Romans 1:24 Therefore, God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves.
The phrase ‘It takes a village to raise a child,’ is an African proverb that conveys the idea that a child needs a community to thrive. I think most Americans believe in this short proverb. However, today I believe that the village is sick. We are seeing more of the village leaders becoming predators rather than models of inspiration. Recently, I’ve read about coaches, teachers, and clergy … all leaders in their village … who have been charged with crimes of molesting children. You may say that these are isolated cases, however, the National Center for Crime reports the following:
1 in 5 girls and 1 in 20 boys is a victim of child sexual abuse.
Self-report studies show that 20% of adult females and 5-10% of adult males recall a childhood sexual assault or sexual abuse incident.
During a one-year period in the United States, 16% of youth ages 14 to 17 had been sexually victimized.
Over the course of their lifetime, 28% of United States youth ages 14 to 17 had been sexually victimized.
Some of these abuses were at the hands of trusted adults. An Associated Press investigation found that those credibly accused are now teachers, coaches, and counselors who live near playgrounds. That report says almost 1,700 priests and clergy accused of sex abuse are unsupervised.
So, as I stated, the village is sick. Children are a large percentage of trafficked people groups:
Today, there are 49.6 million people in modern slavery worldwide, and 12 million of them are children. (ILO, United Nations)
54% of those trapped in modern slavery are women and girls. (ILO)
Sex trafficking is the most common type of trafficking in the U.S. (Polaris)
There were 88 million child sexual abuse material (CSAM) files reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) tip line in 2022.
Child sex trafficking has been reported in AL 50 United States. (NCMEC)
Human trafficking is a $150 billion industry. (UNICEF)
Human trafficking is the second most profitable illegal industry in the United States. (UNICEF)
I think we are all complicit in some way. I usually don’t have any of this on my radar in my life. Do you? Do the national news and opinion talk shows emphasize this travesty? Some will, but it is not as popular as racism, political news, or wars in the Middle East and Ukraine. Yet, the statistics on abuse in the ‘village’ involve the most vulnerable people groups in our society. As parents, who wants the village to even be involved with our kids or grandkids?
We talk a lot about the southern border and the illegal immigrants coming into our country unsupervised and undocumented. That is a tragedy, but there are sex offenders in our schools, government agencies, athletic competitions, and in our Churches. To cap it off, we have men posing as women to compete in athletic competitions. These men have access to shower rooms where females dress and undress as they get ready to compete. The village is sick.
How did the village get so sick? It is simple. If you remove the moral code God has set forth for the way people are to live, you will go backwards into the pagan ways of history. Historians often point to practices like rampant sexual promiscuity, including prostitution, same-sex relationships within a power dynamic (master-slave), public displays of debauchery during religious festivals, human sacrifice in some regions, and the worship of gods with very human-like flaws and behaviors.
We usually think we have moved on since those barbaric days of history, but we are living them right now. This will come as no surprise my readers, but without God, we have no hope of redeeming the village. None. The message I want to leave with you is that we, the Church, must stop our divisions and bickering about nothing and start procuring an army of moral people to stand their ground and say, “Enough.” We start with our own lives and get serious about our own sin. (64 percent men view porn at least once a month (54 percent born-again Christian men view porn.)
How can we stand unless we have our own lives right before God? Religious practice has always been condemned in Scripture because it is the greatest hindrance to knowing God. Religion changes nothing … Jesus changes everything. Revival isn’t just about Holy Spirit goose bumps or falling on the floor in a crazed manner. It is standing against a village that is sick and getting worse because there are fewer and fewer people to say, “Enough.” Where are the prophets who expose sin, and cry out for justice before a holy God? My last thoughts are to those men who we have read about who have fallen from grace. You can redeem your life not to take the pulpit again, but to tell your story of how sin affected the very thing you preached about. Tell people the horrors of your compromise, and the ultimate destruction of a life that was destroyed because of a lack of judgment.
Let us be salt and light again to a village that needs our help. Arise Church … make your voice heard.
Challenging the Culture with Truth … Larry Kutzler