Resist Exploitation, Embrace Dignity, (REED) offers education that helps people and organizations, including churches, understand the root causes of sex trafficking and work together to take action toward positive change.

Our assumption was that sex trafficking during the Super Bowl was the iceberg; but we have since learned it is merely the tip of it.

There is an “us” and “them” mentality that is intrinsic when you are a survivor and this is plays out in the church. “If the church knew what I lived through or had done, people would never speak to me again,” I thought. 

In the pictures, people look happy, hiding the fact that many are forced, manipulated or threatened to produce them. Children are exposed to graphic images as they do their homework. Marriages, relationships, and individuals are harmed by its use. Yet we don’t talk about it. Internet pornography doesn’t belong in Christian community

Pornography is part of a global injustice and abuse of women and children and is not simply an issue of a man’s personal struggles with temptation.

The most powerful agent for hope, healing and justice for abuse survivors in the church is something both simple and surprisingly elusive: people of compassion.

Back in the late 1990s shortly after I published a little book called Remember Creation, I was invited to give five morning lectures on creation stewardship at a Christian Bible camp north of Seattle.

A journey wall is a congregation wide experience in which a congregation posts their memories of positive and challenging experiences with the church, puts their story into chapters and then looks for repeated patterns across the life of the church.

This sermon was preached by Rev. Curtis Korver at Alberni Valley CRC on February 11, 2018 as part of marking Justice and Hope Sunday.