Introduction

‘How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?’ is the plaintiff cry of Psalm 137.4. The theme of refugees and migration is woven through Scripture and focused in God’s Refugee in Egypt as a baby boy.

In Christian tradition, profound theological reflection has come from refugees, including John Calvin in Geneva. His status and context as a refugee is not always remembered, a point made to me, in August 2016, by Professor Jung-Sook Lee, President of Torch Trinity Graduate University in Seoul, who wrote her PhD dissertation at Princeton on Calvin.

In October 2016, Bishop Grant Lemarquand, Anglican Assistant Bishop in the Horn of Africa, gave a paper on refugees at the Pontifical Gregorian University during the Symposium celebrating 50 years of the Anglican Centre in Rome. When he arrived in Gambella, Ethiopia in 2013 there were 300,000 residents; now, with the new refugees, there are about 600,000. I was deeply moved by his report of a conversation he had with a refugee from South Sudan:

‘What did you carry with you?’ ‘Our children.’ ‘What did you leave behind?’ ‘Our elderly, the keepers of our tradition.’

For this edition of Theology, I was asked to gather four articles on this theme. We begin with the social context in East Africa, then move to India for theological reflections on method and then to a theological focus on children, before turning to Europe and the complex missiological concepts of conversion.

In his article, ‘The Plight of Refugees in Africa: A Perspective from Kenya’, Zablon Bundi Mutongu highlights the problems of analysis as well as the experience of both the ‘hosting nation’ and the refugees, from Somalia and South Sudan.

Muthuraj Swamy's article, ‘Refugee Crisis and Migration Today: Challenges for Doing Theology’, describes Christian attitudes, offers biblical reflections and considers methods of doing theology and encouraging public engagement.

The numbers Rohan P. Gideon helpfully gives are sometimes shocking: of the more than 120,000 Syrian refugees registered in Egypt, 43 per cent are children. He sees migrant children as signs of God’s presence and the incarnation as the ultimate migration.

Dorottya Nagy and Gé Speelman collaborate on a project on conversion and dialogue. They stress the importance of seeing conversion as complex in process, rather than static, warn against the temptation of the Church to adopt secular immigration language and terms and plea for all involved to turn afresh to God.