By a great suggestion from my friend Don Dudley, his wife Jill,  and with the eagerness of another friend Damien to jump on board, I’m going to do a few blog posts this month on the subject of human trafficking.

The subject has been on my mind for a number of years. I posted some thoughts on it back in ’08, and later followed up with some discussion with a pastor at our church. The issue was on my heart – and still is – and I wanted to talk with him about how we as a church could be involved. He made the point that while we may not have direct involvement at the moment in fighting human trafficking, or saving those entrapped in it, we are involved in keeping many young people from being targeted.

Covenant Mercies is an organization started by our church several years ago to care for orphans in Uganda, and has extended to include Zambia and Ethiopia. The way their orphan sponsorship program engages the human trafficking issue is simply this: deny the “product”. Orphans are key targets for the nets of human traffickers. It’s pretty easy to understand why – no parents, no body to know they’re gone. And unfortunately, there are lots of orphans in Africa, especially Uganda (no thanks to Joseph Kony). By getting fatherless children into a safe home with schooling and involvement in an indigenous local church, we are fighting human trafficking from another angle: prevention.

I know this doesn’t solve the issue, and certainly doesn’t lift the weight that 27 million human souls subjected to slavery at this present moment. But I think it helps give us a holistic view of what we’re after. This doesn’t complete the picture.  You need to read Batsone’s book. It’s easy to engage, simply laid out with facts and stories, and packed at the end with helpful guidance on where to go in this issue. To be a Christian is fundamentally to be one marked by freedom from slavery.

“But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed, and, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness” (Romans 6:17-18).

Just as God had a vision of what he would save us into (“slaves of righteousness” – to know God!) we must have an idea of not only what we are seeking to save people from (severe, God-hating slavery), but a vision of what we are saving them into (healthy, productive, healing lives) and a vision of how to prevent this in the future. So on this last note, I commend Covenant Mercies and like organizations to you.