Engaging in Justice: Insights from Gary Haugen of International Justice Mission

There are just some very very practical ways to engage. But I think it's our spiritual enemy that says, "You're just

too small for the problem. Who are you? You have your own problems. You'll probably mess it up." You could just

imagine that if the if our spiritual adversary wanted less of God's good work to be done in the world, why wouldn't he

say precisely those things? But those are lies. Those just aren't true. [Music]

You know how there are certain phrases that stick in your mind? I wonder if you have some of those. Well, most of the

things that we hear and say on any given day, we don't remember for a long time. But sometimes it'll be that one sentence

or that one phrase that you'll think about over and over and over again for years. For me, one of those was this.

The statement was 15% of the people get up every morning wanting to know how they can do good. 15% of the people get

up every single morning wanting to know how they can do bad things to other people. And 70% of the people sit back

and watch to see who wins. That was by Gary Hogan, who is our guest today. just uh off the cuff in a

conversation in our group that gets together on Wednesday nights for a book club and I think about it all the time

because he has seen some of the darkest stuff imaginable in the world. He's the founder and the CEO of International

Justice Mission. IGM is a global organization that a lot of you are familiar with and a lot more of you

should be familiar with protecting people in poverty from violence, slavery, human trafficking, uh abuse of

power. He's seen a lot of really dark stuff. And yet he's one of the least cynical people I know. And I want to

know why. And we're going to talk about that. And I think there are some things that we can all learn about guarding

ourselves from cynicism. Before Gary founded JM, he was a human rights attorney at the State Department and he

was director of the United Nations investigation into the Rwanda genocide and um he speaks often on these

issues. Gary, thanks for being with us today. Thanks for having me, Russell. Delighted.

you know, as I just mentioned, you have uh you have seen a lot of uh stuff and we're going to talk about that a little

bit later. But one of the things I'm interested I'm always interested in um not just how God calls people to do

things, but how you know that God's calling you to do things. I mean, you created something uh completely distinct

uh in the world in JM. How did you know that God had gifted you and called you to deal with the the justice issues that

you deal with? Yeah, there was no uh bolt of lightning or you know voice from the heavens about

that at all. It when I look back on it, it's just a very incremental journey. I think trying to earnestly get closer and

closer to the heart of God and just trying to deepen my experience of him because ironically I grew up in a place

that couldn't have been farther from all of all of that's ugly and violent and um and brutal in the world. I grew up in in

California in a nice suburb in Southern California. I'm the youngest of six kids. My dad is a doctor and so we lived

in a a fluent nice suburb. My mom was a stay-at-home mom and took care of us. They had stopped parenting by the age of

like I mean by the fifth kid or something. So I I was free just to to run around. But and so I and my parents

turned out to be actually be very nice people. So I grew up in the kind of bubble almost everyone should be of um

safety and love. Um but um in in in my journey of uh coming to know God more deeply and it's my mom who

dragged me off to Baptist church about 13 times a week uh when I was little. Same interest and I just never had any

question about where I would be at appointed hours during the week. Of course I I would be in church. And so I

I came to know Jesus as a as a little kid and I found the the story compelling and plausible about me needing a a

savior. Um and by the time I went to college, I was a convinced Christian. I had worked through whatever are the sort

of intellectual challenges and the idea is this just baggage from my childhood or do I really believe this? So I go off

to college and I'm a a convinced uh Christian. But in college, of course, in a really

healthy way, you start to encounter all the questions about all the stuff in the world that isn't so great, all the evil

and injustice and suffering. And so I'm going in I'm in at Harvard in 1980. Um there's a lot of racial tension and

violence in Boston at that time. The aparate crisis in South Africa is the issue on campus. the famine in uh

Ethiopia, Ethiopia starts to ramp up and there's homelessness. I got to step over homeless people on the way to uh school

and this is all really new to me and but as an earnest Christian I'm thinking and I had a nice uh Christian fellowship

there uh in varity Christian fellowship that was really trying to think through well how does Jesus think about this?

How do we follow Jesus in the midst of these things? And I was just aided in a very earnest

uh engagement with that. So all all the things you kind of do hopefully maybe we're in college like you go work at a

homeless shelter, you go work with people living in poverty uh who can't winterize their houses and so they're

living in terrible cold and and engage these questions of yeah should there really be a partaid regime in South

Africa abusing people in those ways? Should people really be starving in uh in North Africa? And what I did find

every time, Russell, is that there was something of the heart of God that I experienced when I grew closer to

suffering, to human hurt. And it wasn't uh it was always painful and

difficult to draw that close and it was scary. uh but the actual experience of intimacy with

the God who is with those who are hurting in the world. I just experienced that. That's all I can really say. And

then I started to discover the teaching in the scripture about justice and about God's compassion for the poor, which I'd

heard a thousand sermons by the time I went off to college, Russell, and I never heard a sermon on justice.

That's and I went to a wonderful church, earnest church that taught me a lot about Jesus. So anyways, that's the

story of I felt enlivened, enriched. Enriched is kind of a vague word. I felt

alive in my life with God when I was in places where uh where humans were hurting and

then especially in places of injustice and abuse and um I I when I graduated from college I went and lived in South

Africa and worked with church leaders who were in the midst of the martial law years of the uh South Africa apart

crisis and it's there where I I just found so compelling. My experience of God became so intimate

and alive as I drew close to the places where he was in the midst of great hurt and suffering. And then I just found

this very clear teaching from the scripture about him and justice and about what he invites his people into.

And then I saw him also fulfill those promises in Isaiah 58 about the way in which you will call upon him and he will

answer. You will find yourself uh planted by streams of living water. You will be a repairer of the wall. I just

found all those things actually true as I took steps out to test them. You know, you mentioned not

ever hearing about this um very much uh growing up. There are some people who say, well, if you talk about justice,

it's going to distract from the mission. It's going to distract from evangelism and it's going to turn our turn us um

turn us into just a social work uh operation instead of the ambassadors of reconciliation. How did you did you

think that through? And if so, how how did you how did you work your way through that kind of argument? Yeah,

that definitely was the era I grew up in. If we get engaged with this justice stuff, it's going to distract us from

the real work of trying to save souls. And if the liberals are doing it, it must be bad, right? So, um, but then you

encounter the scriptures, just the plain teaching of the scripture. Jesus of course says that he's come to bring good

news to the poor, liberation to the captives. You can spiritualize that if you want, but I don't see that

consistent with the rest of the scripture, which is super clear. Isaiah 117 says, "Seek justice, rescue the

oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow." Um, uh, Micah 6:8 says, "He has told you, oh man, what is good and

what does the Lord require of you?" And Joe Stole from Moody Bible Institute used to do a great sermon on this

because he says, "Isn't that a great passage?" Because here it is. God's going to tell you what is expected of

you. And is it a long list of a thousand things you can't keep up keep track of? No. It's do justice, love mercy, walk

humbly with your God. And it's the exact same list that Jesus gives in Matthew 28:28 where he says the Pharisees have

you you've neglected the weightier matters of the law, justice, mercy, and faith. So I think you can hold that

position that justice is somehow a distraction from your life with God in service to the world if you just uh

don't really take scripture very seriously. Um, and also I mean if God's own the foundation of his throne is

righteousness and justice, if he hates violence and injustice and loves justice, what kind of story are we

telling about God if we his people completely uh neglect this aspect of his character? And it's also just our best

history of the ways in which we have brought a powerful witness into the world is when followers of Jesus have

manifest a compassion for those who are hurting and have just asked God send me allow me to show your love and your

character of justice in those situations. You know, I often uh quote Wendel Barry talking to a group of uh

environmental activists saying, "Your problem is that you think that the solution has to be at the same scale as

the problem." And that leads most people to think, you know, this is so big. Uh what can I do? I mean, you have you see

on a daily basis the depth of the problems in a way that most people don't see at all.

What do you say to the person who says, 'You know, the reason I don't ever really talk about the poor is the poor

you will always have with you, Jesus said. And there's nothing there's nothing ultimately that we can do

because it's just too big. Yeah. And you can understand that despair, especially in this era where we're just flooded

with all the information about every terrible thing that's happening everywhere.

But also I think all of us actually have testimonies in our own life where someone loving us actually made a

difference for us in our pain and our hurt and our suffering. So almost all of us have our own proof case of well

that's not entirely true that loving and caring for others who are hurting doesn't matter because we've probably

all ourselves been cared for. Likewise we don't think about that probably in regard to our own children or those that

we love most. We think, "No, I think probably my loving and my caring will make a difference." And when

International Justice Mission started, we just wanted to see if we could rescue one girl who is being sexually abused

out of a brothel. And that would be a great year. That'd be a great decade if you did that once. But it turns out we

did it two or three times the first year and then seven or eight times the next or people being held as slaves in rock

quaries or people held in prisons who were just being tortured and abused to extract bribes from them. Uh or just

other girls that were just being uh living in terror because of sexual violence.

And what we've now seen is that if you get past the the the sin of despair.

Um because that's the uh I think it was CS Lewis that says that that despair is a greater sin than any sin that provokes

it. Because it tell because it manifests what you actually believe about God.

because God is the one who said no come my children let's go into this fallen world and let's uh manifest my love and

my courage and what I have seen in my experience after you know 30 plus years of this work is that God is still

prepared to do completely miraculous things beyond what we could have ever asked or imagined as you sort of

indicated I feel like I've been in the midst of the ugliest most vi violent horrible things that humans do to each

other. But I am definitely more encouraged and more hopeful and more excited and energized about what God can

do through his people to address it than I certainly was when I ever started. You know, you mentioned slavery and uh I

have uh seen many JM presentations talking about confronting modern slavery and empowering people to take on modern

slavery. I think there are a lot of people probably who are listening to this who who would would say, "Well, now

slavery, that's a a 19th century problem that William Wilburforce and Abraham Lincoln took care of. I mean, surely we

don't still have slavery uh happening in a in any widescale uh way on the on the planet right now." Uh h how is that how

is that a a wrong viewpoint? Well, yeah. I mean, that's a point of view I would have had u a few decades ago before a

light started to be turned on the existence of tens of millions of people in slavery in the world today. And I

have personally met thousands of them and our teams have have personally helped hundreds of thousands of them.

And so, we could just testify it's a fact. The estimates are there's about 50 million people in slavery in the world

today. And they're the overwhelming number of them are in uh countries where slavery is against the law, but the law

is just simply not enforced. And so they're held in a lot of places of manual labor. So rock quaries or rice

mills or uh brick um factories. Uh but also there's a huge trafficking of humans in the commercial sex industry

because this this makes a disproportionate amount of money. And the truth is there are people in forced

labor situations in our own towns and cities and in the US it will be a relatively small number

compared to the the global phenomenon. But wherever you have marginalized uh vulnerable people in the shadows,

there's going to be people who will have the idea, oh, you can make money off of these people by forcing them to do your

work. And fortunately, now we are in an era where that's against the law everywhere, but in some places those

laws are not enforced and they don't provide services to survivors. But what we found, if you can do those two

things, if you can uh actually provide enforcement of the law and great services to survivors, everywhere we've

done these projects, we've seen rates of slavery and human trafficking reduced by between 50 and 85% in about 6 to 8 year

period of time. So, I could have taken, you know, anyone who's listening to this, we could have gone to the

Dominican Republic 10 years ago and it would have taken us just a couple of hours to be able to purchase a child for

uh sex uh because there was no active law enforcement against that. JM was able to take up a program in coalition

with other forces there and in an 8-year period of time reduced that by 80% as measured by um outside auditors. So now,

a dad that I once talked to who said, you know, he's got his 13-year-old daughter and he wouldn't, he lives in

the Dominican Republic, but he can't let his daughter go to the beach because he's afraid that she will get

trafficked there. And she one day did what a 13-year-old does. She sneaks out of the house to go to the beach. And

sure enough, she was trafficked to the other side of the to the of the DR and was sold into a brothel. IG and was able

to rescue her out with authorities and and have her uh uh placed in some just terrific afterare. But that is an

intolerable situation for a dad, I think. And uh and now that's not the way it is in the Dominican Republic because

most of that child sex trafficking has simply gone away. So it's it is a situation where there's as much slavery

as there's ever been in the world. But right now it's an era in which we actually know how to get rid of it and

there's a real fighting chance in our lifetime to see the end of slavery as an economic phenomenon in human affairs.

the typical situation for say one of those young girls that's being trafficked into sex slavery. Is it is it

usually a scenario like that where someone is uh abducted and and put into slavery or is it usually a situation

where parents themselves will uh traffic their children or you know we see a lot of this uh in the United States where

you'll have maybe a young woman who's in a very difficult situation with her parents or substance abuse or something

else and there are people who Well, oh well, we've got the way to fix your problem. Just come and do this and it

accelerates until they're in in bondage to them. Which of those is usually the way that this works?

Well, if you look at the way it is for most people held in forced labor and human slavery around the world, it will

be an instance in which they are drawn away from their protective community and family by some kind of scheme.

uh because yeah most are not trafficked by their own families. Yes, there are uh there are broken homes and dysfunctional

families in which people are vulnerable and they run away and so therefore people take advantage of that. You do

see that a good bit in the United States. uh in the developing world more generally it is the case of the very

very poor become susceptible to someone saying ah if you come with me to this other part of the country or if you come

with me to this other country you can get a job there you can get an education there and what the trafficker does is

then separate you from that protective network of either your family or your community and now you're in a place

where you are lost and that sounds dangerous and so at First you don't want to do that or let your kid go do that.

But then as your poverty becomes more desperate, you you take that risk and then the trafficker just uh takes you

into a situation from which you can't escape. What I don't think we can do is ever

uh eliminate that vulnerability. Although we should continue to reduce poverty and take all those steps. What's

much faster we found is make sure that if somebody does do that to a vulnerable person that they go to jail because what

we found out is that the people the traffickers they're not brave people. They don't do this because they're on a

mission. They're doing it because they think it's an easy way to make money. And in all of our projects when you just

raise the risk level that they'll go to jail, you can just see it just drops off by uh between somewhere between 70 and

85%. So right now the world actually has the solution for the vast vast majority of slavery in the world. We just need to

actually invest and execute on it. So I it would seem that then what you have to do at JM is both work directly with

those who are being uh traffked and and mistreated but also with the government structures, the law enforcement

structures to make sure there's there's actually an infrastructure there to deal with it on the ground. That must take a

lot of diplomacy in working with those people. Yeah. No, entirely because it's not the job of some faith-based NGO to

protect people from violent criminals. That's actually the job of the local justice system. But the local justice

system uh can be strengthened uh to do that. And that's actually where your 157015 rule came from um that you talked

about because that's what I discovered with most law enforcement in the developing world. 15% of law enforcement

wakes up every day to do as much hurt as possible. 15% puts on their uniform and actually tries

to do the right thing day after day. And the 70% in the middle are just trying to see which of those groups is actually in

control. And when a law enforcement um uh system can start to actually fire and send to jail the ones who are corrupt

and abusive, those 70 in the middle, they just scoot right over to the with the good guys and become part of a of

the solution. So with surprising speed, a a justice system that looks 85% corrupt and broken and irredeemable can

actually turn into something that actually works quite reasonably. And then the bad guys are like they're done.

They they move on to stealing radios or something else that's easier. You know, one of the things that I found just

dealing with people in pastoral situations over the years is that there are very few people who think of

themselves as villains. Uh most of us when we're going to do something wrong, we create a storyline that helps us to

to justify and to push down the conscience. You know, I I've I've never met anybody who's breaking up a marriage

uh with uh with an affair who said, "I really want to kind of get into adultery." Uh that that's not that's not

the way that it works. And there's always some story that can explain to the person why in this case what I'm

doing is really not that bad. How does somebody who is getting into something as self-evidently

cruel and and wicked as some of the things that you deal with, do they do that? I mean, do they have a way of kind

of um grappling with the conscience beforehand or or what have you seen them do?

Yeah, it it is it's fascinating and it's it's true as you say, humans are really really complex and atm we've spent

hundreds of thousands of hours with incredibly brutal criminals. Um, and they'll be complex people because they

may have their own children that they actually do over and care for and provide for in really um sensitive,

loving ways. and they will then in their day job be treating other children with the most despicable brutality you can

imagine. So I think in general, Russell, what I've seen is that humans have this capacity to have a circle of their

compassion and then they can just put certain human beings outside that circle of

compassion. And a lot of it has to do with like you will see with cast systems or tribal systems or other religious

systems that will put a human being as the other as outside that circle of compassion

and then they were usually getting money for it or power for it for it and so it does feed the sinful greedy nature. So

that that takes over. Then I will also say a third thing which is a bit uh more um just terrifying is that human beings

actually can find an exhilaration in evil uh to to to see genocide and the ease

with which like under the Rwanda genocide investigation you just had tens of thousands of average people who could

turn rather quickly surprisingly quickly to being a mass murderers. Um it's the any genocide studies class will show you

the ease with which really ordinary people turn to the business of of of killing. And there is in in my

experience this capacity for humans to engage evil and taste it and touch it and engage it in a way that they almost

can't even draw themselves back from. There's a blood lust and an exhilaration from um hurting other humans that's

really quite evil, but it's it's a real thing. You know, I think for a lot of people who maybe are listening to this,

they're grappling with it. I mean, I think I thought about this a lot working on um weaguer Muslims

uh being mistreated in China, for instance, is to think about all of the products that we have. I mean, somebody

is probably listening to this saying, "I don't know if this shirt was stitched together by slave labor. I don't know if

this uh this phone was put together by slave labor." How effective is it for somebody to say, "I'm going to boycott

places that act this way, even though it's really hard to figure out how to do with the kind of supply chain that we

have now. Is is that effective at all? It is useful and I'll explain why with a really great example. Uh Walmart found

itself a number of years ago confronted with a problem. an article is written that oh there um is slavery in the

fishing industry uh in the South Island Sea and uh Walmart is sourcing their um uh uh fish from uh from that uh supply

chain. And so they came to us and said, "Hey, uh we don't want any slavery in our uh supply chain. Can you help us

with that?" And we were eager to do that. And one of the things we said to them was, "Look, as as long as the Thai

authorities aren't taking seriously enforcement of their laws, you're never going to have a a confidence that your

supply chain is is clean." But if you partner with us and go to the Thai authorities and say, "Hey, let's let's

see if we can strengthen the enforcement uh of these laws, great laws that you have on slavery in the fishing industry,

and here's JM as a partner to help you to do that." Then we were able to see the performance of the Thai uh

enforcement uh dramatically increase. And this then is a a real um solution for the reputational exposure that

Walmart was uh experiencing. Now, Walmart wanted to do the right thing, but they also knew that they had a

customer base that was just not feeling great about uh buying fish stickicks that someone had a reasonable um uh case

to to suggest was coming from slave labor. Even more interesting, corporations now want to hire the best

people, and the best people don't want to work for corporations that are not um careful about where they're sourcing

their their product. So the key thing is to be able to use that influence that that concern, consumer concern,

investment concern, even talent concern to um uh allow the the the great corporate brands to use their influence

to just increase the political will of these countries to enforce their laws and provide services to survivors.

Because when we do that, you can actually measure boom, there goes the slavery. it goes away. You know, I

imagine that one of the things that you have to deal with a lot would be for the people who have been uh in these awful

situations experiencing trauma coming out of it. And I know there there aren't many people who are going to be dealing

with global uh slavery, but there are a lot of churches that they're dealing with people who have been through really

traumatic uh mistreatment and they're trying to figure out how should we best care for people who have been through

things that we can't imagine. What have you learned about about that? Well, first I I have learned that healing is

possible. And I have seen humans who we found were just in a fetal

position of of utter despair and crushed as humans, just death in their eyes because of the

way they had been treated. But through a long process of love and care and professional traumainformed

uh mental health care, uh Russell, I've seen the the light of life return to people's eyes. M I have see I there are

now atm in our global survivor network thousands of people who have experienced trauma and abuse that

would be just even just a horror from our our nightmares and yet now they have not only found healing but they are

instruments of God's love to be healers in the world and leaders in their community. We know thousands of them.

Now, what I can say though is that that result is comes from an enormously um committed

um investment of love over a long hall over the work of healing. And not a spiritualizing of things and saying,

"Well, we're going to say a prayer over you and then it's going to be all okay." but a real companionship with the very

best tools that are available uh to uh engage the truth about what happened but also to say that's not the whole truth

of the person. It's not their whole life. Uh and there can be this incredible recovery of hope and the very

fullness of life uh and in some ways the e even fuller use of their lives because now they have in many ways an

opportunity to uh touch and bring healing and compassion uh that they would never have had if

they hadn't been through that experience. It's not a reason to have it, of course. Uh but in God's

redemptive work, I have real time seen um the power of a life transformed. Can you tell if you're in a church whether

that church is going to be a good place for somebody who has been through difficult times or not? Whether that

church is ready to actually care for people. Are there some characteristics that they share? Well, I think a lot of

it comes from the leadership, right? From the very from the because we we're church culture gives regard and honor to

those who are are leading. And so if those who are in leadership uh make it clear that

they understand that this is a fallen world in which human beings are taken advantage of. So so their eyes are open.

They also understand that it's a incredibly vulnerable and difficult task for those who are abused to actually

lift their voice. Mhm. And so if they just understand, make it clear that they understand that and that they are really

eager to make sure that this is a place where the voices that are feeling most tender, the voices that are feeling uh

experiences of hurt, they can find a place where they can share that. um there's then a lot of work that you need

to do to actually build you know structures and approaches and programs to do that well but I think the first

thing is just the signal from the very top if it's one of like ah that could never happen here or if anybody has that

point of view well surely they will just come out and say it super clearly and we'll get it or we did that once 10

years ago and it'll probably never need to be dealt with again or this is sometimes the worst if if we're too

worried about what people will think of us as a church. Yeah. Or the reputation or the that we need to

uh somehow just not allow to the surface the things that are hard and maybe ugly. Man, if you're a predator, that's where

you want to camp out is in that kind of environment. And it's just so unnecessary. Um, yeah, that's a sense,

you know, uh, one of the things I love about JM among many things, um, is, you know, I'm around a lot of faith-based

NOS's, and it can be a really wonky sort of, uh, world and kind of a white papers and arguments sort of world. One of the

things that I have seen JM do really effectively over the years is to engage with artists. I mean songwriters and and

people like that. I think about uh JM partnerships with uh singers and and musicians and and so forth. Is was that

an intentional thing of saying we we really need to be able to reach the imaginations of people and not just

their not just their consciences or did it just kind of organically develop? I think it was pretty organic um in the

sense that in the deepest sense that JM was actually is constituted as a community of Christian spiritual

formation that is doing this job this mission together but it is first of all a

community of Christian spiritual formation which we're trying to be more like Jesus and to help each other become

more like Jesus and in order to do this task which is confronting really scary, intimidating violence and evil in the

world. Oh my goodness, we need strength. We need inspiration. And that comes from us from being close

to a much bigger God, a much uh stronger God. And so it makes us desperately dependent upon prayer. It brings us into

that place of worship of Almighty God. And in the midst of that, of course, one of the things you just bring to bear is

just the power of music that can bring you into the reality of how good and loving and majestic uh God is and all

the promises of scripture uh about his love for us. So that music was part of JM because we needed it. Uh I got my

headphones in right now. The number of times you will see JM leaders in the field with their earbuds in doing

something and you figure out what are you listening to? Well, it's some worship music because it's been a hard

day or they're going into a hard thing. And the thing that would uplift them so much was music. And Sarah Groves would

have been one of those early sort of artists who who got that and understood that. We would have uh these annual

global prayer gatherings where we would spend two days together just praying over the urgent needs

uh of JM and what we were facing and what our leaders were facing and we'd had people murdered and we'd had people

facing horrific things and well we just needed we needed the the artists to come and bring the music uh and the beauty

that our our our our soul was aching for And I I just recall there's this amazing

story. I have no idea if it's true or not, but it sounds so perfect. Is there was uh you know some mainline church in

the 1950s that sent a uh clergy down the south to sort of see what was going on the civil rights movement and uh to get

a sense of like what's happening down there and how's this going to work out. And so the delegate goes down there and

talks to church leaders and has a look at what's happening in the civil rights movement and comes back and has this,

you know, devastating report of like they don't have a chance because of this and because of that and the forces are

all arrayed against them and all the rest. And he says, but they're going to win and why? Cuz they have a better

song. and experience the power of the civil rights movement coming out of churches

with a hymn in their heart. And his conviction is sorry, there's nothing on the other side that's nearly as powerful

as that. And um I think that is what we've found with uh these artist partners who usher us into the true

presence of God and then lift our spirit for the work he's given us to do. You know, I heard you years ago. You spoke

at one of our events and I still remember what you had to say because it was about uh do not grow weary in

welloing. And I have to think in doing what you do in the same way that I think about people who are involved in foster

care ministry or in single mom min all kinds of of things in their community. Burnout is a really

is everywhere. Uh and you you have uh you seem to have navigated uh burnout and I think I know I think I know how uh

but but h how is that a reality? Are you are you somebody who just um kind of naturally is able to compartmentalize

and and bounce back or did you really see that and say, "Okay, burnout is in front of me. I've got to avoid it." Oh,

100%. Um the latter of cuz I saw the track record in front of me was pretty much 100% burnout. that is

you can only do this for so long and any struggle for justice is a long fight. So, uh we're all going to burn out and

this isn't going to to to work unless we intentionally attend uh to our own

spiritual health and and strength. And so, a couple of things about that were first of all just as I said we we're are

a community of Christian spiritual formation. So we have a set of practices every day that we do together. We start

every single day with just 30 minutes of no work at all of silence and solitude called it's called stillness and we just

prepare spiritually for the day. Then we work two hours. Then we stop what we're doing at 11:00 and everybody gathers

together to pray. That's the rhythm every single day. Pull up from the work from the idolatry of, oh, I'm the one

that's going to solve this. Remember, oh yeah, this is something God wanted us to do. just uh reagn

oh he's done some good things ask for him what you need do that for each other then go back into it and then every

quarter we take a whole day off to just a day of prayer together uh and that's the rhythm of our life and it also is

this idea of and maybe this has been one of the secret sauce elements of that that joy is the oxygen of doing hard

things and that you need to keep coming back up for air and see, oh yeah, this is a world that's actually full of, you

know, squeezable little babies that are being born and are amazing and the ocean is fantastic and um uh uh physical

exercise is joyful and a bike ride on a autumn day is glorious. In other words, coming up for air because you know how

you always get on that airplane and they say um uh uh please secure your own oxygen mask before uh uh serving others.

And um and that that's our approach too is that oh let's make sure our oxygen mask of joy is secured uh before we try

to help out everybody else because eventually we're going to need to draw on those resources. And I one of the

things that's it's very very sad to see is the earnest Christian trying to engage the great problems of the world

from a lone ranger. I'm going to do this on my own thing and that that just never works out uh well or I'm going to feel

guilty about enjoying my life because there's so much suffering and hurt in the world. Who am I to go have a great

time out with my friends? Who am I to go really uh just have a wonderful laugh about that ridiculous uh movie that we

got to watch together or whatever it is that brings you joy? Uh I probably shouldn't do that because there's people

hurting and suffering in the world. And wow, I just think that's such a clever lie of our adversary cuz he just mostly

wants us to be exhausted and burned out and not actually um engaging the work of love anymore.

And this idea of feeling guilty for enjoying your life, man, I've seen that um really make it hard for earnest,

compassionate people to take the break and the oxygen that they need to to do the work for a long time. you know that

it's funny that you say that because that shows up often on social media which I don't normally I don't normally

check uh all of these things but there was one time I can think of when a a friend of mine who's a harmonica player

uh in many other ways gifted musician he he did a concert here and R and I went to it and I posted a picture of us there

and someone commented how can you be doing something as silly as being at a concert when there's I even forget which

exact thing was happening at that time, but it was something awful that we had been working. That's a that's a pretty

common kind of social media fueled idea that you if something bad is going on, you need to really be focused in on that

bad thing. And of course, there's always something really bad going on. Yeah. Yeah. And actually, that's why I've I

I've told our team in recent days that that the I think the single most important

thing for their uh relationship with God and their strength for

uh the fight we're in is their relationship with this because this of course is a non the cell

phone. Uh, this is a nonstop fire hose

of all the terrible things that are going on in the world and all the terrible things that could be going on

in the world. That's the other thing you start to see around news is that actually most of most of it now is

anticipatory. So, it's not enough bad things are happening right now, but here's all the things that could be

happening. Yeah. and to to not um attend to um the the assault upon the mind that's

just utterly unmanageable for humans without doing that in a profound uh profoundly intentional way. I frequently

ask my team, are you reading as much history as you are news? uh because until that ratio is um is set

uh right I we we we may be just completely overburdened by what we were never meant to carry. Uh

yeah, you know, one of the things that at least two times um when it was your turn to give the the book for us all to

read uh on our Wednesday night gatherings, you chose Dallas Willard. And I know that Dallas Willard has been

a big uh influence on your life. Uh what did you learn from him? Well, it was just so transformative because I can,

you know, it's one of those books where you can uh picture where you were when you were reading the sentences and the

paragraphs and that was the the divine conspiracy for for me. And there was so much of that that was just completely

lifealtering to me. But the basic idea, and maybe you can relate to this, Russell, uh, as a fellow Baptist, of uh,

of long good standing, um, I grew up in a church where every Sunday I heard an inspiring sermon, almost like a a pep

talk from the coach about the life of Jesus, how amazing it was, and how wouldn't it be great if we could live

like that? if we had the courage, if we had the compassion, if we had the love, if we had the patience, if we had all

those fruit of the spirit and um how God would use us in the world and I'd be super inspired and I would so want to be

that kid the next day, but certainly by Monday afternoon that was manifested. It was not the

because what I was not getting is well, how do I become that kind of person because I'm I'm

I clearly am not. So what's the what's the training program for that? And I I I didn't understand that there actually

was a way a a to uh gradually grow in the way that you could live your life more like Christ. And instead it was

like the coach telling you, okay, here's what how inspiring it is to be an amazing athlete, but no actual coaching

or training that day by day you could practice to get better. And that's what Dallas Willard gave me a picture of.

It's like, oh, there's actually a 2,000-year history of spiritual formation practices, exercises, things

you can do, but you can only do them with the power of the Holy Spirit, of course. So the the Holy Spirit is like

the wave for the surfer. Like there's no surfer. There's no surfing without a wave. Um and you can see them out there.

When there's no waves, then no one's surfing. But also, if you aren't cooperating with that wave, you're also

not going to be uh uh surfing. And so spiritual formation for me became like that where you it's the power of the

Holy Spirit that allows you to live differently. But there's practices that you can give yourself to. And we this is

what we do at JM that the idea of starting your day with 30 minutes of solitude and silence. That's a practice.

And stopping every day for prayer at 11:00 is a practice. Um there are these things you can do to as Dallas would say

to arrange your life so that you can be experiencing contentment, joy and confidence in your

daily experience with him. And that that will be the most powerful thing you could possibly bring into the world is

that authentic experience with him. And I suppose the last thing that was completely revolutionary to me because

I'd never thought of it this way, but that Dallas Willard uh says, "You believe something when you act as if

it's true." I'm like, "Huh?" Cuz you know, as a good uh Christian, there was a whole bunch of

things I would say I was uh I believed. You say, "That's profession. That's what you're professing."

But you believe something, not when you say you believe it or when you even believe you believe it, but when you act

as if it is true. And so what that turned into is like, "Oh, no wonder I'm living such a kind of mediocre,

uninspiring life is because I'm not actually acting as if the things that Jesus taught were true." So instead of

leaving me in despair about that, that left me like, "Well, what if I tried this? What if tomorrow I acted as if

this and this and this were true? Things I've always said and that set me on a completely

transformative path that I'm just going to incrementally act as if what Jesus said is true. And

that's been paying off pretty well now. Yeah, I have to imagine that there there probably have been people, you know,

20some hard charging idealist there at starting at JM and saying, "I don't have time for 30 minutes of stillness and an

hour of prayer. We've got people to save." I mean, have people had that kind of uh thought at first? Oh, sure.

because that's the thought I had and that's the thought I still have like um and because I I I show up I show up at

work actually having a plan for what it is all the justice I need to get done and uh and the idea that oh I got to

actually just talk to God about this and just be with him um and then the idea of

stopping because at 11:00 you were just getting rolling like you are killing in terms of justice in the world and how

you got to stop that that is almost annoying every day. But but honestly every I think the reason

most people stay at JM is because of these practices more than anything else and they see themselves that and even

the young interns that will be coming this week to JM and will be coming with all that ready to go active energy. It

doesn't take a long time before they settle in and like, oh, okay, there's there's a deeper power that we can tap

into. And once you, I think, tapped into a little bit of that power, as fancy and fabulous as your own powers, uh, can be

of talents and ability, if you've tapped into the supernatural, uh, I think that keeps bringing you back

to that that search. I'm imagining two people listening to this uh, broadcast today, this podcast. that one of them

young 20some Christian uh another an older maybe retired uh person and both of them are saying

okay I'm I'm convicted about the way of Jesus with justice but nobody can do everything and I don't know what I could

do that wouldn't be counterproductive or that if or would be effective how how does that person know where to

start or if to start. Yeah. Well, uh I always always think the place to start with these is to talk to Jesus

about it. Um and to maybe take his scripture uh to him and say, "Okay, it says here, seek

justice, rescue the oppressed." Jesus, can you just um I'm I'm going to sit with you for a while and and see what

you want to say to me in in those words. And it may be that the word rescue, oppress, defend,

plead, orphan, widow. Just those words. There may be something in those words that draws a family member, something

you saw in your happening in uh in your community, uh something that actually a ministry at the church. There's probably

all kinds of things already happening. There's probably a um uh a battered women's shelter in the in

the neighborhood. there's probably um some manifestation that's not you know far away of those who are hurting and

then to just follow a prompting to even explore to just uh talk to someone about it. I just can't overestim over

overstate how marvelous little tiny steps of love are. Um and that's certainly the way JM began

with just it says seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow. Okay, God, where? What?

How? And then obviously JM exists to be able to actually empower the body of Christ

into that. One of the most obvious ways is every year we have an advocacy summit here in Washington DC and we just have

common Americans come and join us and we all go see our members of Congress together and we say hey we think Jesus

cares a lot about this. Um we would love to see the voice and values of uh the American people behind this. So in

September uh we'll have our advocacy summit. This year is focused on the problem of online sexual exploitation of

children. So there's now a business all around the world where you put a child in front of a webcam so that a pedophile

uh or other sort of predator around the world can direct by live stream the abuse of the child. There were a half

million children in one year that were being abused in front of web webcams in the year 2022.

Now, there's policy that can really dramatically impact this and shut it down. And so, IG is having an advocacy

summit um September 9 to 10. And uh anybody who's interested in just going with us and uh getting a little bit of

training on how to do that uh just because it turns out that uh and you anyone who spent any time up on Capitol

Hill, it turns out they actually care what the voters back home actually care about. And if the voters back home don't

care about it, uh then they're not likely to as much. And so there are just some very very practical ways to engage.

But I think it's our spiritual enemy that says you you are um you're just too small for the problem. Who are you? You

have your own problems. You'll probably mess it up. You could just imagine that if the if our spiritual adversary wanted

less of God's good work to be done in the world, why wouldn't he say precisely those things? But those are lies. Those

just aren't true. And there are there was actually commands uh when Jesus says um uh when I leave the Holy Spirit will

come and you shall receive power to be my witnesses eventually to the other ends of the earth. And that's what I've

seen Russell is uh if we just talk to Jesus about it, offer ourselves out there, and just courageously follow his

inklings and nudges, good things are going to happen. I've asked that question many times. That's the best

answer I've ever gotten to it. Gary, last thing we do on this program is to imagine you're on a desert island the

last for the rest of your life. You have access to nothing but five books of the Bible that are going to be with you from

from now on out. Which ones do you choose? I got to I think I got to go with the Gospels.

Well, I'll take um I'll take John and Luke and I'll So, I'll take John and Luke with me. I I want to take Romans.

Uh and I will take James. That's four. And uh I'll go with Galatians. Galatians. All right. Gary Hogan is the

CEO and founder of International Justice Mission. Thanks for being with us today, Gary. Thanks, Russell.

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