by Phil Cunningham
Why do we do justice? Why even talk about it? I have asked and have been asked this question many times. Is it because people are hurting? Is it because our society and culture is all about justice right now? Is it because we want to be just like Bono and Angelina Jolie? Or is it because the creator of the universe, Jesus Christ calls us to? I believe we do justice because we love Jesus. Justice flows out of a desire to love, serve and care about the same things Jesus lived and died for. Doing justice is an act of worship. A couple of years ago I co-founded a ministry called Steps of Justice. Steps of Justice exists to help fulfill the great commission of going into all the world and preaching the good news of Jesus Christ. Steps of Justice is a justice based ministry that partners with local churches, communities and activists to bring awareness, education and practical steps that help us engage in serving the poor and oppressed of the world. Below are some ways that we can be involved in the very thing that God is calling us to, doing justice (Micah 6:8) When we see an area of injustice or need, our first response is often to get on a plane and travel overseas or reach into our wallets and send money. Although these responses are great, there are other ways to get involved, right where you are, with little or no money. We don’t have to send our students overseas to make a difference. Here are some easy things you can do to get your students involved in acts of justice.
FAST
Come Alongside The easiest way to do justice in your community is to get involved in organizations that are already serving in your local community. Commit to coming alongside those organizations and helping them continue the work they’re already doing. Take one day a week or even one day a month to volunteer. We’ve taken students to local rescue missions, where they serve food and talk with the clients for two hours. During these two hours, their eyes are opened and lives are changed.
tutor There are 130 million kids in the world who don’t attend school. Seventy percent of them are girls. Take some time each week or each month to tutor at a center for children at risk, or take time each week to read to a younger sibling or relative in your family. Show them that reading and education are important and that you are interested in their learning. Rusty and Lynette are missionaries in Chiang Raii, Thailand. They work among the Akha people, who are continually oppressed and trafficked into sex slavery. Without an education, these young girls are vulnerable and susceptible to being taken. Rusty and Lynette have set up an organization called the Akha Youth Development Foundation to help educate these girls. As a result, they are staying in their villages, getting good jobs and paving the way for the next generation of girls. You can read more at http://t-amf.org/.
Set an Alarm
Educate
Write down a few justice issues you care about, and set an alarm on your phone to go off at the same time every day. When you hear the alarm, pray through that list. Then post on Twitter or Facebook to remind others that there are people in our world living in extreme poverty or slavery. This will bring awareness to others of injustices in the world and get them involved too.
Read a book on slavery, poverty or trafficking and talk about how you can get involved in doing something as a group. Watch a documentary like Call & Response and then set up a screening with your church, school or community to teach others about areas of injustice. Many of these ideas come out of the book that we put out with Steps of Justice called The 30 Day’s Prayer & Action Guide. In the book, you are taken on a 30-day journey of learning about areas of injustice and then engaging in small steps to be the change both as an individual and as a group.
charitywater.org
malarianomore.org
Approximately 25,000 people die each day from hunger-related causes. There are hungry people in your city. Would you be willing to fast for a day and take the food you would normally eat and give it to the poor? This is a transforming act—you going hungry so the hungry can eat. I remember doing this with Emma, my nine-year-old daughter. We stood in the kitchen and made leftover turkey sandwiches, with lots of turkey and stuffing and even cut it into triangles. Then we grabbed nice napkins, some Cokes and some fruit and headed to downtown San Diego. It was great walking around with Emma, asking whom she felt Jesus wanted us to share food with. We ended up finding a man and giving him our food. He ate half of it and told us he was going to give the other half to a homeless friend of his. It was beautiful. What would this look like in your community if your entire youth group participated in this simple act once a week?
Go Without Water Thirty thousand people die each week from water-related disease, 90 percent of those under the age of five. For an entire day, don’t drink any liquid, take showers, don’t wash the dishes, don’t use water to brush your teeth or to take your vitamins. Consume no water for anything until you wake up the following morning. This exercise demonstrates how much we use and take water for granted every day. At the end of the day, take all your recycled bottles, cash them in and donate the money to organizations like Charity Water, One Day’s Wages or Blood:Water Mission.
Worship for the Sick How many people do you know who have died from a mosquito bite? Approximately 781,000 people, mainly under the age of five, die from malaria each year—death by mosquito. One of the exercises we have done as a community is have a worship service where we talk on this issue. Periodically throughout the night, we push the sound of mosquito buzzing through the speakers and flash pictures of mosquitoes on the screen. As part of the gathering, we have two mosquito nets placed in different parts of the room. As people feel led, they come to the front and place notes with prayers or words of encouragement, change or rolled-up cash in the mosquito nets. Then, at the end of the night, we take all the money and notes and send it to organizations like Malaria No More.
stepsofjustice.org
onedayswages.org
Q&A with Steps of Justice co-founder Phil Cunningham
Did you know?
s ’ t e L talkbout ae
c i t s u J by PHILCUNNINGHAM
Q A
How did Steps of Justice begin? Steps of Justice is a ministry that we started about three years ago. That helps people get involved in justice issues. So when we did it, there was a few of us that cared about justice issues. Poverty, slavery, trafficking, we were frustrated with hearing about issues and feeling sad, not knowing what to do to bring change to it. So we would watch a movie like Hotel R wanda and we would feel like crap and we would go to sleep and we would wake up, have coffee and we would go about our day. Or we would spend money and not think about where the money was going , when we were buying coffee, who was making the coffee, how much they were being paid, and so we started thinking about this stuff and then we really just started it because we were sick of doing nothing. I had this image of God, this mountain, I was standing in front of Mt. Renier in Washington and God said, “Can you climb this mountain? And I said, “nope!” and he said, “Well, could you just start walking up it a bit? And I said, Ok. And so in my mind I started walking and I kept looking back to see how far we came . It was this whole thing of, it was this giant issue, this giant problem and there was no way I was going to conquer it but I could do something. So we started steps because we felt there was ton of people who had the same thoughts. They saw injustice happening and they wanted to do something about it and they didn’t know how. Or what. So we started it so that we could figure that out.
Every day, seven thousand people become infected with AIDS and nearly six thousand die. Right now, almost one billion people on the planet don’t have access to safe, clean drinking water. That’s one in eight people. Every day, seven thousand people become infected with AIDS and nearly six thousand die. There are 3 billion people who live on less than US $2 a day. 1.4 billion people live on less than US $1.25 a day
Did you know?
Malaria is particularly devastating in Africa, where it kills an African child every 30 seconds. Out of the world’s 130 million out-of-school youth, 70% are girls.
Q A Q A
Why do we need to fight injustice? We do it because we want people to…..biblically, we feel like the stuff in the bible that talks about justice, Micah 6:8 biblically that is like a call on us. Biblically we just feel like it’s what God wants us to do. So what does it look like to be a follower of Jesus, he said the greatest thing is to love God and love others.
How can people get involved? The prayer guide is one. We put it together because that was like the first step we had. So we prayed and we said God what can we do and we felt like we were supposed to put together this prayer guide, 30 days, where people can look at different justice issues. Everyday and respond so that they can get a feel of what it would look like to take steps into it and that is one of the main things that we do. So the prayer guide is a big thing, they get it online or buy it or borrow it.
Q A Q A
Who can go to Cambodia? Anyone. Students under the age of 18 can come as a group, 18 and older can come as individuals. So we do individual trips or like college/working age trips, and group trips for people still in school.
What kind of people are you looking for? We want people to come that want to make a difference even people that are like, I just heard about justice issues, I want to see what’s going on in the world..people like that. Or people that have lived in America all their lives, or in one country all their lives and have never seen another culture, but mostly people that love Jesus and want to see change happen in their own lives and in lives of others.
Approximately 25,000 people die each day of hunger or related causes. That’s 9 million people per year
Approximately 100 million people around the world are suffering because of persecution as a result of their faith in Jesus
Q A
Tell us about your work in Cambodia This year we are doing three Cambodia trips. One in june one in august one in September. They are for 10 days and basically the reason we are going is to see what other people have done to respond to injustice issues. So we work with different ministries, that have seen issues of trafficking and they’ve made a difference in it. So we can go and see what other people are doing. We go and we work with the poor , we work with kids with hiv AIDS we work with children at risk for drugs.
Q A
Can people get involeved through social media? We do an October awareness month every October, it’s the whole month, we do different injustice focuses , different actions we go through the prayer guide together as a community, we interact on fb and instagram. So there are people all over the world doing this together there is this community of people doing the same thing for one month. It’s exciting to see what other people are doing, and inspiring, we’ve seen youth groups go through it individuals, work groups, ywamers, non christians and christians.
My name is Phil Cunningham. I am the husband of Amy, and father to Emma, Abby and Eliza. I am also a full time missionary with YWAM and Steps of Justice. I love Jesus and I love serving Him, it is a full honor, joy and adventure. I also like 80’s heavy metal music and hot coffee on rainy days. Phil was interviewed by Masha Shulgina, who lives in St.Petersburg, Russia, where she leads MA program.