UNDER THE RED L Taking hope to the street corners by Chris Lenty We live in a world filled with pain and hurt. Sadly those who are hurt end up hurting others. When caught in this vicious cycle, there is no hope outside of a relationship with God. It is easy to love a woman coming out of prostitution because we see her as a victim of her circumstances, culture, or a trafficker. Her stories are so painful that we cringe, wondering how she survived such degradation. But as our love and sympathy go out to that woman, we are tempted to hate the person who inflicted that pain upon her. But that’s a cop-out. Pervert, john, pedophile—labels free us from the responsibility of caring for the man who buys sex. But before each of us came to faith in Christ, someone walked with us, believing in the power of a transformed heart and using eyes of faith to see that heart in our future. I direct the Men and the Sex Trade (MST) Project, a ministry to men who frequent the redlight districts in Southeast Asia. At MST we resist the temptation to divide the world into worthy and unworthy. We see ourselves in these men and take the time to understand how they got to this place. We do not look at the sexual exploitation industry as an interaction between victims and victimizers, but rather understand that everyone involved is in need of—and, more important still, deserving of—restoration and redemption. Because we refuse to judge, our approach to reaching men in red-light districts is contrary to what most people would assume and the opposite of what many people want. Sadly some of our critics come from inside the church. We equate the men not with their actions but rather with what they will become if they allow their hearts to be transformed. We go to red-light districts not to engage the men in debate but to offer them what they do not yet have and what they are, at the core, searching for—true love and intimacy. These men don’t need someone to tell them what is right and wrong. Like the rest of us, they already have a moral compass—it’s rusty, but they have one. The more we speak with them, lovingly and without judging, the more evident the compass becomes, both to us and to them. What these men need is to see an example of what they can become. We earn the right to be that example by submitting ourselves to Christ and then submitting ourselves, in friendship, to these men, taking the time to get to know them, to hear the stories of how they got to where they are. We do this not because we seek to eliminate the great injustice of sexual exploitation, although we do yearn for that, but because we care about each particular man—the son, brother, husband, father—who stands before us. In the past four years we have talked with up to 2,000 men. Some of them are childhood victims of an abusive family; some have grown up without a father to show them what it means to be a man, their only teachers being popular culture or their high school buddies. Many of them
22 PRISM Magazine