(Photo: David Vosburg)

Last Thursday night, I watched as the sanctuary at the First Congregational United Church of Christ in downtown Naperville, Illinois steadily filled with people to be a part of “Loving the Stranger: A Community Gathering for Immigration Reform.” Having been one of more than a dozen folks who had been planning the event for weeks, it was a relief to see hundreds of people show up, eager to hear the stories of a broken immigration system and be mobilized to pray and advocate for reform.

What encouraged me even more than a full house, though, was to look across the bustling sanctuary and see the diversity of our community represented at the event: white and black, Hispanic and Asian. While many think of immigration as a Mexican or Latino issue, the diverse crowd that evening suggested it was an issue for the whole church, the people God has called “from every tribe and nation and people and language” (Rev. 5:9).

As people found their seats, a group of Rwandans worshiped God in beautifully harmonic Kinyarwanda, accompanied by a Caucasian man on the djembe. The pastor of the host church—a mainline congregation that has been worshiping together longer than any other church in the county—offered a welcome, which was followed by a stirring bilingual prayer by a Mexican-American pastor from a large multi-ethnic evangelical church in nearby Bolingbrook. The pastor noted that he knew personally the importance of immigration reform: it was the legalization of 1986 under President Reagan that allowed him, a teenager at the time, to earn legal status, which made it possible for him to go on to Bible college and answer God’s call to ministry.

A young woman born in China—now a U.S. citizen, but the daughter of an undocumented small-business-owner in Texas presently awaiting a deportation hearing—shared her family’s struggle and challenged us to pray for and actively seek God’s justice for our immigrant brothers and sisters. Her testimony was followed by a brave teenage girl who spoke on behalf of her older sister, who was brought to the U.S. unlawfully from Mexico as a young child and thus, as she finishes high school, is finding herself without options for continued education or lawful employment.

After a call to act—we pulled out our cell phones right there and left messages for our Member of Congress and signed onto a giant letter asking for her support for Comprehensive Immigration Reform this year—a Chinese-American pastor at a local Christian & Missionary Alliance church offered a closing prayer, asking God to help us to work together, across denominational and ethnic divisions, to seek a just reform of our nation’s immigration laws.

Scripture tells us that the church is made up of one body, with many parts, and that each part is entirely dependent upon the others. “The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I don't need you!’” the Apostle Paul explains, “and the head cannot say to the feet, ‘I don't need you!’” because each part is indispensable (1 Cor. 12:21). That means that white Lutherans need Guatemalan Pentecostals, and vice versa. Anglican Africans and non-denominational Asians need Mexican Catholics and Ukrainian Baptists: we each have an important role. While we may not agree on some of the finer points of theology, or worship God in entirely the same way, we have to find ways to come together to do the work God has entrusted to his people: “to act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God” (Mic. 6:8).

Matthew Soerens is a Church Engagement Representative at World Relief DuPage in Wheaton, Illinois and the author of Welcoming the Stranger: Justice, Compassion, & Truth in the Immigration Debate (InterVarsity Press, 2009).