How Burmese refugees are welcomed at a San Antonio Baptist church

Christians are called to make disciples of the nations. We often interpret this command from God as missionary trips to other nations, but I want to share my experience of meeting the nations when God brought them to our city. God places us all in specific locations to fulfill His will, as he states in Acts 17:26, and He called First Baptist Church of San Antonio to do so.

San Antonio is a microcosm of the American melting pot, or what President Ronald Reagan once called a city on the hill. In 2023, the American Immigration Council found that immigrants made up 12.7% of the total population in the San Antonio metro area. 2.5% of the immigration population were refugees, and 21.6% of the total population growth of San Antonio was attributable to immigrants from 2018 to 2023.

While 2.5% of the immigrant population may seem like a small number, the refugees I’ve had the privilege of welcoming have had an outsized impact on our community and me. For nearly two decades, First Baptist Church of San Antonio has quietly modeled what it looks like when a community commits not just to welcoming refugees, but to walking with them over the long haul.

Beginning in the mid‑2000s, families fleeing conflict in Burma, Thailand, and Malaysia began arriving in larger numbers. The Burmese refugees include newcomers of several ethic backgrounds: Karen, Chin, Karenni, Kachin, Rohingya, and others. In the early years of refugee resettlement, Catholic Charities carried much of the responsibility. But as arrivals increased, the demand quickly exceeded what any single organization could handle. Catholic Charities reached out to a Laotian pastor — fluent in Thai and leading a combined Thai‑Lao congregation — for help. That partnership ultimately brought the Burmese ethnic groups into the community with the Lao/Thai Baptist at First Baptist Church San Antonio.

And so, ordinary church members — people who had never met a Burmese family or heard of the Karen, Chin, or Karenni peoples — opened their hands. Additionally, many Burmese refugees and immigrants who made this community their home years ago stepped forward to help the newer arrivals. They provided transportation, meals, household supplies, and, above all, friendship. At a time when no one knew how long the wave of arrivals would last, First Baptist simply responded to the need in front of them.

The cultural and linguistic challenges were real. Many adults had never been to school and spoke little or no English; their children entered classrooms unable to understand their teachers. Yet the resilience these families carried was unmistakable. They took any job offered — hotel laundry, food processing, cutting fruit and vegetables in industrial kitchens — and showed up with determination. Church members helped them navigate bus routes, job applications, and grocery stores. Despite not always speaking their language, the church members spoke the language of love to the refugee families through their actions.

On Sundays, two church buses made rounds across the city to pick up families for worship, long before anyone realized how many languages were represented in the seats. Eventually, the families asked if they could worship in their own tongues. The church responded by creating services in Burmese, Karen, Zomi-Chin, Karenni, and more, ultimately hiring an international minister to coordinate these communities and help them plant their own congregations.

What began as emergency hospitality slowly evolved into a long-term ecosystem of support. Over 10–15 years, the church helped hundreds apply for green cards, then citizenship. Even Rohingya and Myanmar Muslim families — who did not share the church’s faith background — came seeking assistance with paperwork because the community knew First Baptist would help without strings attached. Ministers across cultures learned to collaborate, leaning on the church’s resources and its long-standing presence in the city. As new pastors emerged from within each ethnic group, the international ministry became a gathering place where leaders could plan, pray, and make decisions together, knowing they had a central partner able to guide major purchases or strategic moves. Many of the youth who grew up in these families are now in college, the military, nursing programs, or running small businesses of their own. Some have bought homes — an unthinkable dream when they first stepped off flights from refugee camps.

Today, First Baptist San Antonio is in a new chapter: teaching the international community to give back. The children who once needed tutoring and translation are now leading worship, interpreting for parents, and serving in the community. At youth conferences in Thailand, some have visited the very camps their parents fled, coming home with renewed humility and purpose. One teenager, after seeing the conditions of a refugee camp firsthand, called his mother to apologize for years of anger and frustration — realizing, for the first time, what his family had endured so he could grow up in safety.

This is the long, slow work of welcome — the kind that rarely makes headlines because it unfolds not in dramatic gestures, but in persistent, ordinary acts of care. It took ministers with servant hearts, a congregation willing to stretch beyond its comfort, and a belief that strangers can become family. As national debates continue to reduce immigrants and refugees to slogans, San Antonio offers another story: that when a community chooses to walk alongside newcomers not for weeks or months, but for years, everyone is transformed.

The refugees who arrived with nothing now contribute richly to the city. And the church that welcomed them has learned that love, practiced consistently, can build a global family under one roof.