"Where are the Christians now?"

a pastoral letter from Week of Compassion

As the Week of Compassion Board of Stewards gathers online today for the Spring 2025 business meeting, Executive Director Vy Nguyen offers this reflection, focused on the reality and import of the present moment, and the impacts on this ministry we share. We offer it here as a pastoral letter, confident that even amid desperately challenging realities, we are rooted and grounded in faithfulness and hope.

---

Dear Disciples,

As our Board of Stewards gathers for our Spring 2025 meeting, I offer not just a report, but a reflection – a reckoning, really – on where we find ourselves at this pivotal and deeply consequential moment in our domestic and global humanitarian work. This reflection is grounded in our shared mission: to alleviate suffering throughout the world, with a vision of a world where God’s people transform suffering into hope.

The world we serve is changing at a pace and scale few of us have witnessed in our lifetimes – especially in the past four months under the new U.S. administration. The systems, structures, and partnerships built in the aftermath of World War II to respond to human suffering are not only straining, but being fundamentally weakened – caught in the crosscurrents of escalating crises and declining political will. Conflict, climate disasters, forced displacement, rising authoritarianism, and deepening economic inequality are converging with a global retreat from foreign aid and multilateral cooperation. Together,
these forces are unraveling the very foundations of humanitarian response – with devastating consequences for the world’s most vulnerable.

As these pressures mount, we face not only operational challenges, but profound moral and theological questions: What is our calling as people of faith in the midst of such suffering? What is our role as the Church – a people committed to dignity, accompaniment, justice, and compassion – in a world unraveling at the seams?

Recently, while in Geneva for a meeting with the World Council of Churches , I heard a story that’s stayed with me – one that speaks directly to this question of moral presence and solidarity. A colleague recalled her experience living in Egypt during the tumultuous protests of 2013. From her apartment window, she watched as streets filled with demonstrators, many of them young, courageously calling for justice and dignity. She witnessed people being attacked, arrested, and brutalized by security forces. But amid the
violence and chaos, something extraordinary happened: groups of Coptic Christians formed a human circle around vulnerable protesters, shielding them with their bodies. They risked their lives to stand between the authorities and those demanding a voice.

It was an act of accompaniment, courage, and compassion — a profound witness to the power of faith communities to embody protection and presence in times of peril. As she finished the story, she turned to each of us and asked a question that continues to reverberate: Where are the Christians now? In the face of today’s injustices – the vilification, detention, deportation, and abandonment of migrants and asylum seekers; the violence at borders; the neglect of displaced families – where is the Church’s visible, tangible circle of protection? Where are the followers of Christ standing in the gap? Where is our moral witness, animated by our mission to alleviate suffering and our values of accompaniment and justice, as neighbors like Kilmar Abrego Garcia face wrongful deportation, and countless others are turned away from safety?
​
From the Mediterranean Sea to the Texas border, from Sudan’s displacement camps to Haiti’s fragile neighborhoods, people created in the image of God are met not with compassion, but with hostility. And so again, she asked us:

Where are the Christians now?

That question does not exist in a vacuum. It echoes in a world where the infrastructures of humanitarian compassion and solidarity themselves are unraveling.

Since the end of World War II, global humanitarian response has rested on a network of multilateral institutions, United Nations agencies, faith-based and secular NGOs, and governmental aid programs. These structures – organizations like UNICEF, the International Organization for Migration (IOM), and the World Food Programme – were built largely by the United States and Europe as part of a vision for a cooperative, post-war global order. For decades, they provided the frameworks for delivering emergency
relief and long-term development assistance where it was needed most.

But today, those infrastructures are eroding at a troubling rate. The United States, once the world’s largest and most consistent donor of humanitarian aid, contributed $63.3 billion in official development assistance (ODA) last year – roughly one-third of global aid. However, its leadership is waning, in part due to the current freeze on foreign aid. While I was in Geneva, colleagues from UNICEF and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) shared that their budgets are being cut by 40–60%, forcing them to lay off thousands of employees in the coming weeks – a staggering blow to the humanitarian workforce.

While Week of Compassion does not rely on federal funding, the consequences are nonetheless deeply felt. Our ministry depends on a web of ecumenical alliances, local partners, and shared infrastructure to carry out our relief, refugee, and development work. When major agencies scale back operations, shutter programs, or withdraw from entire regions, it is often our local partners who are left to shoulder greater responsibility with fewer resources.

According to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), while global ODA reached a record $223.7 billion in 2023, much of that increase was driven by temporary surges in domestic refugee hosting costs — not increased support for the world’s most vulnerable. When those domestic costs are excluded, actual aid to the poorest and most fragile states has declined — a devastating reality for millions.

And it’s not just the U.S. government pulling back. European nations – which collectively account for nearly half of all global humanitarian and development aid – are also scaling down, contributing to a broader contraction of assistance just as global need is surging. The consequences of these decisions are not abstract. Real lives hang in this fragile balance. In South Sudan, maternal healthcare clinics have shuttered. In Lebanon, housing subsidies for displaced Syrian families have been cut. In Ethiopia’s Tigray region, a
partner’s feeding program for displaced children had to close — and within three months, malnutrition rates among children had doubled.

Even our own ecumenical partners are feeling the strain. Church World Service (CWS), one of Week of Compassion’s historic partners, has been especially hard hit. Once a $300 million agency supporting refugee resettlement and development globally, CWS has seen deep cuts to its capacity — diminishing the very infrastructure that faith communities have long relied on to accompany people in crisis.

And yet — amid this unraveling — hope persists.

In Indonesia, the ripple effects of the U.S. foreign aid freeze have placed thousands of refugee youth at risk of losing access to essential services. One of our partners, Yayasan Cita Wadah Swadaya (YCWS), continues to provide life-saving support for unaccompanied and separated children and aged-out youth through housing, education, healthcare, and livelihood services. Many of these young people have already lost everything once — and now face losing the fragile stability they’ve worked so hard to build.

In response, YCWS asked Week of Compassion to reallocate a portion of our ASPIRASI project funding to sustain these services through September 2025. This redirection of resources will cover housing, cash assistance, medical care, and foster support for 10 unaccompanied minors, 55 refugee youth, and several caretakers. It ensures that these vulnerable refugee communities – especially women, children, and youth – are not abandoned in this moment of crisis. It is a faithful act of stewardship, solidarity, and trust in local leadership. It is one answer to the question: Where are the Christians now? 

These realities have prompted long-overdue reckonings across our sector. Christian Aid UK recently announced plans to cut 45% of its staff and shift decisively to a partnership- led model – turning over leadership and decision-making to community-based partners in the Global South. This move reflects not just financial necessity, but ethical realignment.

The ACT Alliance, of which Week of Compassion is an active member, is embracing this transformation. At its 2024 General Assembly, ACT adopted the statement Our Collective Action on Locally Led Response, calling for new humanitarian partnerships rooted in mutual accountability, local wisdom, and agency.

One of the most effective tools for this shift is the ACT Rapid Response Fund – a pooled emergency mechanism that enables local ACT members to respond directly to crises without waiting for traditional international funding streams. Week of Compassion has long been a lead supporter of this fund. But to realize its full potential, we must pair financial support with long-term investment in governance, capacity-building, and risk systems that honor the self-determination of local partners.

This work is also rooted in the theological pilgrimage of the World Council of Churches. Through the Ecumenical Diakonia Reference Group, of which I am a member, the WCC is leading the global church toward a deeper commitment to climate justice, decolonization, and collaborativeservice. Its Commission on World Mission and Evangelism calls this “decolonial discipleship” – a necessary interrogation of how our past models have perpetuated inequality, and an invitation to serve in ways that reflect justice, mutuality, and equity.

I am especially grateful for the collaboration with the Office of the General Minister and President on seconding Rev. Alexa Dava to work with the WCC and local churches around the world on reproductive justice — a powerful acknowledgment that this work must be locally rooted and locally led.

For Week of Compassion, this is not an abstract concept.
It is how we live our mission.

In light of these converging challenges and opportunities, Week of Compassion will continue to center our work around two core, interwoven priorities. First, we will invest boldly in local partnerships – prioritizing financial support, capacity development, and leadership formation for local partners who can lead with context and credibility. Second, we will deepen our ecumenical collaboration – because in a time when so many institutions are shrinking, our strength lies in collective action.

We’ve already seen this ecumenical collaboration in practice recently. When our partner in Puerto Rico, Techos Pa’ Mi Gente, lost its AmeriCorps support, Week of Compassion could not shoulder the full cost to ensure continuity of staffing. But in collaboration with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Presbyterian Church (USA), Mennonite Disaster Service, and others, we came together to sustain the program for another year. This is what it means to be the Church: to show up with courage and compassion when others step back.

The dismantling of global humanitarian infrastructure is one of the defining moral, operational, and spiritual challenges of our time. Yet within this collapse lies a profound opportunity: to build a new system of solidarity — one that is more just, more equitable, and more sustainable.

And so, we return to that street in Cairo, where Christians once formed a human shield. In our time, let us form new circles of protection – in Gaza, in Haiti, in Indonesia, and here at home. Through the partnerships we invest in and the witness we bear together as Week of Compassion, may we answer the question that still echoes:
​
Where are the Christians now?

​In gratitude and hope,

Vy Nguyen
Executive Director, Week of Compassion