Olympian effort

When the Summer Olympics open in Rio de Janeiro in August, one team will enter Maracanã Stadium for the opening ceremony under the Olympic flag—a team of refugees.

The International Olympic Committee in June approved the team of 10 to compete—six male and four female athletes. The team will consist of two swimmers from Syria, a pair of judokas from the Democratic Republic of Congo, five runners from South Sudan, and one runner from Ethiopia. One Syrian lives in Germany, another in Belgium. Ethiopian marathoner Yonas Kinde lives under special protection in Luxembourg, where he works as a taxi driver.

The Olympic Committee announcement prompted warm profile stories in news media, and these Olympians will be symbols of hope for their fellow refugees. But recognizing the refugee crisis as now big enough to comprise its own country shouldn’t win our celebration, but our shame.

If one could gather all the refugees in the world together, they could populate a country the size of South Africa, France, or Italy.

If one could gather all the refugees in the world together, they could populate a country the size of South Africa, France, or Italy. Worldwide, the number of forcibly displaced people has topped 60 million, the largest number in recorded history. Two out of every 5 refugees are from Syria, where a five-year conflict has launched the largest wave of refugees to overtake Europe since World War II.

The attention focused on an Olympic refugee team, while refugees themselves bake another year in the hot sun of too many under-resourced refugee camps, reminds me of too many varied, useless hashtag campaigns. Remember #BringBackOurGirls or #Kony2012? Most of those Chibok girls are still in captivity, and Joseph Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army—despite media hype and White House pledges—are plaguing Africans again.

Over and over, we see how the top-down solutions of the world’s centrist planners fail. The International Criminal Court can indict all the African war criminals it wants, but it has yet to find an army willing to bring them in. The UN Refugee Agency is tracking and registering refugees, but its member states won’t contribute sufficient funds to resettle them. In the last year it’s actually approached private relief groups to take over camps processing migrants, so overwhelmed are their workers and plagued with political infighting.

More international cooperation and high-level political solutions are needed to resolve desperate crises facing places like Syria, South Sudan, and Congo. In an election year we should be looking to political leaders at all levels with serious ideas to relieve a crisis bound to get only worse otherwise. But political strategies won’t be enough. And the church can do so much more.

In 1944, with millions of people made homeless by World War II, churches and civic groups around the world established war relief funds. Members of Park Street Church in Boston resolved to go without meals and contribute the money they would have spent on food to such a fund. Other churches joined the Park Street “War Relief Fund,” and together they raised $600,000—or $8 million in today’s dollars. Out of that effort grew World Relief, the aid and development organization of the National Association of Evangelicals that is today at the forefront of refugee resettlement in the United States.

The important thing isn’t establishing big endgame goals; the important thing is simply to start.

Email mbelz@wng.org