ATLANTA — Every day, 25,000 children die of malnutrition.
A billion people have no access to health care.
Millions of children, with no one to care for them, live on the streets.
Women and girls are routinely sold for sex.
Across the globe 27 million people are being held as slaves — the greatest number in history, a trafficking in human life and dignity that enriches the perpetrators by $13.6 billion a year.
Those are just a few painful statistics — there are more, according to Sharon Cohn, vice-president of interventions for International Justice Mission, https://www.ijm.org/NETCOMMUNITY/Page.aspx?&pid=178&srcid=-2 a human rights agency that tries to rescue victims of slavery, violence and exploitation.
“How does God reveal himself in the face of so much suffering?” Cohn asked the Presbyterian Global Fellowship, https://www.presbyterianglobalfellowship.org meeting at Peachtree Presbyterian church Aug. 19. How can people think of God as good when the world is filled with such pain?
She has an answer. God’s presence is felt, Cohn said, when “the people of God show up” to provide food, shelter, safety and justice.
Cohn acknowledged that such statistics are shocking — so much so that, hearing them, many people just shut down. To hear that 27 million people are being held in slavery “represents for most of us people we do not know,” she said. Their lives seem different than ours, and “it’s just one of those numbers we can’t do anything about.”
The enormity of the problem undercuts the urgency, she said, because people think: “I don’t want to hear about a problem I can’t solve.”
But Cohn has met some of these people — and meeting just one, and identifying with that person’s suffering, means “suddenly that number becomes both smaller and larger than you can even imagine,” she said.
Cohn, a lawyer, and others from International Justice Mission work to represent the victims — to rescue them, investigate, push for prosecution of those responsible. Many of those advocates are from the countries where the violence is happening — they are Zambians or Kenyans or Thais, for example, representing their own people.
Cohn spoke of specific cases — a man whose extended family was held captive at a brick kiln, starved and beaten, the women gang-raped.
A girl named Elizabeth from Southeast Asia was sold to a brothel to raise money for her family. The customer who took her virginity was a Westerner who paid $500 to have sex with her.
On the wall of the room where she was held, Elizabeth wrote a passage from Psalm 27: “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? When evildoers assail me to devour my flesh — my adversaries and foes — they shall stumble and fall. Though an army encamp against me, my heart shall not fear; though war rise up against me, yet will I be confident.”
In many cases, the laws are supposed to prevent such atrocities from happening, Cohn said. But the laws are ignored, often with the complicity of corrupt authorities who profit from the exploitation.
And this system “requires the apathy of nearly everybody else,” Cohn said. “Brutal indifference is a necessary and critical component.” She also said: “The oppressors bank on our indifference and our discomfort.”
Cohn is convinced that when the victims cry out, God does hear them. And the people of God have a responsibility to show God’s face to the world and to do something, she contends.
“What would happen if the church stood up, spoke up, showed up and confronted the oppressor?” Cohn asked.
What can local congregations do? Cohn offered some suggestions:
· Discuss the biblical mandate to see justice as fundamental for all people.
· Talk to partners in places where that church already is working to learn what kinds of violence and exploitation they are aware of around them.
· Think of creative ways “to draw the vulnerable nearer to you.”
And while it’s painful to look at the exploitation around the world — to not turn away — “grieve for only a short while,” Cohn said. “Because then we need to get busy.”
