Faithful Doxology: The Church’s Allyship with Immigrants Seeking Asylum

Abstract

Given the mass human movement from Central America to the United States, the church needs to rethink its mission strategy for its humanitarian involvement with these immigrants seeking asylum. Looking through the hermeneutical lens of practical theology and its attention to contextualized praxis, the article situates the argument in conversation with qualitative research that emerged from a pastoral care ministry inside an immigrant family detention facility. The voices of these Central American women and children seeking asylum serve to contextualize, localize, humanize, and testify to the unjust reality of mass migration. The proposal endorses a missional hermeneutic that prioritizes allyship with asylum seekers as the church’s witness to the justness of God.