How the task force began
The world is fallen, and the results are not trivial, they are cataclysmic. In South Asia, millions have been sold into slavery in a moment of economic crisis. Many are forced to spend their lives working in back-breaking conditions in brick kilns, rice mills, or rock quarries. Those who resist have been beaten, sexually assaulted, seared with hot irons, or suffered other horrors. National Geographic estimates there are now 27 million people worldwide who are literally in slavery. That means there are more slaves in the world today than were seized from Africa in four centuries of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Others in our fallen world drug and abduct young women and sell them to brothel owners, who violently force them to service the brothel’s customers. The brutal business of rape for profit is now a multi-billion dollar criminal enterprise, and the UN estimates a million girls are forced into prostitution every year. All this is totally illegal under the country’s own laws.
In 1994, a study surveying over 70,000 evangelical missionaries across the developing world revealed that our missionaries routinely witness crushing abuses — young girls are abducted into brothels, children are forced into bonded slavery, Christians are illegally arrested and left vulnerable in dangerous and disease-ridden foreign prisons. Although in the last 50 years, robust ministries have grown up to feed the hungry, care for the sick, and provide shelter to the homeless, missionaries didn’t have anywhere to turn when the people they came to serve were locked away in a brothel or hidden in a slave compound being horrifically abused. The study revealed that when our missionaries report these abuses, local authorities frequently do nothing to help, or, worse, the local authorities are themselves the abusers.
In a fallen world of such brutal injustice, the body of Christ has an historic opportunity to extend biblical love to those suffering abuses for which local authorities cannot be counted on for relief. Just as God raises up skilled linguists for bible translation, bible teachers and pastors to plant churches, and doctors and nurses for medical ministry, so also he raises up lawyers and law enforcement professionals for justice ministry. Indeed, God has uniquely gifted those in the body with legal training with the skills to gather evidence to document the abuses, intervene on behalf of the victims, and put the perpetrators behind bars. Once released, the victims can be placed in Christian aftercare, where they begin to recover from their trauma and learn about the God who released them.
PCPC is excited about its growing justice ministry. In March 2006, in response to the biblical mandate to “seek justice,” PCPC sent a group of lawyers to South Asia to seek rescue for victims of bonded slavery and forced prostitution in partnership with an evangelical ministry called the International Justice Mission. Afterwards, PCPC’s World Missions Team commissioned a thirteen member Justice Task Force to spend six months prayerfully developing a mission statement, strategic goals, and a five-year plan for this ministry. The PCPC Justice Task Force is now developing teams to implement that plan.