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“We Haven’t Learned How to Rescue the Oppressed”—Gary Haugen

Gary Haugen is CEO of the International Justice Mission, an international organization committed to freeing victims from sexual exploitation, slavery, and violence. Haugen received a B. A. at Harvard and a J. D. at the University of Chicago and eventually worked for the U. S. Department of Justice. The Department detailed Haugen to the United Nation’s Center for Human Rights, where Haugen led an investigation into the atrocities associated with the Rwandan genocide. Overseas, he came to appreciate the great need for Christian compassion. In the following excerpt taken from his book The Good News about Injustice, Haugen reminds Christians of the simple fact that God can use them to answer the prayers of the oppressed who are suffering at home and abroad.

As Christians we have learned much about sharing the love of Christ with people all over the world who have never heard the gospel. We continue to see the salvation message preached in the far corners of the earth and to see indigenous Christian churches vigorously extending Christ’s kingdom on every continent. We have learned how to feed the hungry, heal the sick and shelter the homeless.

But there is one thing we haven’t learned to do, even though God’s Word repeatedly calls us to the task. We haven’t learned how to rescue the oppressed. For the child held in forced prostitution, for the prisoner illegally detained and tortured, for the widow robbed of her land, for the child sold into slavery, we have almost no vision of how God could use us to bring tangible rescue. We don’t know how to get the twelve-year-old girl out of the brothel, how to have the prisoner set free, how to have the widow’s land restored to her or how to get the child slave released and the oppressors brought to justice.

It is perhaps more accurate to say that as people committed to the historic faith of Christianity, we have forgotten how to be such a witness of Christ’s love, power and justice in the world. In generations past the great leaders of Christian revival in North America and Great Britain were consumed by a passion to declare the gospel and to manifest Christ’s compassion and justice. But somewhere during the twentieth century some of us have simply stopped believing that God actually can use us to answer the prayers of children, women and families who suffer under the hand of abusive power or authority in their communities. We sit in the same paralysis of despair as those who don’t even claim to know a Savior—and in some cases, manifest even less hope.[1]

 

[1] Gary A. Haugen, Good News about Injustice: A Witness of Courage in a Hurting World (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1999), 13-14.