Theology in the Raw - Justice in the Face of Violence, and the Pros/Cons of Short-Term Missions: Dr. Kurt Ver Beek

Episode Date: August 4, 2025

Kurt Ver Beek is the co-founder of the Association for a More Just Society (ASJ). He taught as a professor of Sociology at Calvin University, where he directed the Honduras Justice Studies semester with his wife, Jo Ann, for 20 years. He is the author of Call for Justice, co-written with Christian philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff. Join the Theology in the Raw community for as little as $5/month to get access to premium content.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hello friends, welcome back to another episode of Theology and Round. My guest today is Dr. Kurt Verbeek, who is the co-founder of the Association for a More Just Society, ASJ. And he has taught as a professor of sociology for Calvin University, where he directed the Honduras justice studies semester with his wife, Joanne, for 20 years. He is the author of Call for Justice, co-written with Christian philosopher Nicholas Woltersdorf. And he is the subject of a recent book, Bear Witness, the Pursuit of Justice in a Violent Land, written by Ross Halperin. And that latter book is sort of the subject of our conversation. We talk a lot about his work in Honduras in addressing issues of violence, which was honestly

so fascinating to hear of his very courageous work that he's been involved in, in Honduras. So really fascinating conversation, appreciated Kurt's, just the work that he's doing is just really remarkable. So please welcome to the show for the first time, the one and only Kurt beer. Welcome to Theology in the Raw, Kurt. I'm excited to talk to you as I told you offline. I came across your work on short-term missions years ago and was really deeply impacted by it. It was one of those things where you experientially and academically confirmed some things I was

thinking. But why don't we start with your start at the beginning. What brought you to Honduras and what is the work you at the beginning were engaging in? Thank you, first of all, for having me and very nice to be here. So we were young. My wife and I were early 20s, just graduated, just got married. We're applying for jobs a bunch of places, and we offered an internship in Costa Rica, which we didn't even know where it was. My wife had never been on a plane. I had only flown once, so this was in—I'm 61, so this was in 1986. And we moved to Costa Rica to kind of just thought it would be fun and exciting. And we fell in love with Central America, with Spanish, with the culture.

And two years later, they had a job, a full-time job for each of us in Honduras. And they asked us to move there. So we moved there in 88, and we have been there pretty much ever since. I did a PhD at Cornell in the middle and a few other things, but most of the last 40 years we've been in Honduras. What kind of work have you been engaged in?

So our first work, the first six, eight years, was, they would call it community development. I always think world vision kind of work is an easy way to describe it. So helping poor neighborhoods, we worked with Christian organizations in agriculture projects, micro-enterprise, helping people start small businesses. Six years or eight years when you're 20 something seems like a long time. So it felt like I was ready to do something else and decided to go back to school and get my PhD. I would imagine you've learned a lot over the years. If you were to arrive in Honduras

for the first time now and engage in the same work, would you do things differently? Or what are some things you learned along the way? are like, man, I've learned that this approach is not the best and we would maybe do a different approach? Yeah, good question. So we ended up starting a program after my PhD for Kelvin students, Kelvin University, but we ended up having students from Westmont, Biola, Wheaton all over. And we just told them that this was the program we wished we would have gotten before we went to start working in Central America. So I think a lot of it was that, actually.

Not so much that I would have done the work differently, but we should have known a lot more before we started about sort of history, culture, economics. But the probably more complicated piece of that is not only should we have known a lot more, but, and just better. But I think what we ended up finding when we started our Calvin program and I was teaching university students, we were talking about this community development stuff, and I guess two things. One is there's thousands of organizations and hundreds doing the same

things. Orphanages and small Christian schools and health centers, and it's all good stuff. It's small, and it doesn't end up changing the bigger structures, the bigger reasons people are poor. Kind of, I don't know, I don't want to minimize, but sort of the band-aid approach is what people often say. And so, when we were teaching college students, we started asking, you know, what about the big issues like violence in Honduras and immigration and corruption? Like what organizations, what Christians are working on those topics? And the students couldn't come up with any, and I had already been there eight years and

I couldn't come up with, there was no Christian organizations working on those topics and thousands of Christian organizations working on these topics of agriculture and micro enterprise. And that felt like a huge weight on our shoulder and like that's what ended up leading us to start ASJ. How would you describe, yeah, that the systemic foundation of issues of injustice and poverty?

Like, I think a lot of people listening, unless they're from Honduras or spent some time there, are probably pretty ignorant on just even the political situation, the history, the economic situation of Honduras. What are some of the systemic issues that you've seen? Well, yeah. So, violence has been a huge issue in Honduras for the last, certainly 15, 20 years. And you do hear about it, people showing up in the Mexican-U.S. border because they're fleeing violence, pleading asylum, et cetera. So, I think a good example of that is, you know, we, in our previous work were helping people start small businesses. So, like in our neighborhood, which is a little

rough, a little dangerous, there was a woman we were helping that started a pillow business and she was doing super well and she ended up having three employees full-time making pillows and then the gang showed up and said that they were going to hurt her and her family if they didn't start paying the gang X amount a week and X amount kept going up. And so very quickly, it was more than what she was making in profit. And she just closed the whole business down to avoid violence. And so like that's the micro enterprise community development model is this is how you help

poor people. You give them loans and they start a business, which didn't take in account the whole context of violence and gangs and really a lack of effective police. So a lot of our early work in ASJ was trying to figure that out. Like how do we address violence that most affects the poor because wealthy people can have a security guard in front of their store, in front of their business,

but poor people can't. So I think that's a good example of also something, how we would do things different and how you had to fix this violence issue if you really wanted to help poor people. It sounds impossible. Like, what do you, what do you, what do you, well, first of all, what's, I want to know what's the cause of the violence? Is it drug related? Is it political? Or, and then how do you go about addressing that? political or and then how do you go about addressing that? Yeah, that's a good question. We're going down a fun road here. So I'll tell you another story. Joanne and I, so Carlos moved into this rough neighborhood first. He was our best friend. So the book is the book that we'll talk about a little bit more is about Carlos and me and our friendship and what we did and Joanne really too.

So, Carlos moved into this neighborhood. So, Honduras was one of the most violent countries, Tegucigalpa one of the most violent cities, and our neighborhood was one of the most violent neighborhoods in that city. Carlos moved up there to start a school, and then we thought that was a cool thing that he was doing brave, risky, but cool. And we decided to do the same. So we moved there for a year and we thought, we'll just see how it goes. And that was 26 years ago. We're still living in the same neighborhood. And soon after we moved there, our kids were going to school. They went to Carlos's school in the neighborhood,

and they got sent back home because we didn't know, but somebody had gotten killed. And it ended up it was the father of two of their classmates. And so, they were kind of freaked out. But then Carlos came home the next day and said that the wife of the man who was killed came to his office and she knew who did it. And they were three neighbors. And what should we do? And so Carlos and I, ASJA, this little justice organization was tiny, but we said, you know, we got to do something. And so he knew a couple of like police, I knew a lawyer, we called them, we said, who can we talk to? What should we do? And they all said, don't go to the local police station, because you don't know if you can trust those guys. So we'll we'll help you find somebody. And like we made a few more phone

calls and little follow up, but several weeks went by until these guys killed an off duty cop, and one of them was killed and two of them were arrested. And that kind of the whole thing calmed down. And Carlos and I were sitting around a little while afterwards thinking about all this and talking about how terrible this was. And Carlos is like, you know, not only did they kill this guy, they killed X, Y and Z by my church. And I was like, I didn't know about that, but by my church, they killed A, B and C. And he didn't know about that. And so, we started adding up in these weeks that had gone by, they had killed 13 men. We knew who they were, and they killed 13

men, because we didn't know who to trust. And so, like, we felt again, like one of these weights on your, we got to do something, right? Our neighbors are getting killed, and we know even this time, we knew who they were, and we didn't know what to do. So, he said, what if we could find like a Christian cop or a Christian ex-cop, and then we could trust him. And then he would know the good cops and bad cops because he was like in that system. And he would know, make sure like we could trust these people and a Christian lawyer. So that's what we did. We hired in our neighborhood, like we hired a private detective for poor people.

Like usually rich people hire private detectives. We hired a private detective for poor people. Like usually rich people hire private detectives. We hired a private detective for poor people. And the year that we started this, we had almost 40 homicides, 25,000 people in our neighborhood. So almost one a week. And three years later, we had eight homicides. And so with just two people, we were able to dramatically change the violence in our neighborhood. Churches didn't have evening services. Schools were closing at

four or five o'clock. Kids weren't playing in the street playing soccer. And when this, three years later, that had all switched back and churches were open again, high school was open at night, kids were playing. So then we figured out like it isn't impossible, right? You can build that trust up between neighbors with the police, the police trusting neighbors. There's a little more to it. More of it's in the book. So it's identifying law enforcement that are trustworthy? I would say it's a bigger issue. It's an issue of building trust. So building trust between the neighbors and the police, between neighbors and each other, between the police, because the police don't trust the neighbors. The neighbors don't trust the

police. So nobody will talk to anybody. This is not true just in Honduras. This is true in Chicago. This is true in LA. Like these same issues happen all over the world. And like we came up with a model, ended up a big foundation hired someone to evaluate our model and said it was among the most effective violence prevention programs they had ever studied. So yeah, pretty cool. Going back to my original question, what's the main cause of the violence? So I mean, people would say poverty. I think that's part of it. I actually think that it's a dysfunctional police. If you have this trust, if you have the police that are doing a good job and are trustworthy,

then legitimacy is the word that actually people often use. If the police have legitimacy, then this sort of crime issues may start, but they're quickly brought down. But if people don't trust the police and the police don't trust neighbors, then it's like the recipe and as it's a vicious circle of distrust. So there's poor people all over. There isn't crime like this. When these two things come together, it's when there is a broken security and justice system and pretty extreme poverty.

Just so I can picture, when these people were killed, is it because the perpetrator was after money and the person that got killed didn't give them money? I mean, that might be overly simplified, but it's not like inter-gang related or drug related? So both. So a good chunk of the violence, maybe half, depending on when and where, maybe intra-gang violence, so gang members killing gang members.

But it's never just that. And so one of the ways that gangs around the world create wealth is by extorting. So the bus driver, the taxi driver, the little store in the corner all have to pay them $20 a week or $50 a week, depending on how they negotiate. And if they don't, then somebody gets killed, or somebody gets threatened, or then they maybe get shot at, and then they get killed. But sometimes they kill them right away. And they don't have to do that very often, but they have to do it fairly regularly to

keep everyone else in line. So it depends. There are gang members, there are leaders of these groups, some of which I think really like to do this. So then that happens more often. And until you catch that and arrest that person, that stuff can go bad very quickly. I assume you're known in the community. and I assume what you do is known. Does that put a target on your back?

So I think Carlos and I always worried about that because we had little kids, you know, in the neighborhood. We would drive, we would walk around, walk back and forth the church. We tried really hard at first to kind of keep our role quiet, confidential. And I would say to a large extent, we were successful. So, like, we weren't out interviewing people, telling, but I also know a lot of people did know. So, maybe grace of God. So, have you, I mean, has your life ever been under threat, like directly? Have you been shot at? Maybe, I'll tell you the second, another story that'll answer that question. that'll answer that question. So after this story happened, we were able to bring

the homicide rate in our neighborhood down from super high to relatively low, to one of the lowest in Honduras, this sort of neighborhood. And we figured that out. And then a few years later, the homicide rate in the whole country was the highest in the world So hundreds had the highest homicide rate in the world in 2012 2013 higher than Iraq Afghanistan Colombia

And that was all drug trafficking. It was Honduras was where they were sending all the cocaine from Colombia to Honduras and Honduras to the US. So it was like the main stopping point and tons of people getting killed. Honduras had a homicide rate of 90 per 100,000. The US is like eight. So that's like a comparison. And so we started to think like maybe we could help fix that. Like if we could fix our neighborhood, maybe we could help fix the country.

And we ended up creating an alliance, the Catholic Church, the Protestant Church. We had like the head of the Catholic Church, head of the Protestant Church, the head of the largest university in Honduras, us, some others, World Vision. And we started meeting every week about this, like what can we do?

And we ended up figuring out quite quickly that tons, maybe half of this violence was drug-related and that the police were in on it. Oftentimes, they paid the police. Sometimes the police were on their payroll to participate in this violence. And so we said, you got to purge the police force. So from like 2012 to 2016, that was, we would have events and like 2012 to 2016, that was, we would have events and all sorts of crazy stuff to try and put pressure on the government and the police to clean up. And 2016, the president of Honduras called Carlos, my best friend, and said, you know, you've been, you've been whining about this, to use some other words, for three years. Let's see if you have

the cojones to do it." And we ended up saying yes, and we became so Carlos and one of our staff people became a member of the Purge Commission, is what they called it. Two pastors who were on our board became members of it, and then two people, the government names. So there were six people, four of them connected with us. And they ended up firing half of the police force. In the first two weeks, they fired all of the chief of police of the country. And there was 13,000 cops and they ended up firing 6,000. And this is also in the book with the police. And there was 13,000 cops and they ended up firing 6,000. And this is also in the book with a lot more details.

The number of homicides went down from 90 per 100,000 to last year, it was 22. So like a quarter of the homicide rate. And it was led by church people. I mean, it was led by our organization, Christian, and two pastors. One of the pastors had an attempt on his life. So, two SUVs stopped in front of his house when he was going to go grocery shopping with his wife. Six guys jumped out with M16s and shot at him. He and his wife weren't hit. One of his bodyguards was killed. Another bodyguard was shot eight times.

They ended up leaving the country for Texas. Carlos got tons of death threats, still gets death threats because of this. So, crazy stuff. The pastor was the head of the Protestant church at that time and a pastor of a big church and one of the biggest churches in Honduras. He ended up firing police that went to his church. Imagine that. So, very brave, very cool, you know, not your typical pastor activity, right, to be purging the police force, firing cops. But the homicide went from, you know, 90 to 20 something. I think

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I don't know how you're still alive. It just seems like the people causing the violence have probably a ton of power. And you're one of the main, you, Carlos, and other people in your network are the main instigators from the perspective of getting in the way of the work they're doing, which I'm sure leads to financial loss on their part. I mean, of course, God is, we can all chalk it up to God, but I mean, does your American citizenship add any protection? Like is Carlos at a greater risk than you are? Yeah. So you heard that too. I mentioned Carlos got tons of death threats. I haven't. Carlos is the face of this. I'm always behind the scenes. I'm not in the press. I don't talk publicly about the work that we're doing. Carlos is the public

face and I try and make sure everything gets done at the office that's supposed to be. The pastors were super public in this whole process. But I think also, we try and do everything in alliance. So, it's not ASJ or Carlos and I by ourselves, but it's the Catholic Church, the Protestant Church, World Vision, the business sector, which provides both strength to our message but also protection. You know, we try and do everything as data driven. Everything is based on facts. I have heard that in the US, gang members, etc., if you put them in jail for something that they did and it's well documented, you're much less likely to be a target of revenge later. But if you put them in jail for something they didn't do,

like you trumped up charges against someone, then they will for sure go after you, right? So, I think that may also help protect us that our work is, you know, we try very hard to document everything we say and do. All of our, you know, anytime we make things public, we have percentages and facts and names and numbers, which makes it harder for people to argue with us, but also I think may provide protection. Has your work then led to poverty relief? And I guess indirectly sort of, I mean,

it seems to coincide with micro businesses and people doing the work that you mentioned at the beginning, but you're addressing the underlying systemic issues. Have you seen poverty relief happen? Yep. So, you know, like in our neighborhood, there's lots more small businesses that have come up. Girls were stopped going to high school because they were afraid of

getting sexual violence on the way home or on the way back in school. So you can think of all of that stuff in the whole country as violence goes down. We don't work just on security issues. So one of them is education, so public schools. So there's two million education. So public schools. So there's 2 million kids in the public schools. So here are data driven stuff. We did a bunch of research on different issues in public schools. And the main one we found was a problem was kids were only getting the average of 110 days of school. And in Honduras, they're supposed to by log

it 200 days. So they were getting half the amount of days of school. And we worked hard on that issue again with Catholic Church, Protestant Church, everybody. And for five years running, kids were getting 213 days of school. So more than what they were supposed to. So we doubled the amount of days of school kids were getting. So you can imagine like how much more kids learn. They have twice as many days of school kids were getting. So you can imagine like how much more kids learn. They have twice as many days of school. We're working on health care, making sure the public hospitals have medicines,

the doctors and nurses they want. So yeah, we have all of that fairly well documented. Has the membership among the gangs decreased or is that hard to tell? membership among the gangs decreased? Or is that hard to tell? So that gang stuff is always changing. So the gangs in Honduras have become less violent, so partly because of the stuff we were doing, but also changes in strategy. So there's two main gangs actually in the US and all the way through Latin America, the MS-13 and the 18th Street. So these are the two gangs you'll hear President Trump and other people talking about. Those gangs, especially the MS-13 gang, has seen that they can be more effective, I would say, using less violence and more the threat of violence and have transformed

themselves into more like a mafia kind of financial enterprise where they own businesses. They, in Honduras, have instead of directly extorting people, they have a car wash and they make the taxi drivers and the bus drivers bring their taxis and buses to their car wash and pay higher than they would other places. And so it's not illegal. They can't get in jail for it, but they're still getting their money. So that's interesting. It is.

And it keeps changing. They used to accept cash and now they do, there's electronic forms of transfer in Honduras that are like, what's the one everybody uses here? Like cap shaft? Venmo or... Venmo, yes. So it's not Venmo, but it's like that. So now the gangs have the bus and taxi drivers Venmo them money.

And it's much harder for them to track and they're less likely to get caught. So our efforts to stop this have to adjust quickly. And we're always working on that. But the police and the government is often slow to change. So, we're trying to always pressure the government to adjust to these new techniques. Pete In the US, as you may be aware of, within evangelical circles, there's a debate about you may be aware of within evangelical circles, there's a debate about the relationship between the gospel and social justice. You know, some people would see social justice as an optional add-on, other people say it's more intrinsic to our call as Christian leaders. Does that distinction even exist in the churches in Honduras? It sounds like issues of justice are so woven into the fabric of living in Honduras that to be a Christian leader,

you don't have the luxury of even asking the question, should we care about justice? Yeah, you do. Yeah. I would say, you know, when we were in our 20s and 30s, Carlos and I were super critical of the church in Honduras and for the same sorts of reasons that it's often discussed here. So, a good friend of mine is Nicholas Waltersdorf, a Christian philosopher. He wouldn't call himself a theologian, but I think he often is. And he's come to Honduras and visited our work several times. We wrote a book together, because people could look that up. But, you know, he says there are two major themes, I think everybody knows this, in the Bible as you read it through. It's love and justice. And those are like the two pieces of God's character.

like the two pieces of God's character. And if we want to live biblically out our faith, we need to be concerned about both of those. So, this whole idea of distinctions between justice and social justice, honestly, I don't feel like I even get it usually. But I think we are to live loving lives and just lives, and we are to fight for love and justice wherever we are. And Walthersdorf says that almost always, not almost always, but very common when justice is mentioned in the Bible, he calls it the triad of the vulnerable. And it's the poor, the widow, and the orphan, the poor, the widow, and the orphan, sometimes the foreigner. So, sometimes it's four. And that we should especially seek justice for those groups. So, I think that's where ASJ's work is born, out of trying to

live out that call, I think, God's heart to love and to seek justice for those who are most vulnerable, like the people in our neighborhood who are getting killed. And then our mission statement at ASJ is we are seeking to be brave Christians, trying to get the Honduran justice education, healthcare system working for the most vulnerable. So it's all quite different things from the average nonprofit. So I think this idea of being brave Christians, like if you go out in the street in Idaho or Michigan and ask people to describe Christians, they will use a bunch of words, loving and compassionate, hypocritical,

depending on who it is. I don't think you will have one person till you're brave. But if you read the Bible, the prophets, life of Jesus, the apostles, like I don't think you could not include brave as one of the distinctives. So, we are calling the church in Honduras, but also now the church in the US, to like reclaim this. What does it mean to be brave? And I think lots of, it doesn't take much bravery to love someone, but it does take bravery to fight for justice for someone. So what does that look like?

And then we try to be brave Christians to make the Honduran system work. So like the Honduran public school system has two million kids in it. We can never build enough little Christian schools has two million kids in it. We can never build enough little Christian schools for two million kids. But if we can get the public schools working, like really teaching, like wouldn't that be like that would make God happy. Right. And the public health system, the police, if we can get the police working and people are like, Oh, you never could. Well, I just told you like you could, at least way better. Yeah. And then for the most vulnerable. So like, especially for those poor

people. And what's cool is in Honduras and lots of the world, the public systems are the ones that poor depend on. So if you got some money, you send your kids to a private school or you go to a private doctor. But if you're poor, you got to use the public use the public schools, the public healthcare, you depend on the police. So if we can get those public systems working, we automatically are helping the most vulnerable. That's really helpful and makes a lot of sense. Things are so interconnected.

Shifting gears just a little bit, you've seen in your almost 40 years now, I'm sure, many short-term mission trips come to Honduras. You've done extensive research on this. I would love to, yeah. What are some, let's just start with maybe pros and cons that you've seen over the years of short-term mission trips. And maybe, I know you have some healthy critiques, so maybe there aren't any pros. I don't know, but I would, are there pros and cons to short-term missions in your 40 years of experience in seeing

this? So lots of people say that I'm anti short-term missions, and I'm not. I would like more people to go. I would like more people to go to Honduras. And then people say, yeah, well, Kurt would like more people to come, but he's worried. So the two things people often add to short-term missions is a bunch of training in advance, which I'm not even sure that's that helpful. Or what you do there has to be different. I'll give you one example. We were with a short-term mission group one time and they were throwing tortillas to each other like frisbees. And Joanne and I were all upset. That was so disrespectful. These poor people have hardly any food and they're throwing tortillas like frisbees. And so we hollered at them and said, you know, don't be disrespectful

as people. And then we were talking to some of the community people later and they're like, what was your favorite things? And they're like, oh, we just love spending time with them. And like, that was so funny when they were throwing tortillas to each other like frisbees. Like, them and like, that was so funny when they were throwing tortillas to each other like frisbees. Like, so even like we thought of these Hondurans as super fragile and like this group could come how mess them up in a week, you know, like, and I don't think they are Hondurans are super resilient. So what's my major critique? My major critique is people go on short-term missions to go and do something, and then they'll come back and tell you what they did. Like, why did you go, you know, you ask grandma and grandpa for money? Because we're going to go paint a church, or we're

going to do VBS. 90% of them during this Christian already, Like almost everybody goes to Catholic or Protestant church. So I think that why people should be going on short-term missions, but almost never are, is to really change themselves. And people will say that, but it's not really happening. So I would measure the success of short-term missions based on what happens when people come back. So they go to Honduras, but then those kids go to a school that's half Latino, but they don't have a single Latino friend. Or their church is all white and a Latino comes in and they don't feel welcome. But they loved spending time with those Hondurans when they were in Honduras. Or they gave 2% of their income to missions before,

and when they come back a year later, they're still giving 2%. Or they volunteered in Africa at an AIDS orphanage. But there's AIDS patients in Chicago, and they're not volunteering there, right? So the way I would measure the success or failure of short-term missions is not how much training they got,

even very much about how much they do. All of this is caveated, right? I'm simplifying. I think they need a little training. I think it's a little important what they do. You could do terrible things. Most of them aren't. But the way I would measure the success

of short-term missions is what has changed in your life a year later. And I think that's not impossible, but it's a little bit harder. Can I get time for one story quick? Sure. So, my dad did marriage encounter when I was in high school. And he went for a weekend with my mom and when he came back they were all like lovey-dovey, kissing, touching. It was like freaking us all out. It lasted like a month and that was done. When I was in college, my mom did did marriage encounter and they had to set a bunch of

goals. Both times they had to set goals. But then every month for a year, they met at church for two hours, husbands and wives separate, and then they would come together. And every month they had to tell the other, my dad had to tell the other men what his goals were and did he do them. So go out on a date once a month with my mom, buy her flower, you know, all the stuff she wanted, and she would try and do some of the stuff he wanted every month. And my mom died six years ago, tomorrow. Till she died, they did devotions together every morning. They would go on a weekend away just with the two of them in their 80s, two or three times a year,

because those were patterns and habits that they formed after marriage encounter. So why am I telling you this? So if we went on short-term missions trip, I think it's more important to start meeting once a month to set goals like, what are you going to change in your life when you get back to Chicago? I'm going start giving more money. I'm gonna volunteer at the Chicago AIDS patients. I'm gonna, and then meet once a month with that group for an hour or for two hours after church and hold each other accountable and create habits. I'm gonna start giving more money.

I'm gonna start volunteering, whatever it is. I think then you're gonna see a year later that short-term mission trip change people's lives, but because people were held accountable to do it. And would you bake that into the pre-trip training? So that it's expected? My mom and dad had to sign a contract before they went to that marriage encounter that they committed to two hours once a month for a year.

And that was, that made the difference. I think it's the same thing. You want to go on short-term missions? Grandpa and grandma are going to pay for it. We'll give you a couple hours of training before you go, but you got to have, you know, in your youth group or whatever you're going to do it, once a month for an hour or two hours where you're going to have set a bunch of goals and you're going to do it once a month for an hour or two hours

where you're going to have a set of a bunch of goals and you're going to hold each other accountable if you did. I mean, it's the same thing like at New Year's resolutions, we're going to start running, we're going to get in shape, we're going to lose weight. If you don't have anybody to hold you accountable, you don't do it. So I think we need that. In short-term missions, that experience of being in Honduras for a week can be life-changing, but you need someone to help you actually put that into practice when you come back.

You've done research on the negative impact of building projects. I remember being really impacted by that. Can you help us understand, because this is such a popular thing, right? Among short-term missions, you go in and you engage in a building project. And on the face of it, it seems really like you're just super helping them bless the community.

And maybe there's some pros. Actually, yeah. Are there any pros to building projects? And what are some of the cons? I'll start with, I always like to end with the positive. I'll start with the negative. Okay So like hurt Honduras got hit by Hurricane Mitch 1998 terrible hurricane Parked over Honduras for five days like Wow Imagine hurricane winds and rains for five days. So just awful

One of the groups came down, wanted to build houses. Somebody in the church made garage doors. So they were like, hey, what if this guy donated like thousands of garage doors and we'll figure out how to turn them into a house and then it'll be cheap and we can put them up fast and stuff. So on the North coast of Honduras, where it's very hot and very humid, these church people

had figured out to use like a two-by-four structure and stick the garage doors to it and cut out some holes for doors and windows. While those two-by-fours rotted in two years, the structure's falling apart. And those garage doors, when you cut them open, had like a sort of insulation in the middle that caused all kinds of allergic reactions among the people. And so just imagine, right,

like these super hot environment, the sun baking these houses, and people inside getting allergic reactions to the stuff and then the house is falling over a couple of years. So it probably would have cost another 30% to build cement block houses or adobe wall boxes houses even better. Would have taken longer. Local people could have done it with, you know, again, I'm not anti,

like, come down, you know, build the first three houses, and then local Hondurans will build the other 30. So it's a good example, I think, of super good intentions, like after a hurricane, wanting to do the right thing, but often it doesn't quite work out that well. I know another school project where a high school group came down and ran all the wiring for a new high school. And as soon as they left, they had to rip it all out and have an electrician put it back in, because the kids didn't know how to do wiring, which is, you

know, so like good intention. I also flip side during this Hurricane Mitch research I did on short-term missions, was very powerfully impacted. Dozens of interviewees that we would interview would start crying and say, I lost my house and I'm so poor, and I thought I would never have a house again. And, you know, God gave me this house. This group of Canadians, this group of people from Chicago came down and financed it, or helped us build these houses. And I'm just so thankful.

So having a house, having property, not renting, not living in a shack on the edge of a river is super powerful, changes people's lives. So it's not a bad thing. Again, that's a good example of what I minimized, but I shouldn't have so much. It is important what we do and how we do it to think that through a little bit. It sounds like working with and underneath local leaders in these building projects so that you don't put in toxic garage doors or whatever, or establishing a building that isn't conducive to the environment that you're not familiar with.

Yeah. So I have some short-term materials that are online, press the way you put the link in and something. One of the things, people get nervous when you say under, maybe not in theory, but in practice they do. They don't like anybody being in charge of them, like lots of these short-term mission leaders. But I said, if you were going to most say a short-term mission trip to Hond I said, you know, if you were gonna most of, say a short-term mission trip to Honduras

easily spends $50,000. You know, you get 20 high schoolers, quickly $100,000. So if you were gonna invest $100,000 in some stock or something, in some mutual fund, you would do some research, right? You'd call up some experts and figure out before you spent all that money. But oftentimes, we don't do any research about who we're, you know, doing these hundred thousand dollar investment with. It's the missionary from our church,

or it's, you know, this kid's aunt who's in the Dominican. And she may be like a cranky old missionary who's been there years and doesn't even like Dominicans and like there are plenty of missionaries that are like that. Yeah. So, you know, because she's so cranky, the other missionaries say, you just run our short-term missions program, right? Like that's how it often happens. So like if we would do research about a mutual fund, let's do research about who we're going to do this

with. And let's ask around, like, we're thinking about going to Honduras. People in your church and ask around, like, who's doing the most interesting, like, the coolest work in Honduras? And I could get an email and a few other people get emails and we send you some names. And then you call people and you look at their website. It's maybe like a day's work, maybe eight hours, right? It's not like months of research. And if you can find a really good partner, then you can just trust them. They're not going to have you building garage doors, houses. They're not going to have you wiring, running electric wires through a high school, right? They're gonna have you doing appropriate things. And they're gonna have, if you do do something stupid, throw frisbee, tortillas like frisbees,

they're gonna know how to soothe that over after you leave, right? So I think instead of worrying so much on our end, like, am I doing the right thing? Just spend a little time finding the best missionaries, the best organization in whatever country you're going, and they'll take care of the rest. Is there a negative impact on economics of a city or village when short-term mission trips are, in a sense, coming in with like free labor? Does that have a negative impact on the economics of the community, or is it complex?

It's not complex. It's pretty simple. OK, so the high schoolers came and painted the church. It took them three days. There was 20 teenagers. They probably didn't do a very good job. They'll probably have to repaint it again in a year or two and then they'll hire some hundredths to do it.

It would have been a couple hundred dollar job for somebody else. So yeah, again, if those high schoolers go back and over the next year raise $20,000 each, that wouldn't be hard, right? 20 high schoolers, I'm going to do the math. 20 high schoolers and let's commit to raising $1,000 a month each between our parents and our grandparents, and we're going to do a bike ride, and we're going to raise money for Honduras.

If those 20 raised, let's say $12,000 each, that would be $240,000 to support that missionary or that organization in Honduras that they went to paint for. And then you'd be like, oh, that was a fabulous investment for that missionary. They could have given a $500 painting job to some hundred, but those kids ended up raising $240,000 just the first year. And now that's money that's going to go into building a new church or a new school or painting a whole bunch of places. And if they keep doing that, like they raised 240 the first year, but maybe they keep doing it, maybe it goes down, but 10 years later, they're still raising money for that missionary. So I think that's the typical criticism of these groups.

Like the Hondurans are fragile, they're taking jobs away from Hondurans, they're doing this and that. Which is all true. Not that true. But if that's the end of the story, then that's all it is. But if those kids come back and are praying for that church, they're raising money for that church, they're volunteering in their own neighborhoods, they're helping AIDS orphans in Chicago, then the cost benefit analysis switches over completely.

So it sounds like you're saying the physical work that these short-term trips produce is not really the main benefit, it's the relational connection that if that can extend over a long period of time, that far outweighs the material payoff of whatever work they did in the 10, 12, 20 days that they were there. Yeah.

So like I know a group in Chicago that would go down to an orphanage for a week with a bunch of men and their sons and daughters. And like, you know, they'd say, we just love on those kids. They didn't, they didn't speak English, they didn't speak Spanish, you know, they would hang out, they play soccer. But 20 years later, almost all of those guys are still giving money to Honduras, to that orphanage, their kids care about that. So like, the cost-benefit analysis, we need to stretch it out way bigger than the typical critique or the typical positives, right?

So they say, oh, it was worth it because VBS, if we had one person make a commitment to Christ, that soul is of immeasurable value, right? Or we painted this church, or we did this or that. All of that might be true, but it's probably still minimal compared to, you know, like my mom and dad still doing devotions together 60 years later, right? If the people who went to Honduras as teenagers continue, maybe not even Honduras, but continue giving more of their income to missions, to praying more, to listening to the news and to writing their congressman or their senator about X issue that's going on in Honduras

or Philippines or wherever they are. Then it was super worth it. That trip was hands down, send 100 more people there because we know 20, 30 years later, this is still going to be paying off. But then we got to just create that little structure to make sure that happens. Oh, that's helpful. That's really helpful. I'm curious as you're talking, what's the general perception among Hondurans about Americans? Is it a positive perception? Is it mixed? Is it negative? Yeah, it's interesting.

So in Latin America, there's all sorts of each country, parts of countries probably have quite different perspectives, but Hondurans love North Americans. Really? I would say often despite the facts. So yes, I would say very seldom do Joanne and I get sort of a negative reaction from someone when they meet us, almost always like neutral or sometimes extremely positive. And there's a long history of US involvement there.

Yeah, it was curious. I know the US has kind of done lots of pretty terrible things to a lot of Central American countries. I mean, Guatemala and Nicaragua. Despite the facts, like I said. Yeah, yeah. Is Honduras, yeah, I'm blanking now on the history of Honduras with that. Have they been the victim of a US-backed coup or economic?

In the 1880s, US mining companies went in and took tons of gold and silver and didn't leave a whole lot afterwards. The 1900s of banana companies, Chiquita and Dole went in, bought up lots of the property. Were some positives out of that, a lot of negatives to kind of impose their will. Often the companies were way bigger than the 100 and governments, way more powerful than the 100 and governments. So not a lot of limits set around what they could do and couldn't do. And we have the Contra Wars in the 80s of the Ronald Reagan, where the US was pumping tons of money into Honduras to arm the Contras,

who were Nicaraguans living in Honduras. So Honduras had a foreign army in its own country, tons of corruption and stuff around that. So yeah, there's a lot of things Hondurans could be upset about. But I think in general, the perception is, and even if some people would say that, like, you know, even if we don't always like what the government does or what businesses do, but they like North Americans, they feel like the people of the United States are good and care about

them. And it's some of the truth. Lots of short-term missions down, lots of people coming down, good intentions, friendly. Yeah, that's helpful. Hey, in the last couple of minutes, tell us about the book, Bear Witness. I forget, is it out? Yeah, it's out already, right? Came out in May. Bear Witness, the author is Ross Helprin. I'm sure you can put the link in the site or something. But it tells the story in a lot more detail of the things I just told you about,

the gang violence in our neighborhood, the police purge, our education work. It was written by a journalist, so we didn't pay him. I think he got it mostly right. We're not happy with all of it. You can also go to the ASJ website. It's asj.us. And we have a piece of the website dedicated to the book. There's an interview with me, with Carlos, with the author that gives you a little more background about the book and about our organization. Did he come down and like live with you guys for a while? Yeah. So we met him. I was speaking in New York City at an event on violence and violence prevention and he got fascinated with this little story I just kind of told you.

So he came down to write an article, then he was going to write like a short article. Then it was going to be like a New York Times Magazine article, like a longer version. And then he decided it was going to be a book. And he ended up working seven years full time on this. So this was, yes, this was his main job for the last seven years. Did tons of research, tons of interviews. Yeah, it reads as a novel. So it's nonfiction, but it reads as a novel.

I think people will like it. What will people walk away after reading the book or what kind of person would be interested in this book? So it's somewhat like a crime novel. It's a little bit like, you know, could you reduce violence in a neighborhood? Could you reduce violence in a country? Here's a couple of kind of crazy people who thought they could and came at it from a very Christian perspective, which the author is not a Christian. He's raised sort of non-practicing Jews. So he worked hard to get that part right. I think it's another thing he got mostly right, like why Carlos and I were doing what we were

doing. And, yeah, I think it's a fun read. Well, Kurt, thank you so much for being a guest on Theology in the Raw. Where can people find you and your work? You mentioned the ASJ website. ASJUS.org. Okay. Thanks again. Appreciate you. This show is part of the Converge Podcast Network.