WorldVenture::In Review featured Brian and Melissa Leak who serve in Anti-Trafficking. Watch this recorded version of our livestream to see what the church can do to get involved.
Links Mentioned:
- Learn more about Melissa and Brian here.
- Check out their web page and get some resources!
- Ask to get their newsletter: Brianmelissa.leak@gmail.com
- The Freedom Fight. Click here.
- Pure Desire Ministries. Click here.
- European Freedom Network. Click here.
Quotes From the Livestream:
- Brian: “I grew up going to church in the South. I grew up in Alabama Bible Belt, and it was quite a cultural thing for me. It wasn’t necessarily a personal faith. I love the question like, when did it become my own? Because I would have told you I was a Christian, you know, all growing up. But my life didn’t look like it. It looked like everybody else’s, except that I just went to church for an hour on Sundays, you know? I was in my second year of optometry school. I ended up with a roommate that was a real Christian. And he and I used to have these long talks about the Bible, about faith. And I always came out of those conversations feeling like I was missing something. And so, God used my roommate, who’s also my friend, to draw me to him.”
- Melissa: “WorldVenture was just getting started in the anti-trafficking ministry and so they had their director, Adrienne, but she wanted a liaison on each of the continents where WorldVenture works because trafficking is everywhere. And the initial goal was really to help to build awareness of trafficking and help people, individual believers, to engage in that issue anywhere where WorldVenture missionaries are and even just support local churches in those areas.”
- Brian: “I thought that my job was to fight pornography, or it was to fight trafficking. And when I was thinking about it that way, it was overwhelming because you feel like you’re trying to drain the ocean with an eyedropper (is what it feels like). And I was struggling at one point in time and I’m praying about it. And I felt like Jesus brought a couple of things to my mind. It’s the story of the two fish and the five loaves where, you know, in that story, that boy just brought what he had. And it wasn’t much. It would have felt overwhelming to try to feed 5000 with two fish and five loaves, but he brought it to Jesus and Jesus made it work.”
- Brian: “…as far as we know, we’re the only mission’s organization doing that. And, you know, we’ve been contacted by other council counseling groups and other missions organizations. We got invited to speak at a global member care conference at the end of this month in Kenya. And so, we’re going to go and tell everybody how we’re doing it and what we’re doing. And, you know, we’re hoping to expand those groups to other missions organizations. Missionaries struggle with this stuff, too. And so, yeah, there’s a lot of things happening, a lot of exciting things happening that started in Europe and are continuing to grow now.”
- Melissa: “…there’s been a couple of the survivors who’ve gotten baptized over the last few years. There’s, you know, survivors who are growing in their language skills or German language skills. Whether it’s someone journeying with someone and building relationship and sharing faith things together or whether their journey and relationship have been practicing language, building our language skills, and those kind of things. But yeah, so that’s been a neat thing to watch God do. And at the same time that the program was being built, God also opened the door for me to journey personally with a survivor who had been part of the organization or connected to the organization over the years. And so, for me to be serving in a companion role while helping to kind of coordinate this program and build this program, one was helping to inform the other in both directions, really.”
- Melissa: “We have a heart for church-based awareness and engagement. We continue to do that locally, whether it’s giving a presentation at a church, or last spring, I helped to facilitate a pilot group for abuse survivors and with people from my local church context and things like that. So, we really want to be bridge builders between local nonprofits doing great work and local churches, especially people that are wanting to get involved. And we really want to be resource people. We present at a church and then we’ll get three emails from people who are struggling with pornography, or their spouse is struggling with pornography or those kinds of things. Or they just simply want to get involved in anti-trafficking ministry. And so, we want to be resource people to journey with them and find the right resources or the right organizations.”
To hear the stories of impact and how God is working through the Leaks; or to hear how you can bring awareness to this issue in your own church, watch the whole video.