“Typically people want to engage this trafficking problem in a really visibly meaningful way. They want to give themselves something to assess, report, measure, like recovering victims or mentoring victims. The problem with that thinking is that it generally means people want to be involved in the knee-deep place of pulling victims out of sex trafficking. Think about how impractical most of that work is for the majority of people.”

-Sgt. Grant Snyder of the Minneapolis Police Department’s Human Trafficking task force.

Sgt. Snyder spoke at our Anti-Trafficking: Post-Game Plan Breakfast on March 5, 2018. He shared some assessment tools in how to best help in anti-trafficking efforts:

1.Know Your God-Given Calling and Gifts

There is a great value and obedience in knowing where our calling is, where we’re called to serve, and assessing our gifts. Then, humbly going to that place, and doing it. Not everybody belongs out there, in the middle of rescuing victims of sex trafficking by kicking a door in.

2.Think About Trafficking Prevention Work

We don’t need to recover victims from brothels, sidewalks from hotels to work with victims of trafficking. Every time we engage homeless youth, every time we support a family in need, every time we work with organizations like Safe Families or Together For Good, every time we mentor an at-risk youth, every time we do that we’re serving victims of trafficking, we’re making a difference in somebody’s life, and we know these are the kids are who are at risk of sex-trafficking.

We can’t be afraid to serve potential victims by going up stream. That’s where God calls most of us to serve. He calls a few of us to knee-deep right in the swamp. Right where unfortunately a lot of us want to be until we get there.

3.Prayer

We’ve kind of neglected what Christians do best and that’s prayer. We look at prayer as sort of this incidental event that happens in the process of doing other important work. When we look at prayer as somehow less impactful than all of the other things we could be doing, that’s like checking a box, and it really diminishes the power of prayer. What we’re really doing is we’re taking it upon ourselves, and saying we’re more powerful than God, than the action of Holy Spirit.

Related Articles:

https://transformmn.org/4-questions-anti-trafficking/

https://transformmn.org/church-continue-anti-trafficking-work/

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