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This will be the most fundamental challenge for many American congregations, where we hear "for God so loved the world," but often don't think much about the world he loves. Relentlessly focused on ministering to those around us, we just don't have enough left over for "the uttermost parts of the earth"—that broader world for which God also "gave his only begotten Son."

Will our sense of mission recognize the violence in today's slavery?

One of the greatest challenges facing Wilberforce and his abolitionist colleagues was to help English Christians understand the brutal violence that lay at the core of slavery. With no photography and few eyewitness accounts to learn from, most British citizens believed the slave industry's myth of benevolent paternal care for slaves. Thus, many earnest Christians engaged the question of slavery, if at all, only from the point of view of making sure slaves got the gospel and humane conditions.

Today, many North American Christians who have entered the joy of God's passionate global mission embrace evangelism and compassion ministries that bring food, housing, microloans, and medicine to the poor. Yet many are also beginning to see the true basis of slavery, which is another source of suffering for the poor—aggressive violence. That is the core reality of forced labor: coercion and terror. Poverty, ignorance, and spiritual darkness are all part of a complex set of social factors that exacerbate slaves' original vulnerability, but once enslaved, they need someone to rescue them from the brutal hand of their oppressor.

For Nagaraj and his family, who worked 16 hours a day, six days a week, making bricks, there was no mystery about what kept them and 80 other slaves inside the four walls of their compound. It was the vicious beatings unleashed upon those who tried to run away. For Elisabeth, a 16-year-old girl held inside a brothel in Thailand, it was money for Bible college that lured her into the hands of a sex trafficker who lied about a job across the border. Once inside the brothel, however, it was sheer violent terror that forced her to submit to multiple rapes by the brothel's paying customers.

To love these neighbors—and the millions of slaves they represent—the people of God must be biblically and spiritually prepared to confront this violence. But how do we do that?

Will our sense of mission recover the work of justice?

Wilberforce could have done many things to show Christian love to the slaves of his era. He could have sent them Bibles or food or teachers, or he could have even paid for their freedom. He could have "transformed the cultural worldview" of slave owners and traders, or he could have provided African tribal leaders with an alternative model of labor economics to draw them from their ancient slave trade. But he didn't. Instead he gave them, of all things, a law, making the buying and selling of slaves illegal.

Why? Because he knew that the core ingredient of slavery was violence: the wealth and blood "drawn by the lash," in Lincoln's phrase. Like Lincoln, he understood that the problem of violence was properly dealt with in human society by law—bringing to bear the power of government to protect the weak. Of course, the work of abolition and emancipation had to be supported by a complex web of social and economic assistance to make "freedom" meaningful for the former slave. But those who knew slavery well understood that the violent forces of slavery had to be confronted by countervailing forces of a just law and vigorous enforcement.

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March 2007, Vol. 51, No. 3