Prayer Highlight: Venezuelan Diaspora
Despite being vilified in US media, Venezuelans are planting and revitalizing churches across the US. They remind all Christians of our 1 Peter exilic identity as foreigners and strangers.
“Whether we are part of the world’s exiled or the world’s established, our citizenship in the kingdom compels us to care for immigrants and refugees because of who we are in Christ—a people who received mercy and whose God identifies with the lowly, the stranger, and the needy. Apart from Christ, that’s our true condition as well.” Canadian Venezuelan Paola Barrera
Venezuelans have been the fastest growing diaspora community in the US over the last several years.1
Due to the economic and political meltdown within the country, Venezuelans have become one of the largest diaspora communities in the Americas with 3 million migrants residing in Colombia, 1.5 million in Peru, and a half million each in Brazil and Chile.
In Texas, Katy (or “Katyzuela”) has been the cultural center for this community in the Houston area and Pflugerville/Round Rock for the Austin area.
Despite being increasingly vilified in US media and political rhetoric as threats and gang-members, the majority of Venezuelans are from Christian backgrounds, fleeing a country that has become a humanitarian crisis. Many recent asylum seekers have journeyed over land via multiple countries to request asylum in the US, a journey that for many is one of months or years. Upon arriving, many Venezuelans are planting and revitalizing churches across the US.
In the last weeks, 350,000 Venezuelans have seen their immigration status revoked2 putting them at risk for deportation. And many have been deported. Over 100 have been deported to Guantanamo Bay3 and most recently 300 were deported to El Salvador and placed in a maximum security prison in a chilling invocation of the “Alien Enemies Act” of 1798. The last time this act was invoked was to place 120,000 people of Japanese descent in internment camps during World War 2.4
In stark contrast, Canadian Venezuelan Paola Barrera urges Christians to pursue a different path:
“Whether we are part of the world’s exiled or the world’s established, our citizenship in the kingdom compels us to care for immigrants and refugees because of who we are in Christ—a people who received mercy and whose God identifies with the lowly, the stranger, and the needy. Apart from Christ, that’s our true condition as well.”5
Cuban American writer and theologian Justo Gonzalez states that Latino/Hispanics, overall, in the US are a people of exile. They remind all Christians of our 1 Peter exilic diaspora identity. While speaking not just of Venezuelans, this quote from his classic book Mañana, describes the Venezuelan diaspora reality well:
“This is who we are: a people in exile. By the waters of Babylon we shall live and die. By the waters of Babylon we shall sing the songs of Zion. Our Zion is not the lands where we were born, though we still love them, for those lands are lost to us forever—and, in any case, since we have lived for a long time beyond innocence, we could never equate those lands with Zion. The Zion to which we sing, the Zion for which we hope, the Zion toward which we live, is the coming order of God, where all will have a vine and a fig tree under which to sit, and none shall make them afraid (Micah 4:4). And while we wait for that day, it may be that, as exiles, we have some insights into what it means to be a pilgrim people of God, followers of One who had nowhere to lay his head.”
Prayer Points:
Gratitude: for the faithfulness in the midst of suffering and persecution of Venezuelan Christians in Venezuela and in exile.
Multiplication: that the Lord would continue to raise up church planters and missionaries from among Venezuelan diaspora leaders.
Next Gen: For the healing of trauma in Venezuelan children and youth, many of whom have passed gone through long journeys with their families to arrive in the US.
Mutuality: for non-immigrant churches to receive the gifts and strengths of the Venezuelan church and that together we would be a voice of justice and peace, in Venezuela and in the US.