Arrive Ministries Board Member, Pastor Jean Pierre Gatera, featured in Christianity Today.
He Led Churches in the World’s Largest Refugee Camp. Now He Waxes Floors.
But in his spare time, a leading refugee pastor is mentoring immigrant ministry leaders across the country.
Image from Christianity Today
Nobody naps on Saturdays in the Gatera family.
If anyone has a right to, it’s Jean Pierre Gatera. Most weekdays the 43-year-old drives his wife, Appoline, to her tomato-packing job in Minneapolis at 6:30 a.m. Then he sends their kids—Joel, 15, Emmanuela, 12, and Deborah, 8—off to school and does a few hours of work for his degree, a master’s in leadership from Bethel University. He preps some rice and meat for dinner, since Appoline is usually exhausted when she gets home. Then, at 4:20 p.m., he leaves for work: waxing floors for a janitorial company until 1 a.m. He sleeps about four hours a night.
But if he’s fatigued on a Saturday afternoon in July, Jean Pierre does not show it. He and the kids pile into the family van and one of them says a prayer for safety before heading to the Hosmer Library, just south of downtown Minneapolis. He leaves them at the stately, hydrangea-framed historic building to kill a few hours while he drives to Jonathan House, a ministry in neighboring Saint Paul where immigrants seeking asylum can stay for up to six months while they find their feet.
[pullquote style=”left” quote=”dark”]Jean Pierre spends every spare moment doing exactly what he did in Kakuma: exhorting refugee leaders and refugee churches that they are too rich to live stuck in some helpless-immigrant narrative.[/pullquote]Jean Pierre stands waiting at the door of the small, forgettable white structure, unornamented except for some gray shutters. He is about 20 minutes late for a 1 p.m. appointment with Gabriel Wilson, an immigrant from Liberia. But Wilson is still asleep. He works nights too.
Asylum seekers like Wilson have almost no safety net; they are not eligible for welfare cash assistance or other government benefits. Which is why Jean Pierre is here today, to see to it that Wilson never needs a net… Read the full article on Christianity Today
This article originally appeared in Christianity Today on November 27, 2018.
