Justice Matters

For me, for several years, one of the driving forces of my engagement with justice matters was work with and for asylum seekers. It began one Sunday afternoon in the latter part of the 1980s. I received a telephone call. I was, at the time, minister of two tiny inner city URC congregations in Islington. My caller said: we’ve got a problem. There’s a big influx of Kurdish refugees from Turkey to this part of London and we don’t know what to do with them, where to accommodate there. Is there any chance that your church could house a group while we sort things out? The lettings policy, not that we probably had one, went out of the window, as did some elements of Health and Safety, as I said ‘yes’. By the time the evening congregation were arriving, so were a group of approximately 30 Kurdish men, non- English speaking of course. And all credit to that congregation, which didn’t bat any serious eyelids. And so began a period of about, in the end, three months that some of them stayed.It was a fascinating time and experience. It taught me a lot about hospitality. It taught me a lot about welcoming the stranger. It taught me a lot about justice. I spent quite a bit of time fund-raising, and quite a bit just going and do the practical things – accompanying them to Sainsbury’s and buying food, driving down to Burton’s in Oxford Street who offered a car load of clothes. I was part of a group of local church people who did a bit of crisis management and campaigning. I also used to just sit and drink tea with my new Kurdish friends – and that probably achieved as much as anything. I saw, in some cases, the marks left behind by torture. I saw photos of family left at home. I shared the frustration of their not being able to work. One of the great joys later on was to accept an invitation to share some food at the home of a couple of these men once they had been rehoused.