Global Grace Cafe is a vibrant, ‘pay-what-you-can’ restaurant inside an RCA church in New Jersey. Its cuisine features the favorite dishes of refugee chefs who cannot return to their homelands. The cafe inspired me to write a book published by the RCA press in 2023.
How do people get trapped in no-win situations and how hard is it to remedy each situation? Immigrants and advocates at the church tell their stories, starting with a nighttime immigration raid that destroyed 35 families in 2006. Fathers, wage-earners from Indonesia, had escaped anti-Christian and anti-ethnic Chinese pogroms that began in 1998 with the demise of Indonesia’s Suharto regime. Weeks after the raid, these New Jersey church members were deported to a country where Christian churches were being burned, leaving behind single-family households where no one worked or spoke English.
The U.S. immigration system is complicated! This book provides a plain-English primer to help people understand it better. Writing this book challenged me to research how world events influenced law and policies that contribute to our country’s complex and conflicted immigration system.
The book Global Grace Café is also a faith story: the inspiring faith of Harry and Yana Pangemanan, for whom God alone provides a way where there is no way. The determined faith of Rev. Seth Kaper-Dale and dozens of community leaders who stepped up with imaginative tactics that solidified a large, interfaith movement. The personal faith of me, its author, as this story inspired me to enter seminary and become a faith leader myself. “A Love Story about Battles Lost and Won to Keep Families Together in America’s War on Immigrants” is the sub-title.
Readers tell me it is a love-story most of all.
Global Grace Café: A Love Story about Battles Lost and Won to Keep Families Together in America’s War on Immigrants
This book is a part of the Historical Series of the Reformed Church in America (No. 109)
Action Step:
Read Rev. Estes’ book, and spend some time in prayer about how God might be calling you and your church to care for immigrants and refugees in your community.