Shrewd Stewardship in Versatile Sanctuaries: Ecclesial Reimaginations Under Constraint

Sanctuaries cannot be reimagined in a vacuum detached from experiential realities. These realities are often characterized by various forms of constraints, which shape the perceptions, experiences and navigations of contexts. Constraints are subjective in the sense that even if there is congruence, similarities or comparability in their descriptions across contexts, people exercise their discretion in acting within, beyond, or amidst them, and by so doing they reinforce, pose challenges against, or collaborate with the sources of these constraints. Constraints are therefore not deterministic, but rather present opportunities for collective actions to arise that interact with them in many possible ways.

Three instances of sanctuary may illustrate the above more tangibly. In the 1980s, when Central Americans fled civil wars and death squads, many of them sought safety in the United States. Amidst the government’s deportation measures, Southside Presbyterian Church in Tucson, Arizona welcomed some 15,000 people seeking refuge. The congregation navigated multiple constraints imposed on the sanctuary – harassment, surveillance, infiltration of state agents, detention, convictions, among many other state-sanctioned actions were common and are well-documented.[1] The congregation’s collaboration with other churches developed into what is now known as the Sanctuary Movement.[2]

On October 26, 2018, an Armenian family who had lived in the country for nine years and risked expulsion sought refuge in the Bethel Protestant Church of the Hague, the Netherlands. Permission to stay had been granted, but the state made multiple appeals. The family’s application to the Children’s Pardon regulation that exempts minors who have lived in the country for over five years also failed. Pastors and visitors from around the world across traditions participated in a non-stop service that spanned 97 days. Having learnt about the situation facing the family, people gathered around them in solidarity. As law enforcement could not legally enter the church when a religious gathering takes place, the service became a de facto sanctuary. The service was concluded when the family’s status to stay had been confirmed.[3]

Since 2013, the Cosmopolitan Affirming Church has been welcoming LGBTQI+ people of faith in Nairobi, Kenya. Many attendees have experienced violence due to their gender identities and/or sexual orientations and fled neighboring countries. Most congregants were only willing to be interviewed anonymously due to possible government retaliation and familial violence.[4] Even in Kenya, where many interviewees considered relatively safer and more tolerant towards LGBTQI+ people, the church has had to relocate ten times due to arrests, intimidation, threats, among other experiences, which made the congregation decide to keep its current gathering site a secret to the public, as it continues seeking to be a safe space for the spiritual healing and communion for LGBTQI+ people of faith.

It is important to consider the ecclesiology that informs our reimagination of church as sanctuary. Gordon Lathrop reminds us that “if we let the church be simply another small interest group or a universal, ideological interest group or a new chosen or a seminar of the like-minded or a name for what I do alone… we will be ignoring the Christian hope that God’s transforming power is not just another name for our own status quo.”[5] Deeply embedded in such ecclesial understanding is the church being a communal undertaking through which God’s transformation is enfleshed.

What, then, are the features that an incarnational church embodies? Shrewdness can be understood as a quality that communities possess in making good judgments of situations in their actions. It signals an element of unpredictability in its creativity under death-dealing circumstances. The aforementioned sanctuaries did not emerge with law-abiding “good” citizens gathering together but were instead birthed out of the re-evaluation of the contexts through people’s determination of doing something good. When persons made in the imago Dei are forced into life-threatening dangers of persecution and violence, an incarnational church becomes a sanctuary by leaning onto the Spirit’s creativity moving in the valleys of death, where people embody the refuge for those mislabelled as aliens and acknowledged as siblings reunited in God’s care through the sanctuary.

Leo Guardado writes that “through the Spirit, the primary place of God’s dwelling becomes human persons. To speak of holy places, then, is primarily to speak of persons and communities who make present the holy presence of God through their life.”[6] The church can be incarnational because of Christ’s incarnation – a movement of the Word drawing near to us and living among us.[7] Such movement persists as the Divine continues to journey with God’s beloved. Sanctuaries are not locationally static but traverse spaces and barriers to encounter people where they are, especially those who have been removed from their homes and separated from their loved ones.

Guardado further reminds us of the necessary stewardship of the church as sanctuary to renegotiate our distance with the displaced, no matter the labels attached to them, as it is “a form of resistance to distance-generating mechanisms that aid in the execution of societal violence and killing, especially of persons who are already regarded as ‘others’… [and] has the capacity to interrupt physical and emotional distance and can allow local communities to grow near to the threatened humanity of displaced and persecuted persons.”[8] Such reversal of distancing can be costly but is mandatory for a church that is truly life-giving.

Scholars have written about creating refuge as solidarity. Janna Hunter-Bowman shows how Columbian communities “[created] the conditions of peace and engaging politically for structural change in and through their sense of time, God’s time, sacred time.”[9] Elsewhere, Pieter Dronkers characterizes sanctuary as a practice that goes beyond temporary, occasional tactical gains, but one that contributes to the political transformation of society.[10]

If we believe that God continues to dwell among God’s beloved in today’s world where violence, subjugation and alienation persist, we should not only notice God’s work as bystanders but participate in its witnessing nature where the Divine invites us to become sanctuary as God’s presence. As the Spirit moves through and beyond spaces where death is imminent, we are called into a life for one another.