International Justice Mission in the New Yorker

Lots of good buzz out there about the New Yorker piece on Gary Haugen, founder and president of the International Justice Mission. It's been in print for a few weeks, but now it's available online.  His talk at this year’s Willow Creek Leadership Summit was absolutely compelling. Here’s an excerpt from the article:

In 1994, Haugen took a short leave to direct the United Nations’ investigation of genocide in Rwanda, gathering the preliminary evidence needed in order to set up a war-crimes tribunal….He was sickened to come across charred piles of bodies in a church where Tutsi had expected to find sanctuary. He took down the testimony of a father who saw his three small children hacked to death with machetes. At one massacre site, Haugen rolled back the decaying body of a woman and found the corpse of her child beneath her.

Six weeks later, after returning home, Haugen felt disoriented. In church, his mind drifted into calculations of how long it would take a machete-wielding gang to wipe out the congregation. Although the Salvation Army, World Vision, and other Christian organizations fed the hungry and sheltered the homeless, no Christian organization that he knew of had heeded the Bible’s appeals for justice (“Break the arm of the wicked and evil man; call him to account for his wickedness that would not be found out”). He resolved that Christians serving God had to do more than pray for the victims of cruelty; they had to use the law to help rescue them. “This is not a God who offers sympathy, best wishes,” he later wrote. “This is a God who wants evildoers brought to account and vulnerable people protected—here and now!”

Haugen decided to form an independent justice agency, and his original mission statement laid out the four functions that drive the organization today: victim relief, perpetrator accountability, victim “aftercare,” and structural prevention of violence. He wanted the organization to be explicitly Christian, because the ministries and relief groups in poor areas would be quicker to trust and refer cases to a Christian group; it could mobilize a grassroots constituency of American Christians; and, as he saw it, the prayers offered by the church community had proved to “make a difference in human history.”