Faith Seeking Action by Leffel Gregory P.;

Author:Leffel, Gregory P.; [Leffel, Gregory P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1343779
Publisher: Scarecrow Press, Incorporated
Published: 2013-06-26T00:00:00+00:00

Pastoral Encounter Leads to Political Protest

Phoenix’s Alzona Lutheran Church pastor James A. Oines was raised in a small South Dakota farm town. A college field program allowed him to travel throughout Central America and to learn Spanish. In seminary, he and a friend bicycled from Detroit to La Paz, Bolivia, representing his denomination’s United Mission Appeal. The ten-month trip “sensitized me, because on a bicycle people just come up to you. They trust you and they’ll talk to you. I really got to know the people of Latin America.”

Oines accepted a call to the nearly abandoned Alzona parish in a Phoenix barrio in 1979, and patiently began his new ministry. “Listening . . . that’s one of the things I was extremely determined to do that I had learned on my bicycle trip—to listen.” Listening alerted him to the worsening political situation in Central America when, in 1980, an undocumented Salvadoran approached the church for food and shelter. Oines also befriended a Salvadoran family living legally with proper documents. They too were aware of the growing number of Salvadoran refugees seeking asylum in the United States. “They kept getting phone calls from people who were picked up by the INS. And they would call me in and I would try to raise the bond money to get them out.”

Finding it impossible to keep up with the bond requests, Oines turned to INS, in his mind an “immigration service,” to work out a better arrangement. “Immigration, being this young guy from South Dakota, to me meant exactly what the word means: help people immigrate. I thought of ‘give me your tired, your poor, and all that.”’ In all innocence—“being this guy who just assumes everybody wants to do the right thing”—Oines approached INS with a proposal: “If they would release refugees to us on their own recognizance we would find them a place to stay and we would help them find their way through the legal system and help them get to court.”

Thinking he had a tacit agreement with INS, he was stunned to find “they were picking people up right and left and deporting them like crazy . . . never contacting me. . . . I quickly learned that INS was a ‘deportation agency.”’ His search for alternative ways to provide pastoral care for refugees brought him into contact with TECTF. He and others in Phoenix agreed to arrange placements for refugees brought across the border by Tucson’s underground. Alzona Lutheran also provided office space for CRTF’s Darlene Nicgorski to screen refugees for public sanctuary.

Oines was aware that Central Americans living around the church had no adequate form of community, so he and an Ecuadorian Catholic lay leader created a comunidad for them. Meeting on Sunday evenings in the church, it was this Bible study that was infiltrated by Jesus Cruz during the INS Sanctuary investigation. Nine or ten members were arrested. The investigation intimidated the church. “Our Bible study was never able to function again after that. The fear of government agents being present.

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