimony is quite clear we should take care of strangers. 2. The example of Christ and the Early Church Christ never abandoned someone because of his religion or his ethnicity or his background. The same attitude can be found in the history of the Early Church. 3. Ecclesiology: as we participate in the activity of the Triune God, when we proclaim, serve and seek for communion, we give our common testimony and by that we invite people to salvation through Christ, and there is no exclusion. Here I would like to refer to the basic policy on mission in our Church in Finland. I have many copies with me of Common Witness: Basic Policy on Mission in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland, published by the ELCF Office for Global Mission, and you are welcome to take one with you. There is a passage talking about Holistic Mission and Evangelism and one of its principles says that Holistic Mission also includes justice, human dignity, equality, and advocacy for people s fundamental rights. Parishes and mission agencies may encounter immigrants, refugees, displaced people, the marginalised and the persecuted. They will support and serve them, work with them and on their behalf, and give a voice to those who have none. 4. The history of the Church and the empathy learned: Christian believers have been, and still are, the most persecuted believers in the world. And because of that we should understand other people who are persecuted from a religious and political point of view. And that is why defending religious freedom and defending the people gives a strong testimony. 5. The Tradition of the Church as Sanctuary: this is rapidly growing in the world and an interesting illustration of this are the 200 cities in the USA who proclaim themselves sanctuary cities, offering shelter to illegal immigrants. In these cities there are congregations and parishes which have taken seriously the words of our Lord, Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of these least of brothers or sisters of mine you did for me. (Matthew 25.40) And to end my presentation I take three more aspects: 1. The concept of truth: this arouses problems in Finland because we Finns consider ourselves to be people who always tell the truth and we expect others to do the same. But the problem is that we haven t quite understood that truth is not the same as facts. When living in Senegal in West Africa one of the most precious lessons I learned there was that the truth is the thing that brings the best result. And that s why people sometimes tell good stories about their life, and through these stories they try to explain what has happened to them, but their stories might not be accurate facts about their lives. If we don t understand this we start to call people liars. But we should begin to read fairy tales and stories and children s books and try to understand that sometimes the best story is the best truth. 2. The concept of conversion: we are saturated with the idea that faith is a private matter. Our individualism and pietism prevents us from seeing that a person s family or community is relevant. So I see how the officers in the Immigration Service do not understand the fact that a person is, number one, someone who comes from a community, and if that person breaks his or her relationship with that community it is only as a result of making a very difficult and hard decision. If you publicly say I want to be a Christian and you are publicly baptised you are under the threat that your family will exclude you. This has happened many times. A person who has been baptised is

8 told by the family, You no longer have any relationship with us, and if you return we will kill you. Our officers don t seem to understand this. 3. The concept of a traumatised people: in the media there is a lot of discussion about why so many young men are coming to seek asylum, and there is less written about the fact that the young man may be forced to become soldiers and kill their fellow citizens or they may be sentenced to death. Their only real choice is to flee their country. Vesa Häkkinen ended his presentation with a short video. It was made on mobile phones and showed people welcoming migrants and refugees to their communities in Finland. ( Tervetuloa written on the banner means Welcome ) In the discussion that followed Vesa, when asked about the theology underlying the Finnish Churches approach, said that welcoming refugees was at the heart of the Christian faith and that no further justification was needed. Then, asked about the problem of learning a new language, he said that volunteers did offer lessons in the Finnish language but that it is difficult for those who have not grown up with it, so on-going help is needed. Interpreters are provided to assist asylum seekers when they meet the Finnish officials. But what is important is that the refugees should be able to keep their own mother-tongue. Vesa was also asked where a line should be drawn between what the government agencies should provide and where the Churches might step in. He said that government tends to provide papers whereas the church and other voluntary groups are the ones that have produced the short videos explaining in several languages about Finish culture and the processes to be gone through in gaining asylum. For example, a refugee may be handed a document and told to fill it in, but he can t read it. The official may not help with that situation and that may be where a volunteer can help. Following this up he told us that when the refugees first began to arrive in great numbers the officials didn t know what to do and it was voluntary groups that provided food, clothing and shelter. But soon the government provided asylum seekers with practical assistance like a monthly sum of money. But a

9 real difficulty has developed over those who have been refused entry by the Immigration Service, do not therefore have the necessary papers, have been told that they are to be sent back to their country of origin but who simply stay on in Finland illegally. The comment was made that it is very difficult to assess just how much at risk a person returned to his country might be. Obviously, if he has changed his religion that might be a problem, but how can the authorities know what his status might be? The rulers of his native land are unlikely to cooperate with the Finnish authorities. Those refugees awaiting decisions, or having entry to Finland denied, must get more and more depressed about this. There seems little the Christian community can do to resolve this difficulty. Vesa agreed, telling us that people do become very depressed and that there have been suicides in reception centres because people can t stand the strain of not knowing what is happening. He told us that whatever else Christians do they should never promise that becoming a Christian will help an asylum-seekers case. But importantly, the volunteers in Finland have been told that if they do get involved with an asylum seeker they should stay with that person to the very end, even after that person has been returned to his native land. You may go to the airport to see him off, Ves said, and you may remain in touch once he is back in his homeland, via Skype and , for example. The Ecumenical Council in Finland has tried to give training to officials but it does not always help because their decisions are dictated by the law. Christine Allsopp thanked Vesa for getting our day off to such a good start and giving us plenty to think about and providing a good basis for what will follow during the afternoon.