David Carr: Well, IJM has been around for 15 years, and I believe they have 16 offices worldwide. It was started in the late 1990s by Gary Haugan, who used to work for the US State Department and was one of the initial people on the ground in Rwanda after the genocide in 1984. He was one of the first people to make an account for the damage done and loss of life, and really saw firsthand the brutality and consequences of the genocide. He came from a legal background, a Harvard graduate, and started this organization to basically battle against issues of injustice around the world. When we think of injustice in this day and age, much of it has to do with slavery-human trafficking. Another situation which is not quite as often heard about but is equally important is in certain countries, such as Africa, where women who are widows (their husbands have been killed or have died) have their land taken from them illegally. People just basically steal their land and threaten them. It's a big problem in a lot of third world and developing countries, and so IJM gets wind of this and is able to fight these cases, usually involving women. So that's another big part of what they do as well.

David: Yes, basically the main thrust of what they do is in the legal realm. For example in Guatemala (I just went there), one of the things they're facing is that children are targeted as sex victims. Not so much trafficking and not so much slavery, but you'll have young children who are sexually abused by a father, an uncle, a neighbor, or somebody, and they are the poorest of the poor. And they have no one to really fight the case for them, so a lot of times they don't even report it-it just kind of keeps happening, keeps going on, and they don't really report it. Because a lot of times the police won't do anything-in fact they will aid and abet the perpetrator. And in areas where access to the law/justice, in areas where that's kind of unheard of for the poor, IJM will go in and try to fight these legal battles. They do so very professionally, very strategically, and they work with local attorneys in these countries, the local government officials, judges, whoever they can work with, so they can bring a case against the perpetrator. They exhaust themselves to make sure it is done properly and not haphazardly and have tremendous success all over the world. And I think that's why I'm so passionate about it because there are a lot of efforts in this day and age-and while they're well-intentioned to do good things for the poor, for the needy-there are a lot of do-good-ers. But a lot of them, as well intentioned as they are, just simply don't have the know-how, the experience, or really the dedication and determination to do it properly. They end up with a lot of shoddy work, for lack of a better way to put it. [Or incomplete?] Yeah, incomplete. You know, it's funny how the term social justice has become such a big idea in our culture, especially with young people, but a lot of them don't really know what it means, and I don't even know that I fully know what it means. I think it comes from a good place of wanting to see justice in the world. We want to see wrongs made right and we want to see people be healed and the broken be put back together and the broken hearted-we want their hearts to healed. But some of this stuff is far beyond any one of us to figure out how to do. When I look at an organization like IJM, I see people that are well-qualified, in fact overqualified for what they're doing. They could be making a lot of money as attorneys, in other careers, where they could be doing really well. And a lot of them had been doing that, but they stepped away from that because they felt the work of IJM was so much more meaningful, so much more urgent.

David: It was sort of a progression of events; a person that we worked with years ago in the band introduced us to the organization. We had heard a little about what they did. I had been hearing over the past 10 or 12 years, more and more; I've, we've, all heard the terms, slavery and human trafficking, become more prevalent in our modern day vocabulary. But I really didn't know what it meant and I really didn't think about it - I almost didn't think it could be happening still. We all think about the 1800s and we all remember that. But you do a Google search now for modern day slavery, and you start to read the real things that are happening all over the world and it's shocking.

David: Yeah, exactly. My wife and I discovered that in a neighborhood where we'd lived previously there was a home that was being run as a brothel at certain times, usually in the evening. I don't know if it was happening while we lived in the neighborhood, but still that fact that we lived in it and it happened in that neighborhood where we lived, and we knew the neighborhood very well, and it's not the kind of place you'd even remotely think it would happen-and here it was under the radar. These underage teenage girls from El Salvador had been smuggled into the US and forced into prostitution and had no way out-in Woodstock GA, the suburbs-and it just blew my mind. As I started to peel back some of the layers of this thing, I had to somehow get involved in some way. It almost felt like a self-righteous thing. You know, everybody should be involved, this shouldn't be happening. This is like a burning building with children inside and we're just standing outside going, "Well that's just how it is," when there's still time to run back in and rescue people. It just felt so urgent. And I understand that now I've come back down to a sort of "ground level," that I understand this isn't going to be everybody's cause and I'm okay with that. But all of us can play a part in it, some part, in what to me is one of the most urgent works of God in our modern day. People are being brutalized and victimized-there are an estimated 27 million slaves in the world. That's a staggering number, but in fact it seems like a conservative estimate when you look at countries where the population far exceeds 27 million and much of the population lives in poverty, such as India where you've got almost a billion people or right at a billion people and many live in abject poverty. So with these statistics, the likelihood that 27 million or more could be slaves is very high. Now I'm not going to say that with any certainty but you have to wonder just how many people are living under that kind of oppression day after day with no hope of rescue. So I see IJM as a light in the darkness, and as an organization with true integrity and true professionalism and the credentials to do it. They're actually going in and doing amazing stuff.

David: Well that's a good question and I'm sure there are different definitions depending on where it's happening. For a long while when you heard the word "trafficking" you'd think of drugs being smuggled from one country to the next and distributed through an underground network. When you think of human trafficking, you have to apply sort of the same thought process. So you have people who by no choice of their own, or maybe they made a bad choice not knowing where it was going to lead them, but one way or another, they are put in a situation where they are forced into some kind of work-and it's not all sex trafficking. There are numerous cases of manual labor and domestic servants. I've read story after story of people who have come to the US for good work and been promised a good job working for a wealthy individual or a wealthy family and working in their home-and really what happens is that they're enslaved to that. When they threaten to leave, then their life is threatened or their family back home, wherever they're from, is threatened. It's very plausible when you think about just how evil people can be in this world, and they play on people's ignorance or lack of language skills. They come here speaking another language, they don't speak English very well and they don't even know how to go to the police. [They're powerless.] Exactly, they're powerless. And so for human trafficking in the US, thankfully we have the rule of law and it's pretty powerful and pretty consistent. Now obviously we could play out cases where it doesn't work and the legal system is messed up, but it's far more robust than it would it be in say India or Guatemala or many parts of Africa. In many places in the world the rule of law works for the wealthy and doesn't work for the poor. I like to think in the US that everyone has a more fair shot of being heard. But if you're brought over here against your will, you have no passport, no green card, and you're working under the radar, and then all of a sudden someone is really taking advantage of you and you need to report it-well, they've already taken advantage of you-but if you're ready to report this person, what are you gonna do, you know? The sad thing is often times when it comes to prostitution they are many female prostitutes in the US who a lot of us, even in the church, would look at and say they've made the bad choice, that's foolish and they shouldn't have done that. [They should just leave, they should just run from that and they can't.] Yes, they should just leave that lifestyle but then you really start looking at their story and it's so common that they were lured into it and that they could not escape, they were so threatened. And I gotta say this as a side note that it really irks me, really gets under my skin, this whole glorification of the pimp and the gangsta and the whole thing. It's like the word "pimp" is just, you know, we're playing around with a word that when you really look at the meaning of it it's not funny, there's nothing funny about that. And I mean it would be like going around using the word "rape" in a funny way, there's nothing funny about that. I just think people are becoming more aware of this and I hope that as the church we would rise to the challenge of supporting these organizations that do this work-that most of us can't do quite frankly, and then also pray for the victims and take them in and love them. We need to urge our leaders to make this a big issue and that's so much of what IJM is doing, and again that's why I support them so wholeheartedly in the work that they're doing.

David: It's good you ask that, yes, that's so true. For instance in 2003 IJM went into Cambodia and launched an investigation that took several years to break into a district right outside of the capital city of Phnom Penh. There was a massive problem of child prostitution; in fact they just had these brothels everywhere. Western tourists from the US and all over would come and go on "business trips" in Cambodia, during which all they were doing was coming over to systematically and repeatedly rape children. It was known, the government knew it was going on, everyone knew it was going on. No one was standing up for these children, nobody was stopping it. The children were completely desensitized to it, it was as if the children were just doing tap dancing on the streets as you might see in New Orleans or New York or something--it was just that blasé. They were providing a service, and everybody was desensitized, and the children were dehumanized. [They were a commodity.] Yeah, they were a commodity. IJM caught wind of it, and in the way that they do, they said this is a lot of work and we gotta rescue these children, but we can't come in like Rambo with machine guns and just yank the children out. Number 1, that's illegal, and 2, we'll get killed or be threatened and that's not how God would have us do this. And what are we gonna do with the children when we get them out? So they had to come up with this entire strategy of how to launch the investigation and how to get the Cambodian police involved, and the judges had to be warned and prepped about how the cases would be brought in before of them and that they had to take this seriously. So the Cambodian officials and everyone was told, "Look, this is happening, this is illegal, it's against your own law and we're gonna help you fight it and you need to fight it cause it's the right thing to do." Fortunately, through much persuasion and after several failed attempts due to police corruption and other problems (there were several officers who sort of ratted out the IJM and anyone who else was fighting this - and alerted the pimps so they were able to prepare themselves for it and thwart the efforts of IJM), they were finally able to have success with it. And what happened was that like 30 girls, ages 5 and up, (which I still can hardly say without getting chills at the terror and horror of that), but girls 5 and up were rescued and put into a home where they were taken care of and nurtured. Some of the very first things they gave these girls was a care package with crayons and coloring books and things to make them feel like children again, teddy bears, just so they could feel like little girls again. These amazing rescue after-care efforts, I just love that. This was back in 2003 that this happened. What happened as a result of this, the bigger thing that I don't know if anyone saw, was that it sent a shockwave throughout the entire community: You can no longer do this, people are going to be watching you, you are going to be prosecuted, spend time in jail, and you may spend your whole life in jail. And all of a sudden that crime diminished significantly-now it didn't go away completely, but that one action sent a shockwave. They may have only rescued 30 children that day, but the ripple effect of that probably rescued thousands of children. And in that whole Southeast Asian/south Asian part of the world there's an understanding that this is not going to work. The pimps are actually not brave at all, they're complete cowards, and the perpetrators are cowards, no bravery in them; taking advantage of basically anarchy and doing whatever they want to do. So when this kind of good effort comes along, it really puts the brakes on that activity. And that's the bigger impact, that's what stops it from happening next time or makes the perpetrators think twice that maybe they should be doing, unfortunately, something else to make money. [But at least it gives them pause, you know, and makes them think, "I could actually be found out."] Exactly. You just wouldn't hear that kind of activity going on in the US, at least to that level. Of course we just talked about my neighborhood and what was going on there and that it was happening. But in Cambodia it was just a known thing. Imagine a kind of seedy part of town in your city where there's brothel after brothel and it's known little girls are raped there every day. That just wouldn't stand, it would be allowed. The people know the law is too robust here and they're just going to be dealt with. I think it's really good to see this effort and I don't think you can completely eradicate slavery forever. I hear people say, "Let's end slavery forever." And that's like saying, "Let's end evil forever." I mean, 'til Christ returns we're unfortunately going to have to deal with evil in the world. But we can fight it now, and people can fight individually-each person who is reading this can actually take part. What I always say is you can be part of the solution instead of contributing to the problem by turning a blind eye to it.

David: Absolutely. I've had to answer the questions from people over the years, "What can I do, how can I get involved?" Give, just give. When you give financially and then you tell your friends to do the same thing, amazing things can happen. Teams of lawyers and investigators and everybody that works diligently, long hard days, to fight for justice in the world-they're actually able to keep doing their jobs, do it better, hire more people to do it, open more offices around the world. Really the goal of IJM or really any organization like it, their ultimate goal is to put themselves out of business so they can get to a place where they don't have to exist anymore. But until that happens, they need your support. Sometimes, you know we're all there, when someone is asking for my money I really need to know it's going to a good place, it's being used wisely and effectively. That they're not wasting my money and only putting a third of it into the effort and the rest isn't going to administration or decorating the office. I want to know that what I'm actually contributing is doing good-and I can't say enough about how involved you will feel as you become a Freedom Partner with IJM. It's a long-term donational arm of IJM where you can give a monthly amount. They offer a remarkable level of involvement. They really stay in touch with you, on a regular basis, giving you progress reports on their efforts. When they launch a new office, a new effort in this country, that country, this city or that place, you know about it. And you can actually specify where your money goes. You can say I have a heart for Southeast Asia, I just really want to give to that - you can give to that effort, they'll funnel the money to that. I tell people to give and ask your friends and family to give. In fact, this Christmas my wife and I are going to ask our families, in lieu of giving us gifts for Christmas, that we just want them to donate to IJM. The biggest gift they can give us is to take part in something that we're so passionate about. You know, you think of the billions of dollars that are going to be spent on Christmas gifts this year, and what kind of impact could we make in the world if we were supporting causes like this?

David: It's a campaign that they've asked me to run for my birthday; my birthday is actually November 15. I'm trying to raise $2,500. I just set that as a number and it seemed like a good easy number to get my head around. So I'm asking friends, family, Facebook followers, everybody to just, for my birthday, if you want to give me a gift. I don't really do birthday presents or ask people for them, but this is obviously almost a tongue-in-cheek thing to say: give me this for my birthday. *laughs* So far I've raised just over $1000 and I haven't put it out there really hard, maybe three or four times, and thanks to amazing friends, you being one of them, and fans of Third Day, I've raised this much. I've always loved how we as a band or when anyone of us individually steps up and cares about something and asks our fans if they would jump in on it as well, how quickly people just go sure, yes, if you're into it I'm into it.

David: Yes, I think anybody can do this. IJM want to spread the word as much as possible and get the involvement of as many people as they can and this is a good way to do it, to get people to take part in it. I think it's good to have the focal point be your birthday or Christmas or some sort of event. You can just do it just because, too. So far it's been really successful and I just encourage people to find out more information. I don't work for IJM, I'm not an official spokesperson, I don't have all the bullet points nailed down that I would if I worked for the organization. But what I know is that I've felt nothing but reward and a feeling of involvement in something bigger than myself. It's not about that, we all know that we give and we do good things and it's not about just our good feelings, but that is a natural by-product. People want to get involved in something truly revolutionary and something that is honestly having a lasting amazing impact on people's lives. The poorest of the poor-we're not only talking about poverty and famine and all these other detracting things that happen to people, but we're talking about poverty with abuse put on top of it, and torture, and these are true victims that have no way out. If you want to be part of their solution, and be their miracle, you can do that.

To support David Carr's FreedomMaker campaign, visit https://ijmfreedommaker.org/campaign/538/David-Carrs-Birthday-Freedom-Wish

To launch your own IJM FreedomMaker campaign, go to http://ijmfreedommaker.org/about

To learn more about human trafficking and the International Justice Mission, go to www.ijm.org

To find out more about Third Day, visit their web site at www.thirdday.com

Third Day's latest album Miracle releases November 6, 2012!