LANCASTER, Pa. — From the road, you would never guess what’s inside Habecker Mennonite Church in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, on a Sunday morning.

Surrounded by cornfields, obscured by trees, lacking a steeple or stained glass, the outside is unremarkable by design. It’s tucked into the heart of Amish country, where people put down roots and stay, often for generations. It’s a politically and religiously conservative area, and in the 2016 election, the county – as it has every year in recent memory – voted for the Republican candidate.

Some things inside Habecker are typical for the area: A pile of handmade blankets; several women wearing prayer caps; a program that reads, “Come let us bow down and worship.”

A few dozen faithful locals attend the church. Many have been going for decades.

But the pews hold an unexpected gathering, too, on Sunday mornings – they’re filled with more than 100 South Asian refugees.

“It’s a gift from God . it’s just a precious gift,” said Miriam Charles, who’s been attending Habecker for 70 years.

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The church uncovered a need and responded – by welcoming a refugee family into its congregation nine years ago. Then more and more families joined, until the Sunday service became bilingual.

The call to help refugees is particularly strong in Lancaster County. The city of Lancaster has been called the refugee capital of the nation, resettling 20 times more refugees per capita than the rest of the country, according to the BBC.

The area’s primary resettlement agency credits the support of the county’s strong religious community for its success: More than 85 percent of refugees – people fleeing their homeland because of famine, war, persecution or other causes – are self-sufficient in six months or less.

“Why Lancaster? It’s sorta simple: It just really comes back to the community,” explained Stephanie Gromek, a community resource coordinator with Church World Service, a faith-based organization with local headquarters in Lancaster that holds a government contract to resettle refugees in central Pennsylvania. “This is not new to Lancaster County. This is who the community is. It’s who we are,” Gromek said.

The organization’s goal is to help refugees to assimilate into American culture. “We never proselytize,” said Gromek. Sharing faith should happen in the context of friendship.

Support is particularly strong in Mennonite churches, a diverse community of believers with a faith tradition that has loose similarities to the Amish.

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Even so, some in the area are resistant to helping refugees, said Habecker co-pastor Dawn Landis. “It’s sad when we see Christians be too afraid or be too swayed by the culture or the politics of the time, and then they compromise their witness, in my opinion.”

On Oct. 1, 2016, about 10 miles down the road from Habecker, Lancaster County welcomed a different guest – then-presidential candidate Donald Trump.

A crowd of Trump supporters cheered with their candidate’s promises, booed with him as he critiqued his opponent.

Among those criticisms: “And now she wants a 550 percent increase in Syrian refugees to pour into our country?”

He looked baffled. In the next breath, he spoke of “radical Islamic terror.”

The county handily voted for Trump in November. Since then, he’s overseen a clampdown on refugee acceptance, documented in a USA Today Network investigation.

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From the outside, Lancaster County might seem a paradox: A religiously and politically conservative community that simultaneously welcomes refugees and embraces a candidate suspicious of refugees.

That’s how it looks from the outside.

Craig Coble has a sign in his front yard: “No matter where you are from, we’re glad you’re our neighbor.”

It’s written in three different languages: English, Spanish and Arabic.

Sitting on his front porch on a sunny June day, Coble mused dryly, “I’ve not gotten very far in life. … About 2 miles across town.”

He was being modest – that’s what people do around here.

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It was clear his life was full: A career chemist at a Fortune 500 company; a family of four children and six grandkids; a lifelong church family – Elizabethtown Church of the Brethren.

Labels frustrated him, especially when it came to the issue of refugees: “I don’t know what ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ means anymore.”

His faith taught him to help those in need when he can. After hearing the stories of refugees who many come from war-torn, famine-stricken lands, he looked around lush Lancaster County, and the right thing to do seemed clear.

“It can be a ministry for some people. It can be just plain human decency to many other people,” said Coble. No need to overthink it.

Something else that Coble doesn’t overthink: The number of refugees now coming to the United States. “I can’t do a whole lot about what the government sets as a quota, so we do what we can for the people who can make it.”

Rachel Bunkete is one of those new neighbors.

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When she first arrived in the United States in 2013, she cried for days. And not for joy.

Her hope was fading: She might never see her family again. She missed her husband and three children. She had waited five years to get to the States, to flee the land where her parents were killed. When she arrived in Lancaster County, an ocean separated her from the Congo. She didn’t know the language and the customs.

But her tears didn’t last. She was welcomed into her new home. “Love. Only thing: Love. Everybody show me their love,” she recalled.

She found a new family, the people of Keystone Church in Paradise, Pennsylvania, who drove from the Lancaster County countryside to the city to help her with, as she put it, “everything.”

And soon a global church family she had first connected with in Africa would help her with something that meant everything to her: Reuniting with her family.

Today, there’s only one Bunkete missing from Rachel’s home – her oldest son, nearly 30, who’s in limbo awaiting approval to join his family.

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The Rev. Keith Rohrer helped lead the efforts to welcome Rachel, Keystone Church’s first refugee.

He’s also a Republican (but not a straight-ticket Republican, he’s quick to note). It’s important to him that the United States remains secure – for his family, for Rachel.

That’s probably the most important part of the president’s job, he thinks.

But Keith Rohrer is not the president.

Instead, he sees himself in a different role: “If (refugees) get here and I have an opportunity to help, I want to do that.”

Since 2002, more than 4,000 refugees have had the opportunity to call Lancaster home, with over 75 percent having come since 2010, according to USA Today Network data.

The majority come from south Asia, but Iraq, Somalia, Cuba and the Congo have also sent hundreds. Less than a hundred fled Syria, the subject of political controversy in the Trump administration.

“I think we do have a lot of religious conservatives who take their political views as a package and maybe don’t scrutinize them as hard as they should,” he said. That happens on both sides of the political aisle, Rohrer said.


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