Refugee Consultant Named By Presiding Bishop's Fund
Episcopal News Service. January 18, 1979 [79009]
NEW YORK, N. Y. -- A priest and refugee expert from the West Coast has been named a special consultant to the Presiding Bishop's Fund for World Relief with a mandate to make refugee ministry a normal, continuing part of the Episcopal Church's mission.
The Rev. John A. Huston was retained as a consultant Jan. 1 to serve for four months with an immediate task of helping the Church find placement for at least 1,000 Southeast Asian refugees before April 1. That figure represents the Episcopal Church's share of the refugees that the ecumenical agency Church World Service has agreed to place.
While actual placement of refugees will still be done by Mrs. Isis Brown, Refugee Resettlement Officer at the Episcopal Church Center, Huston will be working to create the structures and channels that will make refugee work a continuing concern of the Church through trained, standing networks.
He has been involved with refugee work since 1975 and currently serves as refugee officer for the Washington (state) Association of Churches. He is a priest associate at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark, Seattle, of the Diocese of Olympia.
While the Episcopal Church has a good record of response to emergency refugee appeals, the work has not become a regular part of its ministry at diocesan and local levels. Both Huston and the Presiding Bishop's Fund board feel that with the dramatic increase in refugees and the resources now available the time is ripe to enable this change in direction.
Speaking of the assignment, the Fund's executive director, the Rev. Samir J. Habiby, said that "what Huston will be working on will be a critical matter in terms of where we go in this ministry."
Huston expressed confidence that the resources were in place to help the Church engage in this ministry. "The environment is far different from 1975 when parishes stepped forward alone and had to learn it all by themselves. Now there are networks of communitybased services, a clearly accessible federal assistance program and cluster groups of established refugees -- soon to be full citizens -- who now wish to be partners with congregations.
"Our world neighborhood has changed and more people are now in motion than perhaps at any point in history," he said. "A refugee is a person in motion seeking a place, a sense of home, seeking hope, seeking new life, seeking healing and those themes and notes are deep in tHe hopes to build on that theme to "enable people to see refugee ministry as a normal form of ongoing pastoral service and mission.he whole biblical story."
"If we can get ten dioceses to establish refugee ministry as a component of the department of mission, of evangelism," Huston concluded, "then the Church will be moving into a new level of commitment and awareness."