Excerpt from Good News About Injustice , by Gary Haugen President of International Justice Mission

...We have learned how to feed the hungry, heal the sick, and shelter the homeless. But there is one thing we haven't leanred to do, even though God's Word repeatedly calls us to the task. We haven't learned how to rescue the oppressed. for the child held in forced prostitution, for the prisoner illegally detained and tortured, fo rthe widow robbed of her land, for the child sold into slavery, we have almost no vision of how God could use us to bring tangible rescue. we don't know how to get the twelve-year-old girl out of the brothel, how to have the prisoner set free, how to have the widow's land restored to her or how to get the child slave released and the opressors brougth to justice.

It is perhaps more accurate to say that as people committed to the historic faith of Christianity, we have forgotten how to be such a witness of Christ’s love, power, and justice in the world. In generations past the great leaders of Christian revival in North America and Britain were consumed by a passion to declare the gospel and to manifest Christ’s compassion and justice. But somewhere during the 20th century some of us have simply stopped believing that God actually can use us to answer the prayers of children, women and families who suffer under the hand of abusive power or authority in their communities. We sit in the same paralysis of despair as those who don’t even claim to know a Savior—and in some cases, we manifest even less hope.

In response this book has one simple message: it need not be this way. We can recover a witness of Christian courage in a world of injustice. We can rediscover our Maker’s passions for the world and for justice—passions that may have grown unfamiliar to us. We can come to know the compassion of Jesus like never before as we go with him to look into the eyes of those who are in need of rescue. Moreover, we can be restored to the conviction that God is prepared to use us to “seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow (Isaiah 1:17)

…how little I knew about a holy God who spent his days weeping beside children in brothels, prisoners in pain or orphans in trauma—a God whose core hatred of injustice was rivaled only by his hatred of idolatry.