Last weekend we celebrated resurrection, the defeat of death, light breaking into the darkness and hope from despair. Easter was a long time coming. Scripture teaches that Jesus rose on the third day, but it feels as though we’ve endured darkness much longer.

Despite ever-changing conditions, disappointments and even setbacks, pastors Carlos Navarro and Israel Rodríguez offer unchanging Christian love to refugees along their sections of the U.S.-Mexico border.

Navarro leads Iglesia Bautista West Brownsville near the southern tip of Texas, just across the Rio Grande from Matamoros, Mexico. Rodríguez pastors Primera Iglesia Bautista in Piedras Negras, across the river 320 miles northwest, on the Mexican side of the border.

Immigrant children dominate my memory.

Fellowship Southwest’s immigrant relief ministry operates shelters and feeding programs along the U.S.-Mexico border. I’ve met hundreds of refugees—mostly from Central America, but also from South America, the Caribbean and even Africa—in Mexican cities from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico.

Varias veces a la semana, amigos de Fellowship Southwest y del Compañerismo Bautista Cooperativo se comunican con nosotros y nos preguntan: "¿Cómo puedo ayudar a los inmigrantes en la frontera?"

“Beware the Ides of March,” Julius Cesar is warned in Shakespeare’s famous play.

But March 15, 2021, was a day I had been looking forward to for weeks—and one for which I had hoped and prayed for even longer. This was the day I would start as executive director of Fellowship Southwest. Even though I’d start by sitting down at my desk in my home office just as I had for a full year thanks to the pandemic, this first day was still exciting. It did not go as planned.

Overcrowded shelters and constant movement of migrants from other sections of the U.S.-Mexico border are testing the limits of El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, reported Pastor Rosalío Sosa, a key member of Fellowship Southwest’s immigrant relief ministry.

Relief organizations, such as Sosa’s Red de Albergues para Migrantes (Migrant Shelter Network) also are feeling the strain, noted Sosa, pastor of Iglesia Bautista Tierra de Oro in El Paso.

“Not for Ourselves Alone” focuses on the women’s suffrage movement and two of its primary leaders, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Anthony and Cady began working as a team in 1848, and the movement consumed the rest of their lives. When both died, the right to vote for women had not yet been accomplished. Yet their work was not in vain, and women did eventually obtain that right to vote.

A simple question launched a ministry that touched more than 100 refugees in a single week and promises to serve thousands of lonely, vulnerable people in the months to come.

An immigrant named Carina approached Eddie Bernal, a worker helping travelers at a gate at Valley International Airport in Harlingen, at the southern tip of Texas, just miles from Mexico.

A symbol of one of the harshest immigration policies ever devised by the U.S. government has been dismantled and vacated.

The refugee tent camp on the banks of the Rio Grande in Matamoros, Mexico—just across the Gateway International Bridge from Brownsville, Texas—has closed in the past week.

Pastor Lorenzo Ortiz always finds a way to serve people in dire need.

As director of the El Buen Samaritano Migrante ministry, he feeds and protects more than 100 refugees in three shelters in the Mexican states of Coahuila and Tamaulipas.

But he never considers that mammoth commitment as an excuse not to help others.

Pastors who form the backbone Fellowship Southwest’s immigrant relief ministry are adapting to meet the needs of asylum seekers as immigration policy rapidly changes.

The U.S. government is cooperating with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees to implement Phase One of a program to roll back the Migrant Protection Protocols—better known as the "Remain in Mexico" policy—designed to begin processing migrants on the U.S.-Mexico border.

When the mid-February polar vortex caused temperatures to plummet to historic lows, Fellowship Southwest’s close ministry partner Hearts4Kids showed up to provide physical and spiritual warmth on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border.

Stephen Reeves, the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship’s public policy leader, has been elected executive director of Fellowship Southwest.

February is a month for us to remember the contributions that African Americans have made to the our society, which are many. I would like to take a narrower focus and examine the wonderful contributions that African American churches have made for the wider Christian community. Certainly, we could go to the major contributions that African American churches have made in civil rights, homiletics, education, and music. However, the thing that most impresses me with African American churches is how they live into hope.

The U.S. government has taken a humane turn in its immigration policy this year, but the situation for refugees seeking asylum in the United States remains dire, participants in a webinar about immigration reported.

“Take Action for Immigrant Justice in 2021,” sponsored by the Interfaith Immigration Coalition, outlines changes in U.S. immigration policy either implemented or promised by the Biden-Harris administration.

Kyle Tubbs, a national leader in church starting, has been elected coordinator of the Cooperating Baptist Fellowship Oklahoma. He will succeed Steve Graham, who will retire the end of May.

The CBF Oklahoma Coordinating Council elected Tubbs following a national search for a leader to follow Graham, coordinator since 2012.

If you’ve been wondering how to directly help immigrants seeking asylum in the United States, Pastor Carlos Navarro can tell you how to lend a hand. Actually, lend a backpack.

Thanks to a clever idea and willingness to work, three Cuban immigrants are supporting themselves and their families while living in a refugee shelter supported by Fellowship Southwest in Juarez, Mexico.

Shelter Director Rosalío Sosa knows his Cuban friends well and appreciates their strong desire to work. So, when he realized a concrete fabrication machine was for sale, he saw a path to financial independence. And with Fellowship Southwest’s support, he bought the machine and moved it to Juarez.

Fellowship Southwest has launched a new initiative to strengthen churches by helping them discover, train and nurture ministers.

The Fellowship Center for Ministry Development provides a focused response to a growing need among congregations throughout the region, announced Fellowship Southwest Coordinator Marv Knox.

CBF and Fellowship Southwest leaders have expressed appreciation for President Joe Biden’s tone toward immigrants and gratitude for affirmative steps taken by his administration on immigration policy.

“As Christians, we have heard Jesus’s call to welcome the stranger. In response to that calling, we as Cooperative Baptists will continue to witness the love of God to immigrants and refugees through our missions and advocacy work,” CBF Executive Coordinator Paul Baxley said.