What were you doing at age 31?
IJM founder and CEO Gary Haugen was just 31 when he found himself in Kigali, Rwanda to bear witness to the graves of 800,000 Tutsi civilians hacked to death by their Hutu neighbors. As an attorney with the US Department of Justice and head of the UN team investigating the shocking 1994 genocide, Haugen recalls thinking, “What do you do with that experience? How do you steward that for the rest of your life?”
In a richly personal talk, Haugen described his journey from a happy childhood in sunny California to the killing fields of Rwanda. On that path, he worked on cases of police violence in Boston and alongside Bishop Desmond Tutu in apartheid South Africa. Regardless of crime or country, Haugen came to realize that the common denominator to human suffering and poverty is violence arising from the abuse of power. “When the machetes come,” he said grimly, “nothing much else matters.”
Haugen was recently hosted by Faith and Law, a non-profit, non-partisan organization operating on Capitol Hill since 1983. The group’s mission is to equip and encourage Christian policymakers to think deeply about how their faith integrates their work in the public square. Haugen gave them a lot to think about. His talk, “The Global Fight to Protect People from Slavery and Violence,” described how Haugen’s harrowing experiences led him to found the International Justice Mission in 1997. Today IJM has 1,500 staff working in 16 countries around the world to combat trafficking and slavery, violence against women and children and police abuse of power.
Still, these issues of violence persist, affecting millions around the world – an estimated 50 million people live modern slavery globally and nearly 736 million women have experienced physical and/or sexual violence at least once in their lifetime.
“We take on cases of violence – and also leverage what we learn from working those cases – so we can strengthen and transform criminal justice systems.”
While IJM has developed a successful model, the alarming rise in the online sexual exploitation of children takes this violence to a whole other level. “It feels like the world is all screwed up and getting “screwed-er” up,” he sighed.
“Jesus relentlessly cares about the abuse of power and wants to use us as agents of redemption. But this is a point of mystery because we are ourselves broken and fallen. God allows his children to be both the healers and heartache of his work of redemption.”
How to live in that tension of healer and heartache? “We require everyone at IJM to start the day doing nothing. Everyone at IJM is paid to sit still for 30 minutes and reconnect with Jesus. How can we hold this tension if we are not close to him? We need to ask, ‘How do you see this, Jesus?’”
When they hear his voice rise in their hearts, Haugen and his staff get to work.
Photo by Louis Galvez on Unsplash