Welcoming the Stranger - by Matthew Soerens & Jenny Yang & Leith Anderson (Paperback)

About the Book

World Relief staffers Matthew Soerens and Jenny Yang move beyond the rhetoric to offer a Christian response to immigration. With careful historical understanding and thoughtful policy analysis, they debunk myths about immigration, show the limits of the current immigration system, and offer concrete ways for you to welcome and minister to your immigrant neighbors.

Book Synopsis

World Relief staffers Matthew Soerens and Jenny Yang move beyond the rhetoric to offer a Christian response to immigration. With careful historical understanding and thoughtful policy analysis, they debunk myths about immigration, show the limits of the current immigration system, and offer concrete ways for you to welcome and minister to your immigrant neighbors.

Review Quotes

"Welcoming the Stranger lays the groundwork for and practically equips Christians to continue practicing what it means to follow Christ's commandment to love God and love neighbor in a fallen world."

"Welcoming the Stranger offers an introduction to the many aspects of immigration and the controversies surrounding it."

"A fresh, compelling call from Scripture to live out the gospel with boldness and courage in the twenty-first century. A significant pivotal guide for the church in these times."

"In the next forty years there will be an estimated 132 million Latinos in this nation, and a critical concern for our community is fixing our broken immigration system. Welcoming the Stranger is a must-read that helps us to embrace a biblical response to this critical issue."

"In this highly engaging, well researched and documented book, Soerens and Hwang team up to survey and analyze the history of immigration in the United States and attempt to solve many of the problems that immigration faces through well-reasoned argumentation and personal experience. Most importantly, they do all of this not through the eyes of partisan politics, but rather through the lens of the Christian worldview. Welcoming the Stranger is a timely and important book at a point in America's history where the immigrant population is considerably growing and many Americans seek to 'do something about it.'"

"Soerens and Hwang advocate a generous, biblically based invitation to all immigrants to take part in America. This book will not persuade all Christians to support liberalized immigration laws, but even the skeptical should find the authors' approach useful."

"Soerens and Hwang argue persuasively that immigration has been and is valuable to the United States."

"Soerens and Hwang do an impressive job making a complex and charged issue accessible for the average reader."

"Soerens and Hwang have injected justice, compassion, and truth into what needs to become a new conversation on immigration--values that are often in short supply in this debate."

"While Sorens and Hwang may not answer all your questions about the correct response to current immigration policies and, indeed, may even raise more complex questions, they do show us that, if we are to act justly, we will have to consider all its complexities."

About the Author

Matthew Soerens is the US director of church mobilization for World Relief and the national coordinator of the Evangelical Immigration Table.

Jenny Yang is the senior vice president of advocacy and policy for World Relief.