The 12×30-foot storage unit in a Raleigh, North Carolina, suburb is crammed full of chairs, tables, mattresses, lamps, pots and pans.
Most of its contents will soon be hauled off to two apartments that Welcome House Raleigh is furnishing for three newly arrived refugees. It’s a job the ministry, which is a project of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of North Carolina, has handled countless times on behalf of newly arrived refugees from such places as Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Syria and Venezuela.
But these two apartments are going to three Afrikaners — whose status as refugees is, according to many faith-based groups and others, highly controversial.
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“Our position is that however morally and ethically charged it is, our mandate is to help welcome and love people,” said Wyatt, a retired Cooperative Baptist Fellowship missionary who now works for CBF North Carolina. “Our holy book says God loves people. We don’t get to discriminate.”
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Wyatt said he recognizes that Afrikaners are part of a white ethnic minority that created and led South Africa’s brutal segregationist policies known as apartheid for nearly 50 years. That policy, which included denying the country’s Black majority rights to voting, housing, education and land, ended in 1994, when the country elected Nelson Mandela in its first free presidential election.
Wyatt has been running the Welcome House Raleigh ministry for 10 years, providing temporary housing and a furniture bank for refugees, and now asylum seekers. He says they will extend the same welcome now to Afrikaners.
“My wife and I have come to the position that if it’s not a full welcome, just like we would with anybody else, then it’s not a welcome,” he said. “If we don’t actually seek to include them into our lives like we would anybody else, then we’re withholding something and that’s not how we understand our holy book.”
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