Stewarding tangible hope of decimating slavery
Jordan Raynor sits down with Victor Boutros, CEO of the Human Trafficking Institute, to talk about the “tangible hope” Victor and his team have for decimating human trafficking in this generation, why Victor has opted for a “master of one” as opposed to a “master of none” strategy for his career, and how building IKEA furniture with our kids can give us a picture of how our work partners with our Heavenly Father’s work.
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[00:00:50] JR: Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Call to Mastery. I’m Jordan Raynor. This is a podcast for Christians who want to do their most exceptional work for the glory of God and the good of others. Each week, I host a conversation with a Christian who’s pursuing world-class mastery of their vocation. We talk about their path to mastery, their daily habits, and how the gospel of Jesus Christ influences the work.
Today’s episode is a terrific one. I’m talking with my friend, Victor Boutros. He’s the CEO of the Human Trafficking Institute, this really innovative nonprofit that’s focused not on caring for survivors of human trafficking, but training local law enforcement officials on how to prosecute traffickers in the first place. Before this, Victor was a federal prosecutor in the United States Department of Justice. He’s also taught on human trafficking at the FBI Academy in Quantico. He’s a graduate of Baylor, Harvard, Oxford and the University of Chicago Law School where he was an editor of the University of Chicago Law Review. Yeah, in short, Victor’s a pretty impressive guy.
We sat down recently and talked about the tangible hope that Victor and his team have for decimating human trafficking in this generation. And to learn more about why he uses the word specifically decimating. I thought this is fascinating. We talked about why Victor has opted for a master of one, as opposed to a master of none strategy for his career. I love – maybe my favorite part of the conversation was this picture he shared of building IKEA furniture with his son, and how that can give us a picture of how our work partners with the work of our Heavenly Father. I promise you guys, you’re going to love this episode with my friend, Victor Boutros.
[INTERVIEW]
[00:02:15] JR: Hey, Victor. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks for being here.
[00:02:18] VB: Thanks, Jordan. I’m excited to be with you.
[00:02:20] JR: One of our producers, they were doing some research. They found that the seat for your work today was this book on Abraham Lincoln when you were seven? What’s the deal with that? What’s the story?
[00:02:34] VB: When I was little, my parents would take me to the little library at our Baptist church that we went to, and I could check out a book every week and –
[00:02:41] JR: Hang on. Timeout. Timeout, I forget that there was a time when churches had libraries. This was a thing, a big thing, right?
[00:02:51] VB: It was a legit library with a Dewey Decimal System.
[00:02:54] JR: No, stop.
[00:02:55] VB: Now this is going to take you way back. If you’re old enough to know this, you’re really dating yourself. But the back of the book, they had these like physical cards, and on the back of the card, you would literally sign your name, and then they would stamp, physically stamp a due date and you had to return it by that date.
[00:03:13] JR: I barely remember this, but I remember.
[00:03:15] VB: Do you remember that?
[00:03:16] JR: Yeah.
[00:03:17] VB: Okay. All right. You’re dating yourself, Jordan.
[00:03:19] JR: I know.
[00:03:20] VB: When I was little, I actually have this sort of snapshot in my memory of that very card in the back of the book. And I remember just looking at it, it had my name over and over and over and over again, with due date, due date, due date, because I had kept checking it out, so captivated by it. There’s a pediatrician that wrote a series of books about different virtues that were illustrated through the biographies of different people over time. I was particularly captivated by the biography of this tall, lanky lawyer from Kentucky who grew up to lead the epic battle against slavery in our country. I was just so captivated by it.
I grew up in Texas, and I just wondered like, “Oh my gosh! What would I have done?” You have good people on both sides. How do you respond in a time like that where this is the great era of moral struggle that in retrospect seems quite straightforward? But at the time, I’m sure was quite challenging. And I was very captivated by that story.
Then you get a little bit older, and you start to feel like, “Oh, that era of moral struggle is in the history books. It’s a bygone era." And began to wonder, what does the great moral struggle of this era look like? As I transferred to a very challenging prep school, and I started feeling like, “Oh, here at this school, there’s –” it’s not that it was hostile to Christianity. It was more like Christianity was kind of like community service. It’s, “Oh! That’s nice. If you want to do that on the side, good for you if you get the time and inclination." But obviously, wouldn’t talk about community service in a serious conversation about policy, or relationships, or economics.
And likewise, it’s equally absurd to talk about Christianity when you’re talking about these serious topics. As long as Christianity or remains on the sidelines, it’s fine, but don’t bring it into the center of what we’re talking about. I remember internally struggling against that and eventually learning about apologetics, which I thought initially was a house at a Christian sports camp that had an elective on apologetics, which I almost skipped, because I thought, this is about being humble and saying you’re sorry when you mess up.
[00:05:21] JR: I think a lot of people have made this mistake, P.S, at middle school camp.
[00:05:25] VB: Totally. Well, I almost missed it. Then I was reading about it and he was talking about building an intellectually credible case for the gospel. I had been struggling with – I had atheist friends who were asking really good and hard questions about Christianity. I thought, “Well, this will be really helpful for that.” Out of the 2,000 kids at camp, like me and four others thought that would be really interesting. We sat in this non-air-conditioned, sweltering, humid wrestling gym room and talked apologetics for a few times a week. I thought, “Well, maybe that is the greatest struggle of this era.”
I began in college to pursue that a little bit more as I studied philosophy and was very, in particular drawn to the question of the problem of evil. How can there be a good God and an all-powerful God and there had to be so much deep evil and suffering in the world? That was one of the questions a lot of my atheist friends asked. I remember having a conversation with one of our atheist friends at a coffee shop. It kind of felt to me, Jordan, a little bit like a game. Like you’re sitting here at this coffee shop, we’re drinking cappuccinos and you’re saying that you don’t believe in God because of all the evil and suffering in the world. But you’re not experiencing evil and suffering, you’re in this place of great privilege with me, and we’re about to go to a football game. It just felt a little bit like an intellectual game.
I remember feeling like there’s something hollow happening here. It wasn’t until I began to travel in the developing world, actually with my InterVarsity group at Harvard, that I began to meet people who were themselves having trouble believing that God was good, because they were personally in so much pain. It was a different kind of pain than I anticipated. I knew that being in the developing world, you would see hunger, and homeless and illness. Often, you see those, kind of the moment you step off the plane in the airport. But I began to meet people who are experiencing a different kind of suffering. A specific person was exploiting or hurting them. Particularly, as I learned about what is sometimes now called, modern slavery, which was a wild shock that took me back to that moment of being a six- or seven-year-old reading about Abe Lincoln and going, “Wait a second. Maybe this isn’t a bygone era. Maybe this is a great moral struggle of this age that is not in the history books alone, but is happening right now, on our watch.”
[00:07:42] JR: You’re awakened to this problem in college. You’re traveling to the developing world. What are the steps from there where you were like, “This is the thing. I am dedicating my life to fighting against this modern-day evil”?
[00:07:57] VB: Yeah. I think for me, it first came in exposure to a very specific case, which involves a 12-year-old girl who lived in rural India, was very poor. Her family sent her to the big city to get a job and earn some money for the family. She goes to the city. She finds a job in a restaurant. This is like, as a 12-year-old, it’s shocking. I have a daughter who just turned 14 and a son who’s 11. These ages are very fresh in my mind.
But she’s 12, she goes to the big city, she gets this job in a restaurant washing dishes. In the summer, she’s got some summer money, getting ready to head back to home to her family. To do that, she’s got to catch a train in Victoria station in Mumbai, which is this wildly chaotic train station. I think a million people a day are going through this train station and she’s just utterly overwhelmed. She can’t find her train. She doesn’t really know how to navigate the station. She’s really very stressed out. A couple of older ladies see her stressed and they go over say, “Hey! Are you doing okay? Can we help you?” She said, “Well, I can’t find my train?” They said, “Where are you going?” So she tells them and they said, “Oh! We know that, because in fact, it’s on our same train. It’s on our line. We’ll show you where that is.” She’s kind of relieved that these older ladies are looking out for her.
They get on the train together, they start chatting, they have some tea and it turns out the tea is drugged. She is knocked out cold and when she wakes up, she finds herself on the third floor of a brothel in the red-light district of Mumbai where these two women have sold her for the equivalent of 250 American dollars. At that point, the trafficker says, “Look, you’re now going to have to service my customers. You have a quota. You have to serve seven to twelve men a day seven days a week.” She says, “No, I don’t want to do that. I just want to go home. He says, “That’s not an option for you now. I paid good money for you. You’re going to make money for me.” When she resists, he uses violence. Hits her with rods and pours scalding water on her and finally kind of pumps herself with alcohol, she’s barely conscious. From that point forward at the age of 12, that just becomes her daily reality.
Meanwhile, you can imagine her parents over here at the rural train station, they have no idea where she is. They don’t even know how to begin looking for her. I remember as I learned about her story, it just made my blood boil. It just made me so mad. I thought, “How do you do that to a 12-year-old?” It was like, in a world of moral gray, this is black and white. This is unambiguously, clearly, objectively wrong and it must stop. So as I started learning more about it, I learned that her story was not an anomaly. It’s replicated around the globe on a massive scale. The best estimate suggests, there’s about 25 million people who are in that same position. If I had a snapshot at every victim in the world today, it’d be about 25 million snapshots.
To be totally honest with you, Jordan, as I learned about the scope of the problem, it was profoundly unhelpful to me, super unhelpful. I felt like my soul was divided because there’s one part of my soul that was saying, “No, no. You’ve got to get that girl out now. This has to stop. This is so wrong. Whatever it takes, you get her out now.” And this other part of your soul is going, “No, no, no. She’s one of 25 million. Whatever you do, whatever anyone does, it’s just going to be a drop in the ocean. It’s not really going to make a difference.” It’s like, it was this experience where I felt, because we’re made in God’s image, and God is a God of compassion, I think we’re instinctively drawn to pain. We’re actually attracted to it for the purpose of helping someone out of that pain.
But I think if we start to believe in our souls, there’s nothing that we can meaningfully do to address that pain, then it’s like getting too close to a fire that you can’t put out. You feel like, “No. I got to back away. I’m going to get burned. I got to back away.” I remember feeling that. I mean, it’s a terrible feeling when you have that, your soul is so divided, and one part is saying, “Get her out now” and the other part is saying, “Back away. You’re going to get burned.” For whatever reason, I nevertheless at that moment had this, really probably for the only time in my life, just sort of real clarity from the Lord that this is what I was supposed to do.
I remember calling my girlfriend at the time and saying, “Hey! This is it. I think this is what God has called me to do.” Maybe it’s an emotional reaction, it will kind of fade away. Maybe it’s just a fad. And it just never went away. So ultimately, that changed the course of my life. I was in a graduate program at oxford. Left that early to go to law school, really to be equipped with the skills and gifts that I thought I would need to be effective in this space.
[00:12:16] JR: You’re hitting on something that I think is one of the great, difficult tensions Christians have to wrestle with. Jesus said, “You’ll always have the poor with you, always.” We will always, in all likelihood, have to fight against the evil of human trafficking, until Jesus returns and brings his kingdom in full, and heaven comes fully to earth. How do you wrestle with that tension? I mean, you’re playing this infinite game, you’re making small drops in the bucket. How do you remain hopeful as you do that work day in day out?
[00:12:53] VB: Well, to be totally honest, Jordan, as I felt alive at that question at the time. What I needed in that moment was, and this is probably more of a commentary on me than it is on the scriptural mandate here. But I felt like what I need, is more than just that God will right things one day at the end. Like that is true, and that is good and that’s important.
But if this is really just, we’re pulling one victim out, and as quickly as they’re out the front door, there’s more coming in the back door. I’m like, that is just not enough for me, like that is not enough to do this. I felt like what I really need is very tangible hope, like extremely tangible, like A is doable, B is doable, C is doable. And collectively, they result in not just a few people being freed, but in massive drops in the prevalence of trafficking.
Honestly, I didn’t have that at the time. I really didn’t. But I think the great irony is that we do today. For me, I think one of the great calls, and this is sort of what I feel like is now the heart of what I get to do today, is to be stewards of tangible hope. We now have the tangible hope today that I longed for 20, 25 years ago. It’s there and now our job as the church is to actually steward it. Because I think, most of the world is still stuck in that place that I was where they’re a divided soul.
It’s funny, I can almost see it when I talk to people about the work I do, that they just – there is this sort of like, “I’m standing back. I’m skeptical. Whatever you tell me, it’s not going to make a difference.” That’s exactly how I felt and you don’t want to be rude to a nonprofit do-gooder and comment so negatively on the work that they’re doing. But that’s how I felt in my soul. Even when I just tell people that, they’re like, “Oh! Wow! You just called out my thought. That’s exactly how I feel. I’m glad we can now be open about what’s happening here.”
I think that the tangible hope that exists today is not being stewarded by the church as fully as it might. I actually think that lighting that tangible hope and watching it spread like a forest fire is how we see trafficking decimated at scale. I used to think the frontlines of the battle were really waged by the FBI guys who are going in and doing the raids and all that kind of stuff. I don’t think that anymore. I really think the frontlines of the battle is on the battleground of tangible hope. To the extent that we steward that effectively, we will have a front-row seat to modern slavery being decimated at scale for the first time in human history. And to the extent we don’t, we’ll dismiss it.
[00:15:29] JR: I got to believe that part of the reason for this tangible hope you have, is that you guys at the Human Trafficking Institute have found a model that can really scale the fight against human trafficking, but also – part of that is theological. It is recognizing that human slavery has no place in the eternal kingdom of God. One day, it will be decimated, but that day could be in our lifetime, right? That is possible. God is certainly able to work through loyal human beings to do that. But so often, we don’t believe that it’s possible in the church. Is that what you’re saying? I don’t want to put words in your mouth, Victor. But is that where you’re going here?
[00:16:08] VB: No, you’re right. We actually use decimate with great intentionality. Decimate literally means to cut by 10%. It actually came – the Latin word for 10 is deca, December used to be the 10th month. And it comes from this actually quite brutal practice in ancient Rome, where to deter units of the Roman army from defecting, they said, “Look, if you defect and we catch, we’ll decimate your unit. We will randomly execute 10% of your unit.” It created such fear, and because no one knew if they would be among that 10%, but it actually created widespread compliance. So that now, colloquially, when we use decimate, we use it to mean having a comprehensive or devastating, universally devastating effect. But I think it’s actually a really apt analogy.
Actually, don’t talk about ending modern slavery in our lifetime, because I honestly don’t think that will happen. I think there will always be a remnant of traffickers that no matter what the enforcement risk is, then they’ll take that risk anyway. But I do think the trafficking can be decimated, I think we can actually begin to stop that critical mass, that 10% or whatever that magic number is. We can stop that critical mass of traffickers, that starts to make trafficking too risky for the vast majority of traffickers so that they say, “Wait a second. Hold it. Hold it. I’m in this to make money.” Right now, I’m making a choice, I’ve got a simple decision. I could either choose voluntary laborers who I pay some kind of competitive wage to, and keep them happy, or they’ll go somewhere else. Or I could use force, and threats, and violence, coerce them to work for me, and prevent them from leaving like that 12-year-old girl I mentioned before.
Well, as long as there’s no real consequence for engaging in force, and threats and violence, as long as there’s no consequence for engaging in trafficking, then all my labor costs magically turn into profits. I’m just going to make that much more money. What happens is, in places where the laws are not enforced, trafficking just explodes, the business of trafficking just explodes wherever the laws are not enforced. But the flip side is, that if traffickers say, “Wait a second. There’s a specialized enforcement unit that could come in and actually seize all my profits, and I lose all my money, and my business, and my family, and my freedom and go to jail.” Then all of a sudden, “No, no. It’s too risky. I’d rather pay a few extra dollars to voluntary laborers or shift industries and risk losing everything.”
That’s when you get to see these big drops in the problems of trafficking. And because most traffickers are highly risk-sensitive, that is – they’re only willing to engage in the crime if they know there’s zero chance that we’ll get in trouble for it. You began to see that decimation effect, where you’re deterring not just those who are actually prosecuted, but this much larger group of people who say, “Wait a second! Too risky, I’m out.” Now, like I said, you always have that risk-resistant 20% or so that said, “I don’t care what the risk is. I’m engaging in the crime.”
But if we think about the 80% of traffickers that are risk-sensitive, that’s huge, because each of those traffickers represents not just one victim, but typically a group of victims. Not just today’s group of victims. But if we don’t stop them over the next 10, 20 years, a long future stream of victims. Each trafficker stopped represents a tremendous number of victims protected from this crime. That’s where we start to see impact at scale. That’s where we start to see that tangible hope.
For me, yes, I think theologically, we are riding in God’s wake. That’s the great freedom, is that, this is not my mission. This is not the Human Trafficking Institute’s mission. This is what God cares about. This is something that he is doing in the world. In a sense, he’s standing on what we now see as the shoulders of giants throughout history to actually bring about the widespread fall of this horror, that has existed for literally thousands of years. And we get to have a front-row seat, and even be a part of watching and participating in the work that he’s doing.
Now, in the end, one day, you’re right, all things theologically will be righted. But even in the interim, if we can be a part of the body of Christ decimating this injustice at scale, I think that is what we get to be called to do and what we get to delight to watch God work miracles of justice through these small acts of obedience.
[00:20:17] JR: Amen. Amen. Very well said. That’s the role of the church, to partner with King Jesus, with Lord Jesus, Lord of the Earth to put things back to rights as signposts to the ultimate putting of rights when he returns. You’ve touched on it. I want you to go there explicitly. You’ve touched on the model of the Human Trafficking Institute. You guys are not focused on survivor care, as important as that work is. You guys are doing the work of stopping traffickers and you got a really unique model for doing this. So real quickly, explain to us how you guys partner with law enforcement officials, to disincentivize the trafficking of human beings?
[00:21:02] VB: What we do at the Human Trafficking Institute is we’re really scaling a model that many of the folks at the leadership at HTI helped build when we were in the federal government. I was the US Department of Justice, I was a federal prosecutor in the Human Trafficking Prosecution Unit for almost a decade, and traveled around the country directing a team of federal agents and really working these cases start to finish. From identifying the victims, to doing the raid, getting the victims out, all the way through charging the case, trying the case, and through sentencing in Federal Court.
I think we got a front-row seat to what trafficking looked like during that period. One thing that we were troubled by early on is that we seem to have trafficking happening. We had good laws against it and we had smart motivated prosecutors and agents that seem to think this is a very compelling kind of thing to work on. Yet, we are seeing very few cases happen and we think, “Okay. What’s the disconnect? Good laws, smart, motivated people? Why are we not seeing more results?”
What we discovered is, that the way that you do a human trafficking case is actually quite different than the way you say you do a drug case or a gun case. It requires a level of specialization that at that time did not exist in the local FBI offices and in US Attorney’s Offices. Now, that’s not that unusual. Ordinarily, if there’s a new type of case, you just walked down the hall. You say, “Hey, Jordan. You’re our expert on organized crime. I’d really like to learn how to do that. Can I shadow you for a few cases?” Before you know it, we’re sharing responsibilities, and then you’re supervising me. All of a sudden, we’ve got like a little mini-informal unit that knows how to do that type of case.
Well, what happens when the enforcement of a crime is still so young, that there just is no one down the hall at the local FBI office, or US Attorney’s office who’s ever done this before? Well, they don’t want to screw things up, especially when there’s some very traumatized victims on the back end of this, so they just weren’t happy. They did not get started. We did when I was at the Justice Department, is we started a pilot to try to solve that problem. We basically did three things. We would go in, there’s 94 federal districts. We had them compete for six slots. And in those six districts, we would go in and essentially build a mini specialized unit. Here’s our team, here’s our prosecutors, here’s our federal agents. We’re not going to focus on human trafficking. Just like we have an organized crime unit, or narcotics unit. We would build a mini human trafficking unit that would focus on human trafficking.
Then the second thing we would do is put them through a mini Law Enforcement Academy, where we walked through, here’s the strategies that we’ve seen be effective throughout the process, from identifying the case all the way through trial. Then the third thing we do is we pair them up with me or another member of our national unit, and we would fly out, join up with them and start rolling up our sleeves and working cases together. Of course, there’s all kinds of challenges that would come up that you hadn’t talked about in the classroom. But now, at least, you had someone with you who could solve those problems, move your cases forward.
So two years in, we pull the numbers to see, “Hey! How’s it going?” What we discovered is that those six pilot districts had just hit it out of the park. They had produced more convictions in those six little pilot districts than the other 88 federal districts combined. Literally, the majority of convictions in the entire United States were coming out of these six little pilot districts.
So we realized, okay, this is working and that model is now beginning to spread in the US. But as I took a sabbatical from the Justice Department to write a book with a friend of mine, Gary Haugen at International Justice Mission, we wrote this book called The Locus Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence. It was just this opportunity to take a step back from the boots-on-the-ground work I was doing as a prosecutor and look at what was happening at a global scale. What I learned was that, right now, the vast majority of the world’s victims are not in the US or the developed economies of the West. 93% of the world’s victims are actually in developing countries, where trafficking is exploding because there’s effectively zero enforcement.
What we now do is we partner with developing countries at Human Trafficking Institute to essentially do those three things. We help them vet and build specialized units that focus on human trafficking, teams of police, and prosecutors, and victim specialists that focus on trafficking. We do some specialized training to help them build their skills, and talk through strategies that are effective and stopping trafficking. Then we do that third piece of actually embedding experts inside those units by agreement with the government, who work with those units day in and day out, and help them solve case related challenges that come up, build their skills, and create a level of transparency and accountability that helps protect against corruption risk. And then we measure that from start to finish. That’s kind of how HTI is scaling the model that we helped successfully pilot while I was at the Justice Department.
[00:25:31] JR: I love it. It’s crystal clear how the gospel shapes what you do. I’m curious how the gospel shapes how you approach the work, how you go about your day-to-day. That’s a broad question, but I’m curious to see where you take this. How does the gospel shape how you do the work?
[00:25:49] VB: Yeah. I think for me, one of the great challenges, even that existed prior to joining HTI is just this sort of fear of failure. I think a lot of high achievers have this sort of fear of failure. We can sometimes restrict ourselves as a result of our spheres of certain competence. That can influence the job we pursue, the kind of goals and targets we set. We’re worried that, “Oh my gosh! I don’t want to fail.” I think that my faith really influences this by pushing how to do this fear where leaving the Justice Department was wildly scary. I felt like – I felt a little bit like I had more compassion for Peter as he stepped out of the boat, and started seeing the waves like swirling around and went like, “Whoa! Wait a second, what am I doing out here? I left the boat. What was I thinking?”
And yet, I think there’s this incredibly powerful faith-building experience that comes when you step out of your spirits to certain competence and you actually need God to show up in your life. I think for many of us, especially in the West, that’s actually a somewhat novel experience. It’s not that we don’t have that need. It’s that we don’t really experience the need. We live in this delusion, or I lived in this delusion of self-sufficiency, that I can kind of outwork any problem that comes up as a prosecutor. I might not be smart enough to figure it out, but I can call the right people, I can ask the right questions and eventually, I can solve whatever problem that comes up.
Then leaving to launch Human Trafficking Institute, I think you really have to rely on God not as a matter of discipline, but as a matter of desperation. Like if you just not going to show up, these things won’t happen. I remember having conversations, especially in the first couple years of the Human Trafficking Institute, with donors who were saying, “Now, wait a second. Aren’t there like a bunch of things that have to go exactly right for this to be even possible? Does he have to have a government agree to build a brand-new specialized unit and allow you to embed one of your people inside there? Isn’t that like – I mean, do you know that’s going to happen?” No, I don’t. But I mean, you’re entirely right. There’s lots of contingencies that we have no control over. Like, “Okay. That’s great. Well, why don’t you come back to me after you’re a little further down the road.”
I do think that that sense of limiting yourself to your sphere of certain competence will actually take you a remarkably short distance, compared to the opportunities that God is inviting us into as we step out in faith into the kingdom. I think that shapes the work I do, and the targets that I set, in the kind of anxiety that I have around my work. I think like my anxiety levels would be so much higher if I were not a follower of Christ, because I would feel like, “Oh my gosh! It’s all on me. It’s all on my shoulders, and I can just be bullied by my fear of failure.” Instead, when we’re riding in God’s wake, you - the whole sort of savior complex gets sort of swept away. So you're like, “Hey, this is not me. God is going to do this." He’s going to do this, because he loves these survivors and these victims. He cares about them and he hates injustice. He’s moving his body to do that and he’s allowing me to be a part of that.
It reminds me of when my son was four or five, and I was trying to build this new IKEA desk. He’s like, “Hey, Dad. You want me to help you?” I was thinking, “Okay! This is just from a one-hour project to like a four-hour project. Of course, I was like, “Yes. Definitely, I want you to help me.” Of course, he can’t get the nail in straight, and he doesn’t know how to hold the hammer, but I got to hang out with my son for four hours. It was so much fun. In a very similar way, I feel like, “God does not need me to do this. He does not need HTI to do this. Like he could do this without any of us.” But he’s kind of inviting us in to partner with him and to do this work that he loves and cares about. He’s actually answering my unfully formed prayer at seven saying, “God! I want to be a part of this great moral struggle. Like, what would I do? How could I be a part of this?” He said, “Okay. In 20 years, I will. I’ll invite you in. It’s like I’m inviting the rest of the body into the work that I’m doing, that you get to be a part of.”
I think part of it is around sort of the targets we set, the kind of the risks that we take, but also around the sort of open-handedness, and less white-knuckling our way through. And knowing that, “Hey! God is doing this and we get to join him in it.”
[00:30:03] JR: Yeah. There’s like a deep level of rest there that I would imagine a lot of unbelievers have a hard time grasping. As a believer, I know that God’s going to do this work with and without me. He did not need Moses specifically to lead his people into the Promise Land. He does not need Victor specifically to do this work. It is a gracious gift. When you recognize it as such, you can rest, you can sabbath, you can get eight hours of sleep at night because you recognize his purposes as he says in Job 42, will not be thwarted. It will not be thwarted. They will come to fruition. That brings tremendous peace and rest. It sounds like that’s been your experience, Victor.
[00:30:47] VB: Yes. Honestly, I vacillate in the depth in which I’m trusting him. But I would say yes, that has been the trajectory of my experience. And in the absence of Christ in my life, it would be none of my experience. I think I’d be consumed with anxiety, and worry and sort of trying to bootstrap my way through the work and through life.
[00:31:07] JR: I think there’s a big difference between doing your work for God, partnering with him in this great mission, and doing your work with him and basking in sonship, right? Like just being a child of his and communing with Him. Do you think about this? If so, how do you ensure you’re doing both, both the work for God and with Him?
[00:31:31] VB: Yeah. I think that’s really astute, and I think, in a way, it takes me back to the story I just shared about me and my son. If I told Lawson, “Hey! I want you just to do this for me. You’re going to build a desk for me.” I mean, he would be crushed. Right? Like he’s like, “Oh, Dad, I can barely read the – I don’t know how to read the instructions. I don’t know what these tools are. I don’t know any. I can’t do it.” It would be crushing, right? In the same way that if God said, “Okay, Victor, I want you to build an organization that decimates slavery.” I’d be like, “Oh my gosh!” That’s crushing. That’s just overwhelming.
But when I say, “Hey, Lawson. I’m inviting you to do this with me. I’m going to go with you. We’re going to do this together.” “Oh, okay. That’s all right.” There is a reason why His yoke is easy and His burden is light, it’s because he’s carrying – he’s shouldering most of the weight, right? He is the strong ox that is pulling and just training me as the weak ox to just follow his motions. I think that creates a sense of peace and helps protect against overwhelm.
But the flip side is, I think he really has given us the dignity of making real choices. I think about the steward, the parable of the talents and the stewards. Clearly, there was some free choice involved and you had two stewards who chose to actually take what they’ve been given by their master, and go out in the world and put them at risk. To allow them outside their sphere of certain competence. To use whatever mastery God had given them to do their best. And they produced different results. One had produced more talents than the other, but they went out and they were faithful.
Then you had another who was ruled by fear, right? I honestly have so much sympathy for that guy, because I’m like –
[00:33:21] JR: Yeah, me too.
[00:33:21] VB: – that very easily could be me, right? Like he didn’t steal it, he didn’t misappropriate it for his own personal pleasure. Again, he just was afraid of losing it. So he goes and he buries it. And of course, as we all know, the master comes back and says, “Well done, good and faithful servant. Enter into the joy of your master,” to the two stewards who put things at risk. There’s a return that we get, that we personally get for walking with him, and that his joy. To enter into the joy of our Master is better than any financial return we could ever make, right? That’s the investment return that we would most actually deeply enjoy.
The contrast is striking. It’s sort of, the one who is ruled by fear is left in darkness, where there’s weeping and gnashing of teeth. There’s this sort of regret, and there’s this missing out. I think for me, holding those two things together is critical, is that, these are not my resources. I’m not stewarding on my own, everything I have has been given to me, it’s all his anyway. He’s asking me to steward it, but there’s real consequences to my choices. Like yeah, he will do it, but he may have to do it in a wildly different way. Sort of like the difference between, if I were to be disobedient and not do it, God can put out the forest fire, but it might be the difference between putting out a spark and putting out an entire forest fire. He’s going to accomplish his purposes, but it might not be in the same way.
My choices actually had real meaningful consequences, and there’s real responsibility there, and real joy or real regret, and yet, it’s not all on my shoulders. I’m yoked with Him and riding behind His wake and participating with Him in what he’s doing.
[00:35:07] JR: Yeah. We have not been entrusted with the gift of salvation to just hold it, and sit back and consume and wait for all eternity. We’ve been called to invest in our lives, to spend our lives, to risk our lives for the sake of the gospel in the advancement of the kingdom. Victor, this podcast is really about two things. Number one, and we’ve already talked about number one. How does the Gospel give shape to the work that we do? But the second thing I’d like to talk about is, all right, in light of that, in light of the fact that our work matters deeply to God and others. How do we pursue mastery at the craft that God has called us to? Because it’s such an important response, I believe, to the Gospel. This is the Parable of the Talents. I’m curious, for you, you’ve made the shift from prosecutor to this leader of a nonprofit. What do you think world-class leaders do that their less masterful counterparts don’t do? What’s the Delta between good and great?
[00:36:02] VB: I think the key is having the discipline and patience to really produce and build specialized expertise. I think you see this sometimes lost in the nonprofit sector, where you have people who will build an organization because they had a particular experience, or an emotional experience, or a spiritual experience. And they may not have any specialized expertise in that area of their entry into, but they have a lot of goodwill and good intentions. I think the sort of challenging word is that God is probably calling us more than to mere good intentions. What trafficking victims need is more than good intentions.
I think one way this actually plays out very practically for me is, I now have been in the nonprofit – I still feel relatively new to the nonprofit sector. I’ve been in the private sector for the first part of my career, and then the government sector, and now in the nonprofit sector. But I feel like there’s a lot of folks in the nonprofit sector or ministry that talk about having a holistic ministry or providing holistic care. Sometimes, I think that that can be a euphemism for being a jack of all trades and a master of none.
If I had a heart attack, I actually don’t want a holistic doctor, right? I’ll actually want the cardiologist who has spent his years training in the heart, to come take a look at that. Then I want him partnering with the pulmonologist to look at my lungs, and the internal medicine doctor to look at the internal medicine piece. Collectively, this group of specialists working together will provide holistic care.
I think likewise, as I think about the human trafficking space, and sort of what’s at stake here, one of the great tragedies that came to that surface as I wrote The Locust Effect with Gary and began to look more at the developing world is: in places like Uganda, for instance, to be very practical and concrete, the church may be doing some incredibly important work. They’re planting churches, they’re building mission hospitals, they’re building schools, they’re doing micro-loan enterprise, all of which are super important. But what happens when all those interventions, and all those ministries actually can’t reach the people they’re called to serve, because those people are walled off from the gospel by a brothel wall. What happens then? That’s what we have, is a 25 million person, unreached people group, that’s often sitting in the very places we’re already sending a lot of missionaries, a lot of development, relief, medical work, education.
What’s happening is, trafficking is starting to act as this bottleneck, choking out the efficacy of all these interventions that are too important to be constantly undermined by trafficking. But the flip side is, if we can wedge up in that bottleneck, there’s already a lot of bandwidth there to begin to meet those needs. So I began to say, “Gosh! The body of Christ is doing all these things, but if we don’t wedge up in that bottleneck, they can’t actually reach the people they’re called to serve. It’s undermining the efficacy of these really important interventions.
Well, we realized early on that the Human Trafficking Institute was not going to be a faith-based organization, because many developing countries are just unwilling to allow that access and that level of influence inside their criminal justice system to an openly Christian organization. They’re suspicious. They think it’s some type of ulterior motive or subterfuge. We’re not a faith-based organization. But realize, if the Human Trafficking Institute can come in and wedge up in that bottleneck, then that’s actually a critical component for the church to begin to address some of those other needs.
For me, the call to mastery is really around, "Hey, we actually know how to do this one narrow thing very, very well. So we’re not going to do aftercare, we’re not going to do trauma therapy, or build businesses or vocational training." All those are critically important, they’re necessary. But if we don’t stop the traffickers, they just keep creating more and more victims that need more and more care. What we want to do is move upstream and stop the traffickers. By stopping the traffickers, decimate the trafficking that’s happening in that community, so that there’s more bandwidth for aftercare providers to reach, hopefully, a much fewer number of victims who need their care. And they can spend more time with them, work more closely with them, help them recover from that horrible trauma.
But to me, the call to mastery was about, hey, we want to be very operationally disciplined at HTI, but doing what we do really, really well, which is working with governments inside their criminal justice to stop traffickers. Then partnering with those who are equally operation disciplined about what they do well, such as aftercare providers, and then collectively, as a value chain, we will provide holistic care,
[00:40:34] JR: You can’t see me but I look like a bobblehead shaking my head, up and down because I wrote a book. You and I have never talked about this. I wrote a book called Master of One, because I think we’ve really gotten this wrong in our world and in the church. The path to mastery, getting world-class at what you do requires tradeoffs, requires focusing in on the one thing I believe God’s called you to do, or you’re choosing to do vocationally in this stage of life, to just get truly extraordinary at. We’ve got way too many masters of none. In this world, we need people who are world-class at what they do so that we can work together. This is the purpose of the Church, working with other people who are great at what they do, right? They’re specializing in their thing to partner together and solve some of these problems. Right?
[00:41:26] VB: Totally.
[00:41:27] JR: All right, Victor. Three questions I love to wrap up every conversation with. Number one, which books do you find yourself recommending most frequently to others?
[00:41:37] VB: If I were not doing this, and I were able to do it, I would just teach CS Lewis and talk to people about CS Lewis. I’m such a CS Lewis fan.
[00:41:47] JR: I know. We geeked out about this the first time we met.
[00:41:50] VB: It’s so true. It’s hard to choose just one, but maybe if I had to pick one, I would say Mere Christianity. That has been such a powerful tool that I have used, even just to have conversations with people who aren’t believers and has questions about what is this all about. There’s a number of times I’ve walked with people, and we just use that as a springboard for conversation. It’s been amazing to see how God has used that book in the lives of others. I really, every time I read it, which I’m now in the high, probably double digits at this stage, I always learn more things. It’s just one of those books that keeps giving and I always find a new practical application given what’s going on in my life that comes out of that book. I really love that book a lot.
[00:42:32] JR: I give it to nonbelievers all the time and recommend it all the time. It’s probably one of the most frequently mentioned books in response to this question on the podcast.
[00:42:42] VB: Is that right?
[00:42:42] JR: Yeah. We got a leaderboard up right now that you guys can all check out at jordanraynor.com/bookshelf. You’ll find a link to Mere Christianity, you’ll see where it stands on the leaderboard and you’ll find a copy of Victor’s great book, The Locust Effect, which is terrific. All right, Victor. Who do you want to hear on this podcast talking about how the gospel shapes their pursuit of great work?
[00:43:06] VB: I actually love to hear someone talking about the intersection of faith and philanthropy. I think stewardship in that area can just be super challenging to navigate. I think it’s so hard especially for – I mean, it’s hard for me to engage in that. I’ve now met people who are genuinely joyful and generous givers. I honestly think before I began this job, I was also pretty skeptical that they really existed. I can think of a number of folks who I’d love to hear talking about that, who are very under the radar, and would prefer to remain anonymous, but maybe someone like Trevor Rees-Jones, or David Weekley, or Terry Looper. Or there’s a younger woman I’ve met, Vivian Long, who I think is very thoughtful about thinking about Christian philanthropy.
But I just have a lot of empathy for those who struggle in this area. I think it can be a very lonely experience. It can be very overwhelming when you have a lot of people who are asking for funding. And to even navigate, at what point do I shift from making for-profit investments to making Kingdom investments? And how do I think about those things? Like there’s actually really a lot of really meaningful questions and meaningful challenges that are very hard to talk about, and that a lot of people don’t have space to talk about. To me, that would be a really engaging area to hear someone talking honestly and thoughtfully about that intersection.
[00:44:31] JR: That’s a really, really great answer. I love that. All right, Victor. What’s one thing from our conversation today you want to reiterate to our listeners before we sign off? Keep in mind, your listener is very diverse in terms of vocations. Some are leading nonprofits like you, some of them are lawyers, and doctors, and carpenters, and marketers and entrepreneurs. What do you want to leave them with?
[00:44:53] VB: I would say, don’t be bullied by your fear of failure. I just think that, so often, especially those who are in places of – who’ve had experienced high achievement. What happens, I think, at least for me is, we start to smuggle that achievement into our identity. We’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback, perhaps in the past for success, which quietly makes us all more afraid of failure, because that’s such – because it’s been smuggled into the center place of our identity. I think if we allow it to remain there, we’re just so worried that we will fail, and God does not guarantee that our ventures will succeed. But we often I think, limit what we will even try, because we’re afraid of failure. I think if our identity is secured and sealed in Christ, then the verdict is already in. Your failure has no impact. That evidence is inadmissible. The case is over. The verdict is in. You belong to Christ and His virtue becomes yours through the Gospel. Your failure cannot impact it at all.
I think we also missed that God often uses what we call failure to bring about something far more important and far better. The last thing I would say is that fear can insulate us from the faith-building experience of stepping out of the boat and really needing God to show up. That is such a part of entering into the joy of your mastery that I just don’t want you to miss it.
[00:46:16] JR: Yeah. Amen. You’re preaching the back half of Romans 8, right? God is working all things, including our failures for our good that doesn’t necessarily mean material good. It means our sanctification, as Paul says in Romans 8:29, but risk is oftentimes the most efficient vehicle for bringing about those opportunities for sanctification.
Hey, Victor. I want to commend you for the exceptional redemptive work you do every day, for reminding us that risk is right, for reminding us of the commitment of the need to focus in our crafts, to truly master them. And just thank you for working day in day out to make this world a bit more like the Kingdom. Hey, Victor. Where can people learn a little bit more about you and the Human Trafficking Institute?
[00:47:11] VB: You can go to our website, traffickinginstitute.org. traffickinginstitute.org is our website and that’s probably the best place to sort of land and learn more about the work that we do and to discern how you can be perhaps part of stewarding the tangible hope that God has given us and is allowing us to steward in this era of time. When, after thousands of years of slavery flourishing, we actually get to have a front-row seat to seeing it a bit decimated at scale.
[00:47:40] JR: Amen. Who doesn’t want to be a part of that? Victor, thanks for joining us.
[00:47:43] VB: Thank you, brother. What a gift to be with you. Thank you.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[00:47:46] JR: I told you, it was a great episode, right? I didn’t lie to you. I never will. Hey, if you enjoyed this episode of the podcast, number one, seriously go donate to the Human Trafficking Institute right now. The work Victor and team are doing is exceptional, so important and so clearly tied to God’s redemptive purposes in this world. Anyways, that’s all I got to say. I’m not even going to tell you to go rate the podcast today, like I usually do. Just go give to Victor in the organization. Hey, guys. Thank you so much for tuning in. I’ll see you next week.
[END]