Kenya hosts hundreds of thousands of refugees, most concentrated at the Dadaab and Kakuma camps — among the largest refugee settlements in the world, sheltering people displaced by conflict and crisis across the region for decades. Scripture speaks directly and repeatedly about how God’s people are to treat the displaced: “The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born” (Leviticus 19:34). This isn’t a peripheral issue for faith — it’s one Scripture returns to again and again.
“The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born.”
— Leviticus 19:34
Kenya is home to two of the largest refugee settlements in the world. Dadaab, in the northeast, and Kakuma, in the northwest, have sheltered generations of people displaced by conflict, drought, and crisis across East Africa and beyond — many of the people living there today were born in the camps their parents fled to decades ago. It’s easy for this fact to sit at a distance, a headline rather than a call to action. Scripture doesn’t allow that distance.
A Command Repeated, Not Mentioned Once
“The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God” (Leviticus 19:34). What’s notable isn’t just the instruction itself, but how often it appears. Variations of “do not mistreat the foreigner” or “love the foreigner” show up repeatedly throughout the Old Testament law — not as a single isolated rule buried among hundreds of others, but as a recurring, emphasized theme woven through Israel’s identity.
The Reason Given Is Personal, Not Abstract
Notice the reasoning attached to the command: “for you were foreigners in Egypt.” God doesn’t ground the instruction in an abstract principle of fairness alone — he grounds it in Israel’s own remembered experience of displacement and vulnerability. The command to welcome the foreigner isn’t detached moralizing; it’s an appeal to memory. A people who knew what it felt like to be strangers in someone else’s land were being told: don’t forget what that felt like, and don’t do it to others.
Jesus and the Displaced
The Gospels open with Jesus himself as a displaced child — Joseph, Mary, and the infant Jesus fleeing to Egypt to escape Herod’s violence (Matthew 2:13-15), refugees in the most literal sense before Jesus could walk or speak. Later, Jesus tells a parable in which the criterion for final judgment includes a strikingly concrete question: “I was a stranger and you invited me in” (Matthew 25:35), followed by the identification: “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me” (Matthew 25:40). Welcoming the displaced isn’t presented as a nice extra in this parable — it’s presented as inseparable from how Jesus is treated directly.
What This Doesn’t Require
None of this requires inventing a specific program, claiming an involvement that doesn’t exist, or pretending the practical and political dimensions of a real refugee crisis are simple. Kenya’s own hosting of Dadaab and Kakuma involves real, complex realities — resource strain, security concerns, and genuinely difficult policy questions that deserve honest engagement, not simplistic answers. What Scripture does require is a posture: that the displaced are not to be treated as a burden to be resented or a problem to be made invisible, but as people made in God’s image, deserving the same dignity as anyone born in the land.
Where This Starts
For most readers, engagement with this issue won’t look like solving a geopolitical crisis — it looks like smaller, real things: how a displaced person or migrant in your own community is spoken about and treated, whether prayer for those in displacement is a genuine part of a church’s life, and whether generosity toward organizations serving refugee populations gets any real attention rather than being an abstract cause too large to think about. Leviticus 19:34 wasn’t written for governments alone. It was written for ordinary people, deciding how to treat the stranger actually in front of them.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where are Kenya’s main refugee camps located?
Kenya’s two largest refugee settlements are Dadaab, in the northeast near the Somali border, and Kakuma, in the northwest — both among the largest refugee camps in the world, hosting people displaced by conflict and crisis across the region, some for multiple generations.
What does Leviticus 19:34 say about foreigners?
It commands that “the foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born,” instructing God’s people to love and treat displaced people with the same dignity given to their own community — grounded in Israel’s own memory of being foreigners in Egypt.
Was Jesus ever a refugee?
Yes — Matthew 2:13-15 records Joseph, Mary, and the infant Jesus fleeing to Egypt to escape Herod’s violence, making Jesus himself a displaced child before his public ministry ever began.
Final Thoughts
Kenya’s hosting of Dadaab and Kakuma is a well-known reality, and it’s easy to let that reality stay at the level of a headline. Scripture doesn’t allow that distance — it grounds the call to welcome the displaced in Israel’s own remembered vulnerability, in Jesus’ own experience as a refugee child, and in a direct claim that how the stranger is treated is how Jesus himself is treated. That’s not a peripheral issue for faith. It’s close to the center of it.
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General civic-faith content (Leviticus 19; Matthew 2, 25); references to Dadaab and Kakuma reflect well-known public facts about refugee hosting in Kenya, not any PCEA Milimani South program or statistic. No organization-specific involvement claimed. Compiled by the Editorial Desk.