By Grayson Hester
At the center of Europe lies a crossroads of the world. In the middle of this international intersection, a Cooperative Baptist Fellowship field personnel finds herself adjusting to a new context as she tries to help people making similar changes.
Tina Bailey is most known throughout CBF for her decade-long work in Bali, Indonesia, where she fused pastoral care with creativity and music and art to minister to prison populations (guards and inmates alike) in this Southeast Asian archipelago that is one of the largest Muslim nations in the world. It is a far cry from the Western, majority-white, mountainous and historically Catholic country in which she finds herself now.
For the past few years, Bailey has been ministering in Graz, Austria, the nation’s second-largest city—which is about a two-hour drive from Vienna. If you were to try to inform her that her current placement in a highly developed, wealthy country does not fit the church’s typical mission narrative, she would beat you to the punch. “In the early years of CBF, people would say, ‘it’s a beautiful land, filled with spiritual darkness,’” she said. Which essentially “is taking the oppressed minority and demonizing everyone else. Were the Christians in Indonesia oppressed? Yes. But were some of them also oppressive? Yes.”
Such a globalized, oppressor/oppressed environment might cast Austria as a place not in need of missions, and Indonesia as a prime destination for it. Centuries of colonial hierarchy and racial prejudice are entwined in this view.
But having experienced both worlds—both Indonesia and Austria—Bailey can attest to the ways in which this view falters. Wherever there are people, there is trauma. Where there is trauma, spiritual care is needed.
“There’s so much unresolved trauma in this part of the world that’s hundreds of years old—even from our Baptist history here.” she said. “For Anabaptists, it’s 500 years ago this year that the Anabaptist movement started with executions in Vienna and Steier. It was a bloody beginning.”
Germany, well-known for its reckoning with this fascist past, has, in Bailey’s estimation, made some demonstrable progress toward healing. Austria—not as much.
Younger Austrians do not experience this grief in the same way. But the political and psychological influence it exerts on the country of 9 million cannot be avoided.
In Austria’s 2024 legislative elections, the far-right Freedom Party of Austria won 28.8 percent of the vote, coming in first place and securing the largest victory in its 70-plus-year history. A key plank of its platform rested on the demonization of refugees and immigrants. These populations may be able to cross a national border, but it is much harder to climb an emotional wall.
“They’re trying to navigate being with each other, because, while it is a high standard of living, it’s also at a crossroads of many regions,” Bailey said. In Austria, as in other Western and Central European democracies like Italy, France and Germany, the far-right finds itself ascending largely because of events that transpired over a decade ago.
“That’s the reality in most countries; it’s such a powder keg,” Bailey said. “The very core of it beginning in massacres and fleeing massacres and then doing the very same thing to someone else because it’s how you’ve learned.”
Pitted against each other are everyday Austrians and everyday Syrians or Iranians or Iraqis, trying to do what they feel is right for them and their families. Those most responsible for the conflicts—the wealthy, powerful and politically privileged—largely avoid the on-the-ground ramifications. At the core is deep trauma, aching to be healed.
That healing is Bailey’s specialty.
“Keeping dignity where it belongs on both sides—it’s harder to tell that story,” Bailey said. “That’s why, sometimes, in the older days, we would frame it as ‘this one ethnic group, everyone else is oppressing them.’ It’s never that simple, and it doesn’t do justice for either.”
She calls this process mystifying, occurring in the most ordinary ways. She’s seen it firsthand, having led three art workshops in Vienna where the simple act of drawing—trauma-informed and emotionally regulative—can tease out wounds that have festered for years, if not millennia. Participants, regardless of artistic ability, are encouraged to draw without judgment and to allow themselves the joy of drawing for its own sake. They’re asked to view their progress, or even lack thereof, with kind eyes and are embodying the gaze of their Creator in creativity.
Even if participants don’t link it to theological language, their experience is spiritual and sometimes surprising. Many participants have informed her they’ve never done anything like it before, and that’s why it’s so needed.
“I’ve seen love both ways; I’ve seen the brokenness on both sides,” Bailey said. “We too often can only say, ‘You know, you should welcome everyone.’ There is truth in that, but there is also responsibility. You must understand why it is when someone new comes, they have to figure out how to live here, too. When the humanity and the stereotypes go away, and people can just meet, when that’s happening, it’s beautiful.”
At the same time, “It’s never okay to ignore the population of the host country you’re in; it’s everybody, it’s for the greater good of all—the refugees and building bridges.” To that end, Bailey has met with refugees who have made wonderful friends in Austria, ones taking steps—little ones, to be sure, but steps all the same—to help them acclimate to and find belonging in their new home.
It may not grab headlines like the nationalistic insurgencies but it’s real all the same. It may not easily support dichotomous narratives of oppression, but neither did the Gospel of Jesus.
“The best way I know is to help the refugees know how to live in new places and grieve what they lost. It’s okay to grieve it,” she said. “When I talk with refugees, they talk about their wonderful Austrian friends and vice-versa. It dispels the myths.”
While Austria is not as universally Christian, let alone Catholic, as it once was, and while the refugees settling there are not typically Christian at all, Bailey sees her work as Christlike. It’s the kind of work CBF field personnel do all over the world, from mountains to marshes, Europe to Oceania, middle-income to highly developed—because it’s the kind of work Jesus calls us to do. Wherever there is humanity, there is hurt. And wherever there is hurt, there is a need for healing.
“We’re all created in the image of God: We all have value, the right to life, freedom of religion, human dignity,” she said. “Everyone has a right to be heard and not be silenced. Our freedom, our livelihood, our mental health, is on par with that of other people as well. We can’t put ourselves above anyone.”