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Monthly Letter

Thank God for Migrants!

October 2026

Staying in a monastery in Santiago de Compostela in September I heard little news. I was very pleased to hear about Ed Miliband’s speech outlawing trade with Israel’s illegal settlers and what he had to say about the future of Palestine. But I also heard too much about scenes reminiscent of Oswald Mosley's Fascist Blackshirts in Dover, followed by attacks on cars, coaches and the Royal National Lifeboat Institution in Portsmouth. I hope these disgusting events didn’t go unchallenged by the Church. The police in Dover did nothing to counter the clearly pre-planned and coordinated action that stopped ferries, lorries and cars. In Portsmouth there were no arrests of those who caused criminal damage and threatened RNLI crew and asylum seekers. How different from the treatment meted out to climate or Palestine activists.

We hear too much about migrants - asylum seekers and refugees. They are presented as problems which need solving – sometimes reasonably, sometimes cruelly. In the 18th and 19th centuries a staggering 22 million migrants left Britain to colonise the world. Before that who was it that spread the story of Jesus from Palestine to the world and built the Church?

The answer is ‘migrants’.

Mission has been deeply connected with migration throughout the history of Christianity. From the beginning the Christian faith spread not primarily through institutional strategies or mission agencies but through the movement of people across borders and cultures. The Bible itself is a migration story:

Abraham leaves his homeland in response to God's call; the people of Old Testament Israel experience exile and exodus and return so that Jacob is remembered as ‘a wandering Aramean’. Jesus himself becomes a refugee in Egypt before settling in Nazareth. The early Church emerges within the mobility of the Roman Empire; it was the roads and shipping lanes of the Pax Romana that enabled the spread of Christianity. Paul, the Jewish migrant from Tarsus, moving across the Mediterranean world; Aquila and Priscilla, migrant Jews from Pontus, becoming missionary leaders because they were displaced from Rome by imperial decree; Lydia, a migrant businesswoman from Thyatira, living in Philippi, becoming the first person to be baptised in Europe. The Gospel travelled through merchants, soldiers, sailors, slaves, refugees, students and migrant labourers rather than through the planning of trained missionaries.

Migration was not incidental to mission - it was the primary vehicle through which the Gospel spread. Long may it continue.

Geoffrey Marshall