Social Concern

49.6 million. According to the Global Slavery Index that's the latest estimate for the number of slaves in the world today. It could be just another number in a blur of facts that fly by our faces in a day, but this nearly 50 million number has a face. It includes women and men, boys and girls who are held in bondage as sex slaves, domestic servants, and child soldiers.

Of course, that is only an estimate since slavery thrives in darkness. But another news item gives this statistic an even more horrifying angle. A British paper shared a story about “Daniel” (not his real name) who was brought into the U.K. for what he had been told was a "life-changing opportunity.” He thought he was going to get a better job. Instead, it was then that he realized there was no job opportunity and he had been brought to the UK to give a kidney to a stranger.

"He was going to literally be cut up like a piece of meat, take what they wanted out of him and then stitch him back up," according to Cristina Huddleston, from the anti-modern slavery group Justice and Care.

Luckily for Daniel, the doctors had become suspicious that he didn't know what was going on and feared he was being coerced. So, they halted the process.

Daniel was not free of his traffickers though. Back in the flat where he was staying, two men came to examine him. It was then he overheard a conversation about sending him back to Nigeria to remove his kidney there.

He fled, and after two nights sleeping rough, he walked into a police station near Heathrow, triggering an investigation that would lead to the UK's first prosecution for human trafficking for organ removal.

Despite international and domestic efforts, about 10 percent of all transplants worldwide are believed to be illegal—approximately 12,000 organs per year. For example, according to the World Health Organization as many as 7,000 kidneys are illegally obtained by traffickers each year around the world. While there is a black market for organs such as hearts, lungs, and livers, kidneys are the most sought-after organs … The process involves a number of people including the recruiter who identifies the victim, the person who arranges their transport, the medical professionals who perform the operation, and the salesman who trades the organ.

Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist who believes that your child’s smartphone is a threat to mental well-being. His new book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, hit the No. 1 spot on the New York Times’ best-seller list.

This book has struck a chord with parents who have watched their kids sit slack-jawed and stock still for hours, lost in a welter of TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitch, Facebook, and more. Haidt blames the spike in teen-age depression and anxiety on the rise of smartphones and social media, and he offers a set of prescriptions: no smartphones before high school, no social media before age sixteen.

His concern is with a lack of protection for the young in the virtual world. Tech companies and social-media platforms have been “designing a firehose of addictive content.” This is causing kids to forgo the social for the solitary and have “rewired childhood and changed human development on an almost unimaginable scale.” He continues:

In 2008 the original iPhone was an amazing Swiss Army knife. It was one of the greatest inventions of humankind. So, if I wanted to get from point A to point B, hey, there’s a mapping function. If I want to listen to music, hey, there’s an iPod, and it was not harmful to anyone’s mental health.

But then a couple things changed in rapid succession, and the smartphone changed from being our servant to being our master, for many people. In 2008, the App Store comes out. In 2009, push notifications come out. So now you have this thing in your pocket in which thousands or millions of companies are trying to get your attention and trying to keep you on their app. In 2010, the front-facing camera comes out; in 2010, Instagram comes out, which was the first social-media app designed to be exclusively used on the smartphone.

So, the environment that we were in suddenly changes. Now the smartphone isn’t just a tool; it is actually a tool of mass distraction. What I mean by “the great rewiring” is this … once we get super-viral social media in 2010, a lot of things change. Now it’s not just “Hey, I’m bored, let me play a video game.” It’s “My phone is pinging me saying, ‘Someone cited you in a photo. Someone said something about you. Somebody liked your post.’” We’ve given these companies a portal to our children. They can control and manipulate them, send them notifications whenever they want.

I’ve heard stories from Gen Z. They go over to their friends’ houses sometimes—not that much—and they’re on their phones separately. One might be watching her shows on Netflix. One might be checking her social. ... There’s a wonderful phrase from the sociologist Sherry Turkle: “Because of our phones, we are forever elsewhere. We’re never fully present.”

For the past eight years, the non-profit organization CARE has been tracking what it calls the year’s ten worst humanitarian crises. This year places like Angola, Zambia, Burundi, and Uganda faced famines, wars, or crises that impacted at least one million people. CARE uses a media monitoring service to count the number the crisis gets mentioned in mainstream media sources. Then it compares that number to the number of times more popular stories get mentioned.

Here are some examples from their annual report: There were over 273,000 online articles about the new Barbie film, while the abuse of women’s rights in every country in the report received next to no coverage. The crisis in Angola received the least media attention in 2023. Despite 7.3 million people in the country in desperate need of humanitarian aid, it received just 1,049 media mentions.

By comparison, 273,421 articles were written about the new iPhone 15. Taylor Swift’s world tour garnered 163,368 articles while Prince Harry’s book Spare got 215,084. Meanwhile, drought and floods in Zambia had 1,371 articles.

The CARE report concludes: “In a world where news cycles are becoming more short-lived, it is more important than ever that we collectively remember that every crisis, whether forgotten or not, brings with it a human toll.”

Lew Wilcox and Bobby Rohrbach Jr. met in the summer of 1962, riding their bikes together in a small southern Ohio town.

These days, every Saturday, one picks the other up and they go out for breakfast, run errands, and talk about families, home repairs and how the world is changing. If one can’t remember a place or name, the other can fill in because they so often lived the same story. They didn’t outgrow the other or leave the other behind and still live within about five miles of their childhood homes. “I have a lot of friends but there’s something special about our friendship,” says Lew, 75, of his friend, Bobby, 73.

Yet as important as they are, people have fewer close friendships than they once did. Forty-percent of Americans say they don’t have a best friend at all, up from 25% in 1990. The best-friend gap is more pronounced for men, who typically have fewer close friends than women do. The percentage of men without any close friends jumped fivefold to 15% in 2021 from 3% in 1990, according to the May 2021 American Perspectives Survey.

Michael Addis, director of the Research Group on Men’s Well-Being, says, “We were taught for generations to focus on work, family, and productivity. Don’t share what is really going on inside with other men.”

Time together deepens bonds. Becoming a best friend takes 300 hours of togetherness, one study reported. Those fortunate enough to have friends through the decades develop a common history that fresh friendships often don’t.

In his book Forgive, Tim Keller tells the story of a friend of his who was a PhD student at Yale. Keller’s friend once told him that modern people think about slavery and say, “How could people have ever accepted such a monstrosity?” Keller continues:

My friend said, “That’s not the way historians think. They ask: considering the fact it was universally believed by all societies that we had the right to attack an enslaved, weaker people, and since everybody had always done it, the real historical question is, why did it occur to anybody that it was wrong? Whoever first had that idea?”

My friend then answered his own question, pointing out that the first voices in the fourth, 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries who called for the abolition of slavery were all Christians. And the Christian, who called for this justice, believed there was a God of love, who demanded that we love our neighbors—all our neighbors—as ourselves.

Traveling from Niagara Falls to Washington D.C., a tour group of 10 South Koreans got stuck driving in a blizzard near Buffalo. Two of the group went to a local house to ask for a shovel to dislodge their vehicle.

It was Christmas Eve when Alex Campagna heard their frantic knocking on his door. Outside was “the worst blizzard I’ve experienced - it was the Darth Vader of storms.” Knowing the folly of trying to carry on, he invited them all inside, putting them up on couches, air mattresses, and sleeping bags.

Eager to repay his kindness, the guests cooked several South Korean meals like stir-fried pork, and dakdori tang, a spicy chicken stew. As it turns out Campagna and his wife really like Korean food and actually happened to have some of the more extravagant ingredients on hand.

The Times reports they waited out the blizzard and stayed Friday and Saturday. They swapped stories, and even enjoyed some American football matches on Christmas Eve. On Christmas day drivers came to pick up the tour group and took them to New York for some impromptu flights.

“We have enjoyed this so much,” said Choi Yoseob, a member of the group who described the experience as unforgettable and a “unique blessing.”

Gerrit De Vynck wrote a story in The Washington Post about how artificial intelligences respond to the errors they make.

Citing a recent MIT research paper, De Vynck reported that a group of scientists loaded up two iterations of Open AI’s ChatGPT, and asked each one a simple question about the geographical origin of one of MIT’s professors. One gave an incorrect answer, the other a correct one.

Researchers then asked the two bots to debate until they could agree on an answer. Eventually, the incorrect bot apologized and agreed with the correct one. The researchers’ leading theory is that allowing chatbots to debate one another will create more factually correct outcomes in their interactions with people.

One of the researchers said, “Language models are trained to predict the next word. They are not trained to tell people they don’t know what they’re doing.” De Vynck adds, “The result is bots that act like precocious people-pleasers. [They’re] making up answers instead of admitting they simply don’t know.”

AIs like ChatGPT are not trained to discern truth from falsehood, which means that false information gets included along with truth. Chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Bing, and Google’s Bard have demonstrated a major fatal flaw: They make stuff up all the time. These falsehoods, or digital hallucinations as they are being called, are a serious concern because they limit the effectiveness of the AI as a tool for fact-finding.

What’s worse, scientists are beginning to see evidence that AIs pick up on societal fears around robots gaining sentience and turning against humanity, and mimic the behavior they see depicted in science fiction. According to this theory, if an artificial intelligence actually kills a human being, it might be because it learned from HAL, the murderous robot from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Sundar Pichai, chief executive officer at Google said, “No one in the field has yet solved the hallucination problem. All models do have this as an issue.” When asked if or when this will change, Pichai was less than optimistic. “[It’s] a matter of intense debate,” he said.

Possible Preaching Angle:

In our pursuit of technology, we must never give up our human responsibility to seeking or telling the truth.

Men have fewer friends than women and are at a greater risk of isolation. The gap has widened in recent years. A 2021 report identified a male “friendship recession,” with 15% of men saying they have no close friends, up from 3% in 1990.

The researcher of this study concluded that in 1990, nearly half of young men reported that when facing a personal problem, they would reach out first to their friends. Today, only 22% of young men lean on their friends in tough times.

In his novel Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck’s character Crooks pinpoints why this matters so much to men. At one point in the novel Crooks tells another man, “A guy needs somebody … To be near him. A guy goes nuts if he ain’t got nobody … I tell ya a guy gets too lonely an’ he gets sick.”

Some come with track marks from years of drug abuse. Others come with children in tow. Some are struggling through a bad week. Others, a bad decade. All bring their dirty laundry. They wash it and dry it for free at church-run laundry services throughout the United States. “Christ said we should feed the hungry and clothe the naked, and I think those clothes should be clean,” said Catherine Ambos, a volunteer at one such ministry in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

Churches have been washing clothes across the US since at least 1997, when a minister at First United Methodist Church of Arlington, Texas, started doing a circuit around the city’s coin-operated laundries, passing out change. There may well have been others before this. Today, these ministries exist across the country, run by churches of all traditions and sizes.

Belmont Baptist Church in Charlottesville, Virginia, has one of the older laundromat ministries still running. The church started helping people clean their clothes in 2010, when pastor Greg Anderson heard through another ministry that poor people in homeless shelters and long-term-stay motels would regularly throw away their clothes.

Anderson said, “It was just easier to go and get new clothes at a clothing-center type of ministry as opposed to being able to launder them.” The church decided to install five washers and dryers in a building on its property and open a laundromat. Today, volunteers estimate that they save people upwards of $25,000 per year. This is money they didn’t have, or if they did, they could now spend on food, gas, or medicine.

19.25 million US households are without a washing machine.

38% of US households earn less than $50,000 per year.

Across the world, men are learning that the easiest way to cure a bout of social isolation is not by talking face-to-face, but shoulder-to-shoulder.

When Phillip Jackson moved back to England from Australia, he was 67, and immediately felt like a stray dog in his native town of Barnsley. He realized that many of those in town at his age had their own problems with social isolation. So, he launched a Barnsley UK chapter of an Australian community movement called “Men’s Shed,” which has expanded across the world, and includes more than 50,000 men.

Capitalizing on most men’s appreciation of woodworking, a Men’s Shed is essentially a support group for men with not enough friends or too much time on their hands. The original concept was to get together and make things out of wood. But in reality, it’s about plugging into the social fabric of a community, whether that’s building a park bench, or listening to the problems someone is going through in their marriage.

Jackson said, “It’s like the shed at the bottom of your garden. But all your friends are there. It’s a break from people’s weekly routines. It gets them out and talking to similar people.” 70-year-old Mike Jenn is a member of a United States Men’s Shed. He said, “We have this kind of male pride thing. I can look after myself. I don’t need to talk to anyone, and it’s a complete fallacy. Not communicating helps to kill us.”

The age range of “Shedders” as Jackson calls them, tends to vary from 22 to 87, which makes sense because anyone can feel lonely at times. He adds that the members come from all walks of life—ex-coalminers to shopkeepers.

Not only can Men’s Sheds be a great place for learning and laughing, they can literally save lives, as loneliness has been shown to shave years off of one’s life, elderly or young.

1.3 million people in the Netherlands are older than 75—and one large supermarket chain is making sure they’re not getting too lonely in their elder years.

The Dutch government with its campaign, “One Against Loneliness,” has galvanized towns, companies, and individuals to find solutions. The grocer giant, Jumbo, is doing their part with its innovative chatty check outs.

The idea for the “Kletskassa,” which translates to “chat checkout,” originated more than two years ago—and in the summer of 2019 the first chat checkout was opened. This resulted in many positive reactions from customers—and now Jumbo is expanding the initiative further. In 2022, there will be chat checkouts in 200 stores across the country where people can go for a conversation.

Colette Cloosterman-van Eerd, CCO of Jumbo, is closely involved in the initiative. She says,

Many people, especially the elderly, sometimes feel lonely. As a family business and supermarket chain, we are at the heart of society.

Our stores are an important meeting place for many people and we want to play a role in identifying and reducing loneliness. We are proud that many of our cashiers like to take a seat behind a “chat checkout.” They want to help people to make real contact out of genuine interest. It is a small gesture, but very valuable, especially in a world that is digitizing and getting faster and faster.

Hopefully the Dutch national movement towards supporting older people will catch on in many more countries around the world.

Laurie Fenby, was shopping at a garage sale in Rochester, New York and as she was leaving, she found a wallet on the ground. She looked inside and found a Jamaican driver’s license, some American cash, and some Jamaican cash. She tried all the usual ways to locate the man, whose name was George.

She couldn’t find him through Google or Facebook and so she asked for suggestions through Nextdoor, a community website. Laurie received a lot of ideas and responses. One lady suggested that she contact a little store that is known to have many Jamaican migrant workers as clients. Laurie called the store and found that yes, indeed, there was someone named George who lost his wallet. She suggested that the owner contact George and have him call her. When George contacted her, he was able to identify all the contents of the wallet and Laurie was able to return it.

But it didn’t stop there. Laurie asked George, “What do you and the migrant workers need?” He said they could use some warm clothes. Laurie immediately contacted the Nextdoor community and was able to organize a clothing drive. She received lots of T-shirts, sweatshirts, shoes, and other supplies.

Recently Laurie was able to meet George and the other migrant workers in Rochester, and she joined them to pick apples together. They’re so thankful to Laurie and her friends—and none of this community-building or friendship would have happened if the wallet had stayed in George’s pocket.

The United States military withdrawal from Afghanistan has created an acceleration of Afghan refugees. In the final stages of the withdrawal, a lot of attention was trained on the desperate plight of Afghans who wanted to flee their country but couldn’t. Just as desperate, however, are the Afghans who made it out but are struggling to find places to live.

Airbnb specializes in matching up homeowners willing to share space with travelers needing temporary accommodations. During this time of need it is attempting to help fill the gap. CEO Brian Chesky tweeted a statement of support, promising that the firm would arrange free housing for up to 20,000 refugees fleeing Afghanistan.

The displacement and resettlement of Afghan refugees in the US and elsewhere is one of the biggest humanitarian crises of our time. We feel a responsibility to step up. While we will be paying for these stays, we could not do this without the generosity of our Hosts. To make this happen, we are working closely with Airbnb.org, NGOs, and partner orgs on the ground to support the most pressing needs.

Airbnb has not indicated how long this housing would be made available or to what extent if any it will assist in long-term placement for these refugees. But this isn’t the first time Airbnb has pledged its support during a public crisis. In March 2020, it offered up 100,000 accommodation sites to first responders and relief workers trying to combat the coronavirus pandemic.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Not everyone has the power and influence of the CEO of a successful internet startup, but everyone has something they can share with another person in need. When we follow the Spirit's prompting to act hospitably toward those who so desperately need it, we demonstrate the love of Jesus.

Lacking the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, modern society is looking for new, innovative ways to help make people more empathetic. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, whose company sells the Oculus VR headset, said of virtual reality (VR): “One of the most powerful features of VR is empathy. By cultivating empathy, VR can raise awareness and help us see what’s happening in different parts of the world.”

The hope and promise of VR is that one day everyone will call it an “empathy machine”:

By creating an immersive and interactive virtual environment, a VR headset can quite literally put you in someone else’s shoes. Text, image, or video offers only partial views of a person’s life. With VR, you can get inside their head. And this high-fidelity simulation, the argument goes, will make us better people by heightening our sensitivity to the suffering of others. It will make us “more compassionate,” “more connected,” and ultimately “more human,” in the words of the VR artist Chris Milk. ... By lending you the eyes and ears of someone suffering, tech helps you to develop a greater sense of responsibility for them. You feel compelled to act. This is connectivity not merely as a technical concept, but a moral one.

This expectation is partially explored in the movie Ready Player Two, released in November, 2020. More advanced VR--actually placed inside the brains of most of the world’s population--has rid the world of crime, disease, addiction, and all forms of prejudice. As one of the film’s characters says: “For the first time in human history, we have technology that gives us the ability to live in someone else’s skin for a little while.”

Writer Al Hsu tells this story:

I grew up in an affluent community that was something like 94 percent white. During high school, I went to a Christian leadership program at a camp in the woods. One day, we had a canoe race. My team was in a canoe with two paddles. But another canoe was given only one paddle. Another didn’t get any paddles; they had to use their hands. And another group didn’t even have a canoe; they had an old, leaky rowboat.

The race started, and my canoe zipped across the lake, racing smoothly. I looked back and noticed that the other teams were behind--far behind. The folks in the rowboat had found a tree branch they were trying to use as an oar to pull them along. My canoe won the race, and my team sat and watched, waiting for the rest to come in.

Afterward, we had a group time to debrief. My team was happy that we had won. Some of the others laughed about the accommodations they had made to try to compete. And some were just frustrated and mad at the exercise.

The counselors asked my winning team, “Why didn’t you go back and help the others?” I didn’t get it. I said, “I thought we weren’t supposed to. We were given two paddles, so we used them and won the race.” I figured there was a reason that the others had disadvantages, and they were supposed to figure out what to do.

It wasn’t until the following summer, when I went on an urban ministry trip, that I started to get it. We were in an underprivileged community struggling with poverty, drugs, crime. Leaders gave us some background about the realities of redlining and how structural systems caused injustice, and I realized in a visceral way that this was not right. This was not what God intended for the world. That dislocation and displacement in a community just ten miles from my suburban home, helped me change.

A bus driver became greatly irritated whenever he parked his bus at the parking spot at the midpoint of his route. The reason for this was the open field which was being turned into an unofficial litter dump. Since he had a seven-minute break between his trips, he decided to do something about the situation.

Taking advantage of his breaks through the day, the driver used the time to clear up the litter stage by stage into garbage bags. After some time, all the litter had been successfully cleared. Not stopping at that, he began to plant flower seeds on the land and soon turned it into a picturesque meadow. Learning of his creative efforts, many passengers would thereafter ride the extra distance with him to the parking lot, just to see the beautiful work he had done.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Would you be willing to do something beautiful today to make the world a better place to live in? An unknown author said, “Every job is a self-portrait of the person who does it. Autograph your work with excellence.” The Bible further says, “For we are God's handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do” (Eph. 2:10).

When someone stands up for his/her beliefs in the face of adversity, they are called a “moral rebel.” A prominent example is the case of the sexual predator Harvey Weinstein. He seemed too big to fall until actors Ashley Judd and Rose McGowan courageously came forward, risking their careers if unsuccessful. Moral rebels also confront a bully or correct a friend who uses a racist slur.

Secular psychologists say moral rebels have high self-esteem and are confident of their own “judgment, values and ability and thus that they have a social responsibility to share those beliefs.” The Christian outlook says “Exactly!”

The moral rebel isn’t afraid of occasional embarrassment or a lack of social harmony. They are far less concerned about conforming to the crowd. So, when they have to choose between fitting in and doing the right thing, they will probably choose to do what they see as right. The Christian outlook says “Exactly!”

A moral rebel needs to have grown up seeing moral courage in action, from parents but also peers and community leaders. He or she also needs to feel genuine empathy. Spending time with and really getting to know people from different backgrounds helps. White high school students who had more contact with people from different ethnic groups have higher levels of empathy and see people from different minority groups in more positive ways.

Those who have experienced the pain of rejection are less likely to be moral rebels. They need to fit in. For the Christian a close relationship with God and good fellowship mitigates against this.

A tattoo parlor in Kentucky is using ink to unite communities across the country by offering free appointments to anyone who wants to cover up their hate or gang symbol tattoos. Tattoo artists Jeremiah Swift and Ryun King said they decided to offer this service as a way to take a stance amid the protests calling for an end to racial injustice.

King told CNN, “It's definitely a long overdue change. Having anything hate related is completely unacceptable. A lot of people when they were younger just didn't know any better and were left with mistakes on their bodies. We just want to make sure everybody has a chance to change.”

King's first client was Jennifer Tucker, a 36-year-old mother of two who wanted to cover up a small Confederate flag she got tattooed on her ankle when she was 18 years old. Tucker said, “I went to a school where there wasn't a single black person. ... Everyone in my school flew rebel flags and had rebel flag tattoos and I bandwagoned and got the tattoo. It was a horrible thing to do.”

After high school, Tucker became involved in various solidarity movements and peaceful protests aimed at uniting the community and fighting racial injustice against black people. A friend of Tucker's sent her the tattoo shop's Facebook post offering the free coverups, and she immediately messaged the shop asking for an appointment.

On Tuesday, after nearly 20 years of “looking down at the tattoo regretting it,” King covered up the flag with a character from the cartoon Rick and Morty. “It feels so amazing, it's life changing. I knew I had to do it, to be an example for other people who were in the same position. There's not a whole lot I can do, but this is something I can do to spread love, not hate.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

The fresh start that God offers not only changes our outward appearance but goes to the heart of our need by creating a new person within. We are then able to show love and respect to others instead of racism and hate.