My privilege this past week was to be one of the adult leaders for our youth group at Challenge. Challenge is a national youth conference for the Evangelical Free Church of America held every two years in different cities around the country. This year, we got to be the host city for 5400 youth and over 1000 leaders. (See #ChallengeKC on social media.) This little blog can in no way contain the breadth, depth, and value of all that happened.
One of the events at the conference was the Berlin Walk - a tour through the down-and-out "streets" of Berlin. It was an immersion experience to learn about the enormous problem of human trafficking that plagues the world, but is so focused in Germany, particularly in Berlin, that this great country is called the "Brothel of Europe." Trafficking is not just for sex, but also for labor and other forms of exploitation. The EFCA is ramping up an enormous effort in Berlin in collaboration with many other organizations to bring the reality of Jesus to the city, expressed in ways like dismantling human trafficking.
Most often trafficked are women and children, usually with false promises and dreams. It is a violation that is almost universally decried and battled by people from different countries, religions, ethnicities, and class. I believe the vilest offense is that these trafficked persons bear the image of God, and the very act of trafficking them is a violent attack on that image.
No animal should endure what these people endure, and therefore trafficking is horrendous. More than this, tho, these people are image bearers, and treating them as chattel is a loud lie that they are not - a kind of graffiti of the soul.
As we walked through these "streets" and learned, I watched our youth, also image bearers. Safe, untrafficked, properly fed, groomed, and clothed, listening, reading, and praying about defaced image bearers. They even learned how American teens' appetite for porn on their smartphones actually feeds the problem of trafficking in Berlin (and around the world). But still ... standing there, clean, loved, valued, safe image bearers at a conference to pour more light on what it means to live as image bearers, politely learning about other image bearers who have no one to remind them they, too, bear the image of God. Set in juxtaposition, my heart broke for both our youth and their counterparts in places like Berlin.
I applaud those who deny God and yet still fight trafficking. We care about the same thing. For my tribe, the reality of the image of God in others moves us to respect them, to demand justice for them, and to forsake ways in which we steal from their identity as image bearers.
Yet it's not just because the trafficked bear God's image, but because I, too, bear God's image. And our youth. I want to fight trafficking because they bear His image and because I bear His image. What else does an image bearer do in order to reflect that image than to fight for the oppressed image bearers?
The world conspires to tell us we don't bear that image - the image doesn't exist, God doesn't exist, you're just a more intelligent critter than average on this planet, and so on. The message of Jesus says you are an image bearer, and therefore valuable on His scale. My love for youth fostered even deeper, our love shared with those we served in our projects, and our growing love for the trafficked persons conspire to say that yes, indeed, the image of God is real in all of us.
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