Churches Encouraged to Offer Safe Places for Forced Migrant

LWF Symposium Underlines Centrality of Trust in Relationships

Churches accompanying forced migrants should consider adding “remembering and reconciliation as a fifth and sixth ‘R’ to the ‘4R’” approach in refugee work, a Lutheran pastor told participants in a Lutheran World Federation (LWF) symposium discussing the notion of trust in a multi-disciplinary approach to work.

In a moving presentation, Dr habil. Drea Fröchtling, a pastor of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Hanover (Germany), spoke of the major psychological and spiritual challenges in restoring trust in the aftermath of trauma based on her work with a group of female survivors of human trafficking for sexual exploitation in a context of civil conflict.

Fröchtling explained the 4R approach alluding to repatriation, rehabilitation, reconstruction and resettlement in refugee work, and suggested an additional role for churches in such settings.

Congregations, she said, can be safe spaces to remember—tell stories of violence, injustice and human rights abuses, and therefore provide a framework for alternative discourse on survival and victimhood. They can also be a place for reconciliation, offering justice and reconnection between victims/survivors and perpetrators, and between parties and individuals.

Describing her work at the symposium organized by the LWF Department for Theology and Public Witness (DTPW), Fröchtling pointed out that for victims of forced migration with nobody to turn to, prayer emerged as an important coping mechanism. A mental recollection of central biblical passages was essential for all the survivors, she noted, adding how one shared Bible became a source of hope, and was “seen as a portable home, the only home they had left.”

Post-Trust Society

We live in “a post-trust society” marked by distrust and suspicion, said Rev. Rudolf Renfer, a Reformed Swiss pastor, recently retired as director of the LWF Human Resources Office. He underscored the importance of trust building as a human resources management tool focusing not only on individual job satisfaction, but also on the success of the organization and its models of cooperation.

Dr Christoph Stückelberger, founder and executive director of Globethics.net, which provides an electronic platform for ethical reflection and action, said some of the factors that build trust include trustworthy persons and institutions with characteristics such as competence, reliability, integrity, honesty, openness and a caring attitude.

But he also listed weaknesses that undermine trust in politics, including greed, egoism, narcissism, nepotism and mistrust, among others, and cautioned that the present lack of trust in politics was explosive.

In a paper on trust in the medical field, Dr Samia Hurst, professor at the Institute of Biomedical Ethics at the University of Geneva, said doctors who were not trusted could not obtain the information needed to treat patients well.

“None of us can ‘do’ medicine on our own. We need trust to collaborate in fostering this common good,” said Hurst, who is also president of the Swiss Society for Biomedical Ethics.

Electronic Media

On trust and the electronic media, Stéphane Gallay, responsible for the design of publications and web at the LWF communications office, argued that “trust is about people, not tools.”

He identified three pillars of trust in cyberspace—identity, reputation and output—which are easy to spoof, but also to verify online. Electronic media, he said, enables users to bypass hierarchies as high-ranking people can be reached fairly easily and very often directly. It facilitates access to social circles, which again make it easy to corroborate information through “someone who knows someone.”

The symposium’s organizer, Rev. Dr Kenneth Mtata, DTPW study secretary for Lutheran Theology and Practice, pointed out that in the last three years, the collapse of financial and banking institutions had inflicted severe losses in investments. There was growing unemployment and conditions had worsened for people living on the margins of society.

Other speakers were Prof. Sandro Cattacin, a sociologist teaching at the University of Geneva, and Prof. Edward Dommen, a Quaker and specialist in economic ethics. Respondents included Anna Biondi, deputy director of the Bureau for Workers’ Activities at the International Labour Organization (ILO) and Prof. Moses Cui from Liaoning University in China, among others.

At the end of the symposium, participants listed a range of topics that merit further research and reflection. These include the relationship between trust and justice; relations between trust and truth; the importance of openness and transparency; and possibilities of building structures of trust. (731 words)

(Written for LWI by John Zarocostas)