On the first day of her college internship in the late summer of 2007, Jenna Liao waited amid the baggage carousels of O’Hare International Airport in Chicago. Just 21 and newly assigned to an agency that helps refugees, she had been told only to expect a family of 10 from Myanmar. She and a caseworker were to drive them here to the first temporary home of their new lives.
The family trudged into Ms. Liao’s view after 19 years in a refugee camp and 30 hours of trans-Pacific travel. All their belongings fit into two plaid plastic bags, and in that moment, as Ms. Liao recently recalled, she winced at the memory of starting college with four times as much luggage.
No sooner did the family squeeze into the caseworker’s van than several children began crying. Soon a few others vomited with motion sickness. Seated among them, with no relevant experience and no common language, Ms. Liao wondered what she could do.
Then she remembered that someone had given her a Slinky for the Burmese children, and she began to coax its coils into undulating waves. The impromptu show stilled the tears and stomachs alike. Later, when the Burmese reached their apartment, Ms. Liao showed the parents how to turn on the lights and faucets, and pointed to the stacks of fresh underwear on each bed.
That night, Ms. Liao called her mother. “I know what I want to do when I grow up,” she recalls telling her. “I want to work with refugees.”
Two years later, Ms. Liao works full time coordinating volunteers for World Relief, the same agency for which she interned. In a given year, she has a hand in resettling upward of 400 families, with nearly half of the most recent arrivals Iraqis.
The choice she made was both personal and emblematic. For in coming to the work of refugee resettlement, and more broadly of seeking social justice in a fallen world, Ms. Liao embodied a dramatic change among her generation of evangelical Christians.
Without disowning longstanding causes for evangelical activists like opposition to abortion or support for school vouchers, these young evangelicals have taken up issues previously abdicated to secular and religious liberals: climate change, AIDS prevention and treatment, Third World poverty.
“Jesus, when he lived on this earth, was with the poor and the outcasts,” Ms. Liao said in an interview. “And I want to be where God was at.”
Among her colleagues in the Wheaton office of World Relief is Matthew Soerens, who at 26 has already written a book, with Jenny Hwang, on immigration reform from an evangelical Christian perspective, “Welcoming the Stranger.” The executive director of the office, Hayley Meksi, is 32.
“It’s not that we’ve rejected the issues that our parents were concerned about,” Mr. Soerens said. “We’ve widened the spectrum of issues that can be dealt with on a biblical basis and that our Christian faith speaks to.”
Still, there was little in the upbringing of these young evangelicals that made social justice the obvious career choice or theological focus. Ms. Liao is the daughter of a career Army officer who served in both Iraq wars. She was home-schooled for several years, and she cried the night Bill Clinton defeated Senator Bob Dole, a World War II veteran, to win his second term as president.
Coming to the United States from a military base in Germany to start college, Ms. Liao enrolled at Wheaton College, the alma mater of the Rev. Billy Graham and the center of a region of suburban Chicago known as the “evangelical Vatican.” For most of its history, it was also a place that was overwhelmingly white and uniformly affluent.
What happened to both Wheaton and Jenna Liao tells much about the shifts in evangelical Christianity as a whole. Her Christian education exposed her to examples of religious idealism from St. Thomas Aquinas to Mother Teresa to the progressive evangelical ministers Jim Wallis and Soong-Chan Rah.
While still a student at Wheaton, Ms. Liao took part in a national conference about AIDS for young evangelicals. She volunteered on a weekly basis at a homeless shelter for gay men in Chicago. She met her future husband, Richard Liao, literally over the ladle at a soup kitchen.
Every experience served to confirm what Ms. Liao thought of as her scriptural mission statement, the passage in the Beatitudes that blesses the poor, the meek, the mournful, the oppressed.
As Ms. Liao’s conscience stirred, so did the community of Wheaton’s. Starting with a sprinkling of Vietnamese refugees in the late 1970s, the town and its scores of churches welcomed a growing stream of refugees — few of them white, many of them not Christian. World Relief opened here in 1984 and now has an annual budget of $3.7 million and a caseload of 5,000 immigrants and refugees.
What it meant, in palpably human terms, was that a few days before Thanksgiving Ms. Liao stopped by the tidy apartment of Aseel Raoof, an Iraqi refugee whom she had helped to resettle in 2008.
Over cake and fruit juice, Mrs. Raoof recounted an almost unimaginable series of attacks against her family and friends — murders, kidnappings, suicide bombings, stray gunfire, death threats, all topped off by her husband’s abduction.
After being held for more than two years, the husband is safe at last and now applying for entry to the United States. One son is headed to college to study pharmacy, Mrs. Raoof’s profession. The walls of the apartment abound in children’s drawings. Tears still come, but they stop.
“I feel like God is in this work, and I want to be there with him,” Ms. Liao said after the visit. “That’s the only way to live if you’re living by a higher code.”
E-mail: sgfreedman@nytimes.com
The family trudged into Ms. Liao’s view after 19 years in a refugee camp and 30 hours of trans-Pacific travel. All their belongings fit into two plaid plastic bags, and in that moment, as Ms. Liao recently recalled, she winced at the memory of starting college with four times as much luggage.
No sooner did the family squeeze into the caseworker’s van than several children began crying. Soon a few others vomited with motion sickness. Seated among them, with no relevant experience and no common language, Ms. Liao wondered what she could do.
Then she remembered that someone had given her a Slinky for the Burmese children, and she began to coax its coils into undulating waves. The impromptu show stilled the tears and stomachs alike. Later, when the Burmese reached their apartment, Ms. Liao showed the parents how to turn on the lights and faucets, and pointed to the stacks of fresh underwear on each bed.
That night, Ms. Liao called her mother. “I know what I want to do when I grow up,” she recalls telling her. “I want to work with refugees.”
Two years later, Ms. Liao works full time coordinating volunteers for World Relief, the same agency for which she interned. In a given year, she has a hand in resettling upward of 400 families, with nearly half of the most recent arrivals Iraqis.
The choice she made was both personal and emblematic. For in coming to the work of refugee resettlement, and more broadly of seeking social justice in a fallen world, Ms. Liao embodied a dramatic change among her generation of evangelical Christians.
Without disowning longstanding causes for evangelical activists like opposition to abortion or support for school vouchers, these young evangelicals have taken up issues previously abdicated to secular and religious liberals: climate change, AIDS prevention and treatment, Third World poverty.
“Jesus, when he lived on this earth, was with the poor and the outcasts,” Ms. Liao said in an interview. “And I want to be where God was at.”
Among her colleagues in the Wheaton office of World Relief is Matthew Soerens, who at 26 has already written a book, with Jenny Hwang, on immigration reform from an evangelical Christian perspective, “Welcoming the Stranger.” The executive director of the office, Hayley Meksi, is 32.
“It’s not that we’ve rejected the issues that our parents were concerned about,” Mr. Soerens said. “We’ve widened the spectrum of issues that can be dealt with on a biblical basis and that our Christian faith speaks to.”
Still, there was little in the upbringing of these young evangelicals that made social justice the obvious career choice or theological focus. Ms. Liao is the daughter of a career Army officer who served in both Iraq wars. She was home-schooled for several years, and she cried the night Bill Clinton defeated Senator Bob Dole, a World War II veteran, to win his second term as president.
Coming to the United States from a military base in Germany to start college, Ms. Liao enrolled at Wheaton College, the alma mater of the Rev. Billy Graham and the center of a region of suburban Chicago known as the “evangelical Vatican.” For most of its history, it was also a place that was overwhelmingly white and uniformly affluent.
What happened to both Wheaton and Jenna Liao tells much about the shifts in evangelical Christianity as a whole. Her Christian education exposed her to examples of religious idealism from St. Thomas Aquinas to Mother Teresa to the progressive evangelical ministers Jim Wallis and Soong-Chan Rah.
While still a student at Wheaton, Ms. Liao took part in a national conference about AIDS for young evangelicals. She volunteered on a weekly basis at a homeless shelter for gay men in Chicago. She met her future husband, Richard Liao, literally over the ladle at a soup kitchen.
Every experience served to confirm what Ms. Liao thought of as her scriptural mission statement, the passage in the Beatitudes that blesses the poor, the meek, the mournful, the oppressed.
As Ms. Liao’s conscience stirred, so did the community of Wheaton’s. Starting with a sprinkling of Vietnamese refugees in the late 1970s, the town and its scores of churches welcomed a growing stream of refugees — few of them white, many of them not Christian. World Relief opened here in 1984 and now has an annual budget of $3.7 million and a caseload of 5,000 immigrants and refugees.
What it meant, in palpably human terms, was that a few days before Thanksgiving Ms. Liao stopped by the tidy apartment of Aseel Raoof, an Iraqi refugee whom she had helped to resettle in 2008.
Over cake and fruit juice, Mrs. Raoof recounted an almost unimaginable series of attacks against her family and friends — murders, kidnappings, suicide bombings, stray gunfire, death threats, all topped off by her husband’s abduction.
After being held for more than two years, the husband is safe at last and now applying for entry to the United States. One son is headed to college to study pharmacy, Mrs. Raoof’s profession. The walls of the apartment abound in children’s drawings. Tears still come, but they stop.
“I feel like God is in this work, and I want to be there with him,” Ms. Liao said after the visit. “That’s the only way to live if you’re living by a higher code.”
E-mail: sgfreedman@nytimes.com
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