Set the Captives Free

Angela Wu has an excellent reminder to Christians of the need to make God real to the world around them:

Gary Haugen of International Justice Mission was one of the Plenary speakers at Jubilee this past weekend. It turns out he’s given this talk aimed at college kids for years, but I’d only ever heard him in front of adult audiences, wearing a suit. This time he wore a headset microphone, told text messaging jokes, made faces. He joked about how learning what God cares about was a process that began with him realising that what he cared about was mostly…himself. And then he brought down the anvil.

Gary told three stories of a boy whose arm was amputated after he was shot by corrupt police officers in Kenya, a girl sold into bonded slavery by her parents so they could get money to save her mother’s life in India, and a young woman abducted into a brothel in Indonesia to service 20-30 men a day. Complete with names, photos, case files. He asked, How are these people supposed to believe that “God is good?” Which was a great question to ask 1,800 American college kids. He explained how IJM’s local Kenyan, Indian, and Indonesian workers were able to prosecute the police officers, rescue the girl from slavery, and raid the brothel and bring all the girls there out of their “rape for profit.” Today, the boy in Kenya has decided to become a lawyer to help others like him, the girl is no longer rolling 1,000 cigarettes a day, and the young woman lead IJM to other brothels where girls were being held, and became a believing Christian after years in loving aftercare.

For these people, they had no reason to believe that “God is good,” except that the body of Christ showed up for them. The body of Christ showed up to “set the captives free.” We talk a lot about the body of Christ. That the church is the body of believers around the world. But I never thought of how, when a group of Christians show up to minister to someone in need, that is the body of Christ showing up. God made real to people who otherwise have no hope.

Read the whole thing!