John Garland prefers the term "pilgrim" instead of "immigrant"

John Garland is pastor of the San Antonio Mennonite Church, and hospitality to strangers is at the heart of his work. Garland shares remarkable modern-day stories that sound like they were taken out of a page of the New Testament.

Listen here, read the transcript below, or click here for the full video version.

George Mason:
Welcome to Good God, conversations that matter about faith and public life. I'm your host, George Mason, and I'm thrilled to be able to welcome pastor John Garland to Good God today, as we begin conversations in a series about faith and immigration, a hot topic in so many ways. But John, before I introduce you, let me just say thank you for your time and for your work and for joining us here on Good God.

John Garland:
Well, it's my honor. Thanks so much for having me. It's great to see you and it's wonderful always to talk with you.

George Mason:
Thank you. Well, John is the pastor of the San Antonio Mennonite church. He is also the chaplain of the interfaith welcome coalition in San Antonio. He has been a pastor there for what, almost five years now, maybe, something like that.

John Garland:
Yeah. Sometimes it feels like 20 and other times it feels like two months.

George Mason:
Before we get into the conversation about immigration, I think it would be interesting to people just to hear some of your background and how in the world all of these experiences of your life have come together in a way that makes it seem like it was for ordained that you be in San Antonio at this church doing this work. So, we should start with the fact that you are the son of both Baptist ministers and social workers, and you are the same. Your dad, a biblical scholar and university and seminary administrator, David Garland, and your mom, your late mom, Diana Garland, who is really legend in our kind of Baptist circles, was the head of the Garland school of social work at Baylor before her untimely and painful death a few years ago.

George Mason:
But, you are of both of those things, a minister and a social worker. And, you speak Spanish, you taught middle school science on the border. And my goodness, now you're doing spiritual and pastoral work with people who have experienced extraordinary trauma in their lives and doing so in a place where hospitality to strangers is at the heart of your work. I don't know how anyone could have gone into a laboratory and prepared life experiences better to do what they're doing than what you've been through.

John Garland:
That's such a loving way to put at it. And, when you're sort of in the mix, you don't necessarily take time to go back and count all the baskets and recognize that we're constantly participating in miracles. But, it's sort of ridiculous, my childhood rebellion, to turn to my parents, these amazing Baptist leaders to turn to my parents and say, "I'm not a Baptist anymore. I'm an Anabaptist." But, I lived with Anabaptist. I lived with Mennonites, who'd come back from agricultural development work in West Africa. I was on a farm outside of Waco while studying at Baylor. And then, when I moved down to the border, there's a little Hispanic Mennonite church there. And I participated there. It was later called to be the pastor by vocationally. And it was just so lovely and so much fun to worship with these Mennonites in Spanish. And, it's a lovely experience. Yeah.

John Garland:
And then, moving to San Antonio and recognizing that our church is right in the middle of these pathways of immigration and coming across so many desperate families on their immigration journeys and also their faith journeys here in the middle of downtown.

George Mason:
Well, you mentioned being an Anabaptist. And I think, for people are listening or watching this podcast, that might not be a terminology that is readily available to them. They know Baptist, but in effect, Anabaptist, the rebellion is to sort of go back to our roots as Baptist because Anabaptist were the precursors to Baptists in Europe. They were part of what was known as the radical reformation, so really committed to the separation of church and state and to peace-making, to not using the [sword 00:04:58] of the state and implement of rectitude. And so, the word 'Ana' means 'again'. So, for those who are wondering, it means to be baptized again. And, that meant infant baptism was not accepted. It's an intentional community. And I love the three-foldness of your identity as a church. Can you tell us what those three things are?

John Garland:
Yeah. We generally talk about Jesus being the center of our faith, and community being the center of our lives. And then generally, we talk about reconciliation as the center of our work. And, this is a recent definition of the Anabaptist walk here in America. But if you ask Anabaptist, they'll always be like, "Oh yeah. Baptist came from us." But, we're just not nearly as popular as the Baptist church in America, but the roots are the same. And this idea of being radical and going into those roots is really going into a sense of balance on the journey. So, we're always balancing action with prayer, and this is one thing we always say in our church, like we will do, we need to do nothing and no action without prayer, but then we need to have no prayer without action. There needs to be this walking balance centered in our experience of Christ through scripture and Christ through prayer.

George Mason:
The difference between Baptist and Anabaptist in the United States is largely in my take that Baptist took more of an individualist approach to faith, I think, and Anabaptist maintained a sense of the community being first the priority. And so, I do think that actually the renewal of the Baptist church in America is to reclaim some of that community, that sense of the primacy of the community. And thank you for bearing witness to that, to those of us who still remain in the Baptist tradition of America.

John Garland:
Yeah. And I will also say, there's a wide swath, there's a huge spectrum of Anabaptist here in America. We are in the middle of downtown San Antonio. And we are about as urban churches you can get, and we are in the mix as it were. But just last week, I was visited by Anabaptist, who live on a commune in west Texas, and they still speak low German. And they are very much separated. They felt rather uncomfortable coming into the city and spending all this time, but they were helping us build tiny houses for recent immigrants who don't have a safe place to live. And it's neat to see that spectrum, even though we have very different styles of life, that spectrum come together in this work for reconciliation work for hospitality and healing and blessing.

George Mason:
All right. So, that moves us to the question of immigration. And this is not just an abstract question for you. This is at the very heart of your congregation's life and your own ministry, because since you've been there, you've had no respite from the flood of immigrants that have been placed at your doorstep, as ice buses have dropped off asylum seeking migrants at your doorstep. And, how did all of that come to pass, initially? San Antonio is not on the board, so, even though it's in south Texas. So, tell us more about how all of that started and how this thrust you into a new sense of mission and purpose for your church.

John Garland:
Yeah. So San Antonio is right on the crossroads of all of these migrant routes. So, we are on I-35 and we're on I-37, which connects us to the border. And then I-10. So, these routes that people are taking as they enter into the country via Texas. But we're also surrounded by immigration prisons. So, there's all these privately-run prisons that are contracted with immigrations and customs enforcement to hold families and hold individuals who are in immigration proceedings. And then, we're also surrounded by some of the major border crossings. So, people are crossing in Brownsville and McAllen and Laredo. And then, also a lot of people started crossing in Del Rio and Eagle pass. And, those all create sort of a semi-circle around San Antonio, as well as the sub-center, the ice office, is located in San Antonio.

John Garland:
So, asylum seekers have to report to San Antonio if they're in this area. So, that all sort of led to us being sort of on the crossroads of this, what could be called an immigration disaster, humanitarian disaster that's been going on for the last seven, eight years, sort of the high tide of this disaster. But, we first came across it actually as a church. Seven years ago, there's a woman who was going, she was catching a bus from the Greyhound station, which is about a mile from our church. And she saw a young woman sitting on the floor with her baby, and the young woman looked like she was central American. The woman went over to offer help. And she's like, "Is there anything I can do to help you? You look like you need some ..." And the woman coward and turned away and said, "I don't need any help."

John Garland:
I think their language skills were not that great at that. And, it was really haunting the woman, she was waiting for her bus. And before she got on, she went over again. She tried again, she sat down on the floor next to this young mother, and she said in her best Spanish, "I'm from a church. Is there anything I can do to help you?" And the woman breaks into tears and says, "I have no idea where I am and I have nothing. And I've been begging God to send somebody." And the woman then doesn't know what to do. She calls her pastor, a friend of ours, and the pastor then calls the city and calls these other people because they realize it's not just this woman. It is dozens of mothers like this every day, who are all of a sudden being found in the downtown bus station and no one could help.

John Garland:
This was not a city problem. It was not a law enforcement problem. It was not a county problem. These are not citizens. And, we realized as a church and a group of churches that this was our ... We needed to respond. And very quickly, a group of four, five churches with a whole bunch of volunteers kind of gathered together and created this coalition that we call the interfaith welcome coalition. It was tiny at the beginning. And now, we're really something else. Our church was sort of in the ground floor that we got one of those early calls to get together. And, we had just been given in many ways, miraculously given this house right around the corner from our church, eight bedrooms, two kitchens, and four bathrooms.

George Mason:
Yeah. La Casa E-

John Garland:
La Casa Maria Martha. Yeah, the Mary Martha House, because they gave hospitality to Jesus and his friends. So, the Mary Martha House. Since that week, I don't think there's been a day that's gone by that someone has not been staying in the Mary Martha House. And, it was originally a hospitality house for people traveling through San Antonio. Now, it's just been full of asylum seekers for these last seven years that has dramatically shaped our church. Other churches in San Antonio have focused on advocacy work. They focus on making backpacks for folks. They've focused on hanging out in the airport and the bus station as migrants come through. They focus on border work, working in the camps on the Mexican side. And our church has really, we've really focused on hospitality here in San Antonio.

John Garland:
Giving a place to stay using our own homes and our own guest rooms, and then our hospitality house. And then a lot of folks have stayed in San Antonio. They didn't have a safe place to go. So, they've settled in San Antonio, long term. Now, leaders in our church, there's one woman with her children from the Congo who's running a coffee shop in our church parking lot, a little food truck coffee shop, and she's employing a number of other asylum seeking mothers from Honduras selling coffee to the neighborhood and creating, gathering space for us.

George Mason:
In many ways, when you tell the story of that young mother who was approached by church member, this sounds almost like it's right out of the pages of the new Testament. Doesn't it? I mean, seriously, it's like this divine appointment and this remarkable moment where there's connection made and where a stranger is brought in and where there's a sense of God's presence and guidance in life. It must feel like you're living the biblical story today, which is actually exactly what in our Baptist and Anabaptist traditions we say is the nature of the church that this is that, and that is now. And, this is an immediate sense of continuity that we have with the narrative of Jesus.

John Garland:
It was a very thin moment. That was a thin moment. It's really easy to see the presence of God, the movement of the spirit in moments like that, the church is, if you read Matthew, literally the church was established at the gates of hell and the gates of hell are not going to prevail, but you find the church, big sea church at the gates of hell. So, spending time at the margins with people who are suffering, you have moments like this all the time. It's really sort of overwhelming to recognize the church being church. And oftentimes, it's the more established churches. I'm a pastor with a church an we have a steeple in our church. It's oftentimes, we find ourselves sort of at a distance from what the pilgrim church is experiencing.

John Garland:
They're at the margins, on the floor of a bus station in the arms of a desperate mother. This reminds me the other day, there's a man from ... He was Haitian and he was recounting his story that evening at the hospitality house after prayer. And, he was talking about crossing the Darion gap. This is one of the most dangerous places in the world, the jungle between Panama and Colombia. But, before they got to the Darion gap, they took a boat from Colombia, across the bay, toward the Panamanian border. And the boat, it's like a long canoe with an outboard motor. And, the motor broke down and he and his family and a number of other families were adrift. And they were adrift in the ocean for two days and they thought they were going to die.

John Garland:
And he was talking about the prayer on the boat, and the weeping, and the prayer, and the singing, and the weeping and the prayer. And, they drifted ashore into the jungle and they struck out and trying to survive in the jungle. And they were attacked by bandits. And then, they came across officials and the officials treated them badly. They lost absolutely everything. And they're trying to make it on the way. And I sat down with him after and I got a Creole translation of 2 Corinthians 11, and we read, Paul describing being adrift for two days, and he was not safe from the bandits. He was not safe from the officials. He was not safe from his own brothers, et cetera. And the man's like, "This is my story. He's telling my story here." And he said, this is what he said. This is why I bring this up.

John Garland:
He says, "I participated in miracle, and I want to keep participating in miracle." I want to be a leader in a church that is always participating in miracles. And, that is a lovely testimony. And it's a lovely charge, I think, to the American church, that here are brothers and sisters who are crying out in pain and crying out in prayer. They're crying out in faith. And then, they're also with their heart saying, I want to continue participating in miracle.

George Mason:
Okay. So I think, this is a really important point that we should drive home. And that is, you made the distinction between the more established church and you represent that in a sense because of your tall steeple and the footprint that you have in allocation and a ministry that is ongoing there. And this represents most of our congregations in the United States, and the Pilgrim church. Now, you just transform the language of migrant and immigrant and all of that into a more spiritual sense of pilgrimage. And actually I think, in doing so, you change the way we look at the people who are crossing the border and see them as people of faith who are actually living the biblical story and who are challenging us about our settledness to begin to think about our own faith as more of a pilgrimage now, who would expect that we're supposed to be transformed and changed as the established church, by those who are coming to us instead of trying to settle them and get them to be more like us. It's a fascinating moment in God's work in the world, isn't it? The way this works.

John Garland:
Yeah. Yeah. And I think, it's actually always been like that. I think, it's the spirit moving that the margins of empire and where the kingdom is most revealed and most seen. And I think, the American churches is seeing that now. And I mean, just factually the vast majority of immigrants coming into the United States are evangelical Christians. Phenomenal. I think, maybe 20 years ago is mainly Catholics coming from central America and Mexico. But right now, I'm counting 85% of the people that we're housing are even [crosstalk 00:20:23].

George Mason:
I did not know that. Wow.

John Garland:
And first thing they want to do is, they want to pray and they want to come into the church and they want to sing and they want to read scripture together. And, they're memorizing scripture. They're quoting scripture. And if you want to just kind of do a basic definition of what is a Christian quoting Jesus, I think you'd come somewhere close to definition of, you sacrifice everything in love. And you love God. And, this is precisely what we're witnessing. These are folks who have given up their communities, their jobs, their businesses, their homes, because they love their children. And because they are investing deeply in their future. And, they're risking everything. They're giving up everything, sacrificing everything in that love. And there's something really, really compelling about that faith, and also encouraging, I think to the church. One thing we talk about in our church is, especially around the advent season, because we're telling these stories, we often say, we scour Matthew chapter two to get some sort of inkling of who hosted Joseph and Mary and the infant Jesus in Egypt.

John Garland:
Because, you know somebody had to take care of them. When they fled in the night and they gave up everything, when Joseph gave up his job, gave up his business, gave up his community, his family connections, when he gave up language connections, when he gave up everything to cross the desert, to go to Egypt, somebody took care of them. Someone took them in and we are that. That's who we are acting as a church. And it's always humorous to be like, "and they did not even make it into the record." Matthew does not mention the family or the church or whoever it was, a synagogue maybe that took in Joseph and Mary and the Messiah. And that's fine because blessings on those folks, that their hearts burned within them as they gave hospitality to the holy family. And, they're not going to get any recognition because that's not the story.

John Garland:
The story is the presence of the Messiah. And they got to bear witness to. And, we often remember that, especially around the advent season, we remember that that's what we're doing as a church here in San Antonio. It's what we're doing as an American church as well in so many ways when we are at our humbles to invest.

George Mason:
Well, when we are at our humblest. But the irony you just stated is that 80, 85% of those who are coming to us being evangelical Christians, it's about 80, 85% of American evangelical Christians, whose position about those who are coming is that we should prevent them from doing so, build a wall, and they are up operating more from a Christian nationalist point of view than they are from a Christian hospitality point of view. It's an astonishing thing.

John Garland:
Yeah. But I would just say, that's not Christianity, Christian nationalism is just idolatry. So, it's not real evangelical Christianity. It's just idolatry. And so, we can't chalk that up as Christianity and they don't know what they're talking about. That's the thing with idolatry, it's all based on lies and whatnot. But when they hear the stories, when they see truth and grace, when they hear true stories and get some modeling of good behavior, all that falls away pretty quickly. I've had that experience many, many times of folks saying, "Pastor, what are you doing, helping these people who are breaking the law, et cetera, et cetera." It's only because they don't understand exactly what's going on. They don't understand that these are their brothers and sisters, and when they can hear those stories and see those connections, it's interesting.

John Garland:
I was talking to a church in Houston, real big church, real, real big, and very conservative. There is a guy there who introduced himself as a major donor to the Trump administration, the election campaign. And they had asked me to come to debate the immigration issues. And they gave it a title. I'm not even repeat the title because I was so offended by it, but they wanted to debate how Christians should, I'll say the word, should respond to illegals. And, I knew precise. I mean, I've had these conversations so many times before I knew every single question they would ask. I was like, "Yeah. Let's have this "debate"." All I did was tell stories of real people, true stories of real people and their stories of faith.

John Garland:
And then, we talked about our own experiences and quoted Bible stories and by biblical characters and whatnot, and there wasn't much of a debate. It was really fun. And at the end of that evening, that fellow lovely man, he bought me plain tickets and two weeks worth of time on the board of Honduras and Guatemala to continue making connections to churches in that area, connected to families that we've hosted here in San Antonio. But, it was lovely. And he continue to stay in touch and is funding a documentary about the faith journeys of our migrant brothers and sisters.

George Mason:
And if someone is watching this podcast and would like to do the same, let's just say that we can help facilitate that kind of engagement if your heart is widened or softened by this kind of a conversation.

John Garland:
Yeah. Another story like that. There's a church in rural, rural Illinois. I mean, I think they were like, "We're the rightest county in whatever, whatever," whatever that means. But, they were compelled by these stories of faith and loving sacrifice. And they told me, "You know what, pastor? We want to host a family." And I say, "Do you really?" And so I asked them, I was like, "You need to do this, this, and this. You need to prepare this because there's so many families that need sponsoring. They need a safe place to go, a safe place to land." I was like, "If you can come up with this list of things, give me a call." And, they call me back in a month and they're like, "We've got the apartment. We've got the medical care, we've got the set up with the law. We've got set up with da, da, da, and we're ready." I was like, "All right."

John Garland:
And the next day, this family agrees to go. A mother and a child agrees to go to this church. And it utterly transformed this church.

George Mason:
That's fantastic.

John Garland:
Folks who a month earlier were just talking about building a wall are now being called grandpa and grandma by a little girl who fled El Salvador. And, this young little girl becoming a young woman flourishing in this community and the mother as well. So, the church [crosstalk 00:28:01] be the church when the Spirit's moving.

George Mason:
Right. But, that actually leads me to this way, in which you have framed the three questions most people ask that are based more in legal and economic and nationalist terms and reframe them spiritually. And I think, this is something that church in Illinois and that you were able to accomplish in this Houston conversation. And, as we shift the conversation, the way we do that, I think, this is a really important move you've made. So, let's begin with the legal question, then the fear question, and then the scarcity question.

John Garland:
Yeah. And you know what, they're all fear-based question. I mean, that's the root of all of them. They just kind of take different forms. And these are the same questions we deal with when we're struggling with racism. And, quite frankly, when we're talking about immigration, we really are talking about racism.

George Mason:
It's always about race.

John Garland:
Yeah. Well, this specifically definitely is. But when you're talking about immigration, the first thing, and this is the barriers that prevent people from responding. It's the barriers that keep the church from being the church. And if they'll come up in any congregation, they'll come up in the most well-meaning folks. We just have to be aware of them as leaders in the church. We need to be aware of the first. And that first question is the legal question. It's like, people are asking, "Is this legal? And why don't they just follow the law?" Or, "Aren't we a country of laws?" Or, "Shouldn't people respect the border?" and all these sorts of questions. And, those are good questions when we need to let people ask those questions. There are some interesting answers to all those questions about what is legal and as is there actually a legal process.

John Garland:
And, quite frankly, it is legal to ask for asylum. And that's why you have this whole process. And, I will always respond to that question. It's a good question. It's a good American question. It is not a Christian question because we're not asking about the order of God. We're not asking about the law of God. And when we ask those questions, all of a sudden, there is a major shift. And then, if you can get past the legal question, there will always be the more of the financial scarcity question and that's, "Why should we take care of them? Shouldn't they take care of their own problems?" Or sometimes, people will cloak it in, "Why don't we just help them help themselves in their own country before they come?" Or it will be a question of like, "We don't have the resources to save the whole world."

John Garland:
It's always, and there's a calculation, just like the disciples made a calculation and told Jesus that they would have to work for an entire year to pay for this hungry crowd of 5,000 people will do that calculation. And that's fair. I mean, people need to be able to ask economic questions and we talk about how you tend to your resources and steward what you have. But, asking the question, "How are we going to take care of them?" that's not a Christian question. And, we need to ask better Christian questions. We need to ask like, "What are the resources that we have and how are we bringing them back to Jesus to see them multiplied?" And then, "How are we participating in the service of what has been multiplied?" And then, "How are we cleaning up? How are we counting the baskets and recognizing we're participating the miracle?"

John Garland:
And then that last question, if you can get past legal questions, and scarcity, financial questions, you're going to get hit by the fear of change and someone else I've heard it phrased just the other day. He's like, "You know what? I think, it's more like a fear of not being in control, but it comes across is like, how are these people going to change our economy? How are they going to change our healthcare system? How are they going to change our culture and our food and our language and da, da, da, all these fear of change questions." And I mean, that's fair. If you want to be nationalistic, you need to be able to, you need to ask nationalistic questions in cultural questions. But, those are definitely not Christian questions.

John Garland:
Jesus is always asking us, "How are we being changed by the holy spirit and by our brothers and sisters?" And if we're not being changed, then we're not walking in the way we are. We are building buildings full of stones that are going to topple. Not one of those stones of fear is going to be on top of the other, in the kingdom. And so I think, it's really important for leaders to recognize those three questions. I'm afraid that laws are being broken. I'm afraid we don't have enough resource. I'm afraid that we're going to change, recognize those questions and do not shame them. Just recognize. Then be like, "Oh, that's a fair question." Like Jesus modeled, let's respond to good questions with better questions and faith-centered questions. Let's ask how we are participating in the kingdom of God instead of the empire of fear as it were.

George Mason:
Well, there couldn't be a better way to wrap up this conversation than the way you just did. John, thank you so much for giving us insight into lives of the people who are crossing the border, coming to be among us, those pilgrim Christians who are changing us for the better, and thank you for modeling for us what church really should be.

John Garland:
Well, thanks so much. It's really a privilege. And if you don't mind, my daughter made with me a little informational video for churches and it's based on a dog. It's a stunning story of a dog that crossed 10 countries with a family. And, I'll send you the link to that so people can watch this just 10 minutes of [crosstalk 00:34:18].

George Mason:
Terrific. We'll link it to this podcast and let people connect to that as well.

John Garland:
You bet. It'll get some images captured in cell phones of our migrant brothers and sisters. That's on the journey.

George Mason:
Well, thank you so much, John, for being with us and we look forward to continuing the relationship.

John Garland:
You bet. Blessings.