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Believe it or not, human trafficking is the second largest criminal enterprise in this world—only behind drugs—and it’s growing at a faster rate. People are reusable whereas drugs, if you use them once, you have to do the process over again. People become disposable when they are reusable like this. When I first learned about human trafficking going on in this world and the need that was there, my first question was, What can I do about this? And so, we started FREE International with that in mind.

A good friend of mine who I worked with in human trafficking space for many, many years would break down, “Hey, what is human trafficking?” That question gets asked a lot. And there are a lot of technical terms. We train in it all the time. But ultimately it boils down to this, my friend told me: the exploitation of vulnerability for commercial gain.

How are we looking for the vulnerabilities in our city and how that’s being taken advantage of? But it goes further than that. In our rural and suburban areas, a lot of our human trafficking that happens is familial. It’s families that have addictions and are finding ways to provide for their addictions by the selling of their children. Uultimately as a missionary working with local churches, we want to identify the areas of our city where vulnerability is increased. Those neighborhoods where people pay for their rent by the week. Those foster care networks where there’s instability and they have a different family every six months for years. Because in those vulnerabilities the predators that would exploit that situation are just looking for an easy way to go, “Hey, if you have instability in your life, I’ll be your stability.”

So how can the church not only recognize those areas of vulnerability, but bring the positive, Kingdom-minded community that God has left here to be in the middle of these areas of vulnerability?

The Bible tells us that He brought us out of the mire and clay, but He also set our feet on rock to stay (Psalm 40:2). So how can we see things we’ve never seen before, so that we might do something about it? And how can we be consistent and present in the lives of those who desperately need help?

Psalmist said, God is our refuge and our strength, very present in times of trouble (Psalm 46:1). How can we work missions and local churches together to reach those who are in the middle of their darkest hour so God might bring life into those lives?

FREE International—we’re there to help! We have a network over the twenty years we’ve done this work to be able to plug your churches into active work right there in your own communities wherever you might be. We’re going to keep searching for the one who is being exploited, the one who is vulnerable, the one who needs to be rescued until every one is free.