Shifting Culture
Shifting Culture invites you into transformative conversations at the intersection of faith, culture, justice, and the way of Jesus. Each episode, host Joshua Johnson engages guests who challenge conventional thinking and inspire fresh perspectives for embodying faith in today's complex world. If you're curious about how cultural shifts impact your faith journey and passionate about living purposefully, join us as we explore deeper ways to follow Jesus in everyday life.
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Shifting Culture
Ep. 332 Kurt Ver Beek - Becoming Brave Christians: Fighting Violence and Corruption in Honduras
What does it look like to seek justice when the problems seem too big to solve? In this episode, sociologist and justice advocate Kurt Ver Beek shares his journey from the Midwest to the front lines of Honduras - moving into one of the country’s most violent neighborhoods, confronting systemic corruption, and helping lead a nationwide police reform that saved thousands of lives. We talk about the power of proximity, the importance of alliances, and what it means to be a brave Christian - willing to act in the face of fear. Kurt reminds us that even the most complex issues can have practical solutions, and that God’s heart for the most vulnerable is still calling us to action.
Kurt Ver Beek is the co-founder of the Association for a More Just Society (ASJ). He taught as a professor of Sociology for 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.
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One of the things that we often tell ourselves and our staff is is that none of these problems are so difficult or take so long to fix. Because I think it's a message our culture tells us this is so complicated, it's going to take so long. And we have seen again and again that they're not you grab a piece and you start working on that, and it ends up it isn't that complicated, and it doesn't take that long, and oftentimes solutions are much more achievable than you would have guessed.
Joshua Johnson:Hello and welcome to the shifting culture podcast in which we have conversations about the culture we create and the impact we can make. We long to see the body of Christ look like Jesus. I'm your host. Joshua Johnson, what do you think about when you think about justice? Do you picture small local acts of kindness, like food drives, micro loans, neighborhood cleanups. Well, those things matter, but what happens when the real barriers to change are violence and corruption and broken systems? Well, my guest today, Kurt Verbeek, has spent decades in Honduras wrestling with those bigger questions, from moving his family into one of the country's most violent neighborhoods to helping lead a nationwide police purge. Kurt's story is one of proximity and persistence and of refusal to let fear have the last word. In our conversation, we talk about what it means to be a brave Christian, why solutions to complex problems might be closer than we think, and how caring for the most vulnerable can reshape a society. So join us. Discover God's heart for love and justice. Be brave and move towards the vulnerable. Here is my conversation with Kurt. Verbeek Kurt, thank you for coming on shifting culture. It's an honor to have you here. So welcome.
Kurt Ver Beek:Thank you so pleasure to be here. Yeah, I'd love to start with
Joshua Johnson:the story. So how does a sociologist from the Midwest just happen to find himself at the front lines of justice and one of the most violent neighborhoods in Honduras.
Kurt Ver Beek:Well, you make it sound very dramatic, but the story probably wasn't. So my wife and I met and got married, went to Calvin University and were married soon after we graduated. This is back in 1986 so that's what you did. Very happy I did. And then we got offered an internship to go to Costa Rica, and so we went there for a couple of years, and then they offered us a job in Honduras. So we went there for six years, and then I went back and got a PhD. And then we thought it would be really cool to start a semester in Honduras program to teach college students all this stuff we should have known before we went to Central America the first time. And while we were doing that, one of my best friends, Honduran Carlos, moved up to this very poor, rough neighborhood, and we had always thought that something like that would be cool, and so we decided to do it too, and and things went from there.
Joshua Johnson:So as you moved into the neighborhoods, and you're looking, how do we align ourselves, how do we how do we become part of this neighborhood and help and be a people of of help in this place and make a better neighborhood. What were some of the things that you were starting to try? What were your ideas coming in?
Kurt Ver Beek:Yeah, so it's a nice little meshing of things. God does things this way, I often find so we had flirted with the idea of moving to a neighborhood like that, but we never had, because we were kind of scared. We'd gone to a church there for eight years, but we hadn't moved up there, and then Carlos moved up there, and that sort of like made it seem okay and and safe to try. Then I were there. Was also the first year I was teaching college students, Calvin Wheaton, Biola students, those students we were talking about, like, you know, how to help poor people, basically. And so we talked about the traditional things, micro enterprises and agriculture programs and health programs. And then, I'm not exactly sure why, but I included a textbook that had a bunch of these macro issues like violence and corruption and sort of issues at the at the government level. And we started talking about that, and we said, you know, the students were saying, there's 1000s of orphanages in Honduras. There's hundreds of micro enterprise organizations, what Christian organizations are working on issues like violence, what Christian or and I, honestly, I couldn't come up with a single one. So we have 1000s of organizations doing the same thing, and none of them addressing these big issues. So Carlos and Joanne, my wife, and I decided to start this organization. Nation, but we weren't really even thinking about our neighborhood at that point. The neighborhood came in, I think, because of necessity, and that wasn't part of the plan,
Joshua Johnson:right? So what was the necessity? Why was it something that it had to happen?
Kurt Ver Beek:Our kids went to Carlos' school right in our neighborhood, and they went to school one day and got sent home right away, and we didn't really know why, but Carlos came over that night and said that one of the fathers of my kids classmates had been killed that morning. So he he sold fruits and vegetables out of a back of a pickup truck it was going down about 430 in the morning to buy more fruits and vegetables, and three guys with ski masks came and and stole his money. And after they took his money, they shot him in the head in front of his wife and kids and the the wife had gone to Carlos office that afternoon and said she knew who it was, and there were three witnesses who were willing to testify, which was also crazy. So we knew who the guys were, and we had witnesses willing to testify. So right there, Carlos and I got on the phone, and we called friends, and we said, like, who should we talk to? Can we go to the police? And they're like, no, no, no, at least don't go to the local police station, because you don't know. Like, one of them may be cousins of the bad guys or friends with them, so don't do that, but we'll help you like we'll help you find someone you can trust. And Weeks went by, and in the end, they robbed they didn't know it, an off duty police officer and killed him, and then the police responded in mass, two of them were captured, three were killed. And when Carlos and I sat down a week or so later, we were like, Boy, those those guys were really violent. You know, they, Carlos says they killed X and Y and Z around my church. And I said, Well, I didn't even know about x and y and z, but I know about a, b and c by my church. And we ended up counting that they had killed 13 people after we knew who they were, we could have saved 13 people if we would have known, if we would have done something, basically. And so we ended up coming up with this idea that if we hired an ex cop, who we trusted was a Christian, was our idea, and a lawyer, then the cop would know who are the good cops and who are the bad cops, and so that cop would be our little bridge of trust to the police. The year we started that program, our neighborhood had almost 50 homicides, and three years later, it had only eight.
Joshua Johnson:Wow, you know these micro issues you're you're thinking that if you have charity, if you have micro enterprise, if you could, you know, teach farming, subsistence farming, so people could say, but if there's corruption and violence and things there, money can get stolen. They can't get off the ground. They can't do these things that going upstream is something that most people don't do when they're trying to solve problems. I think, if you're looking around the world, I mean, we're looking at micro issues everywhere, these macro issues are something that is really difficult. How did you start to even wrap your head around solving a macro issue and thinking that, man, if we just have an ex cop, if we have a lawyer, things are going to be a little bit better, and then we could actually help in these this neighborhood in other ways as well.
Kurt Ver Beek:I mean, I remember talking to Carlos like we didn't know it would work, and we also didn't know if we would be safe, because if bad guys found out we had our kids and our wives lived in this neighborhood too, and so we were scared, but we felt like we had to do something. I think that those 13 lives weighed heavily on us. So again, I think it was necessity, and I can give you a couple examples, like we helped start a pillow business. A woman was making pillows in her house and was doing really well, and she had, in the end, three employees, and then the gang showed up and started to extort money from her, and got to the point she was paying the gang more than her total profits, and she had to shut it down. So I think those are the things that people often don't understand, and probably we would not have even gone there, except for this woman showing up in Carlos office and saying, you have to do it. But then once we started down that road, we're like, well, this, this makes sense. Like, how can we do this in other topics? But also, how can we do it at a larger scale?
Joshua Johnson:There's a few times already you said we were scared, but you did it anyways. You're scared, but you did it anyways. You talk, you talk about making brave Christians, people that are brave, that you know, one of the sayings that my wife and I have, it's one of our lifelong sayings, is to defy fear and to do something that's def. Call even in the face of fear and being scared, what does it mean for you to be a brave Christian, to stand up in a place where it is there is a lot of fear. It is scary. How do we how do people become a brave Christian?
Kurt Ver Beek:A bunch of answers to that. One story I often tell is Jesus tells us quite clearly, right? Love our neighbors as ourselves, which I think is sometimes people over emphasize love your neighbors, and sometimes people mostly we over emphasize love ourselves. So we keep those two in balance so we don't do crazy things. But when I would walk my daughter was, you know, 1516, years old, and I would walk my daughter to youth group at the church and walk her home. I would walk her because it wasn't so safe. Young men would be standing on the corners, and they would say stuff to me, and even a couple times they got me riled up enough that I like started. I they started it, but I really started like something I shouldn't have. What I always would tell people is it seems clear to me biblically, that you know, if I love my daughter, I will do almost anything for her, like to protect her, to keep her safe. So what does that mean? If my daughter is in in your house in Kansas City and and she's at risk. I would want you to love my daughter the way I do like I probably wouldn't expect the same, but I would expect a lot, because it's my daughter. And if your daughter is in Honduras visiting me, I know you would expect me to do that. And so how do we live more like that? Right? That every young woman in my neighborhood is someone's daughter who loves them like that. So our mission statement is brave Christians trying to make the Honduran systems work for the most vulnerable. And just that term brave Christians, like, if you go out in the street, I'm in Grand Rapids, Michigan, you're in Kansas City, and we ask people like, describe a Christian, and they'll give a bunch of words, loving, nice or hypocritical. Mean, you know, depends who you're talking to. I don't I bet you. I would bet a lot of money. Not a single person would say brave, the average, and maybe even average person in the pew, maybe even 99% of people in the pew. But if you look at the Bible, the life of the prophets, the life of Jesus, the life of the apostles, like that is a characteristic that jumps out at you immediately. So we both in Honduras and in the states are trying to reclaim that. Like, let's see what it's like if we individuals live this out to be brave Christians. And I often finally say, Yeah, that's true. Like, I need to talk to my coworker, you know, like the desk next door about Jesus. Like, that's how much brave, that's how far brave goes. But I think it's way more than that. And I think that talking has weight when we are living a life that's different when, like, the way we use our money, the way we use our time, where we live, or something that is, is cure, makes people curious, makes them inner.
Joshua Johnson:Being brave as well, is doing what Jesus did, is moving into the neighborhood of being with the people that you want to help. It's not a, you know, a fly by night, just drop in and do some things. So if you think that what you're trying to do in different areas, in Honduras, the Association for a more just society, how does proximity and being in the neighborhood actually help? And where maybe has Christian charity or work missed the mark.
Kurt Ver Beek:First of all, like it didn't start out like it ended right? So we, we said, my wife and I said, Let's do it for a year and we'll just see how it goes. And I really thought it was going to be terrible, right? It was going to be scary, it was going to be stinky, it was going to be like, all, almost all bad things, was my impression, but we're going to try it, and we still live there. 25 years later, we're still living in the same in the same house, in the same neighborhood, and we love it. So it's not suffering for Jesus anymore. It really never was, but we thought it was going to be. So I think that's important, and I think that would be lots of other people's experience when you take those risks. I think we almost always think it's going to be bad, and I think not always, but lots of the time it isn't. But I do think, I mean, the story of violence is a good one, but I can give you one more. When we moved in our neighborhood, kids go to public schools. 2 million kids in the public schools, and we would see these kids, and they would be like, never in school, and they're like, what's going on and and so we started asking our neighbors and Sunday school and on the street, and they're like, Well, you know, teacher didn't show up today, and teachers are on strike, and there's. Training today, supposedly so. And it ended up we did some research and kids were only getting 110 days of school. And so kids are supposed to get 200 days of school, 205 hour days. And so you imagine, like missing half of the days of school. Let's say you're doing your kids are learning fractions or multiplication division, and if they only get half of that like then they then they get the seventh grade, eighth grade, 12th grade, they don't know the basics. So it's super damaging to kids learning. So we, not just us, we got together with the Catholic Church, Protestant church, World Vision, a bunch of organizations, and we started a campaign, 200 days of school. And it became like a national thing, and everybody was talking about it, and we ended up getting schools to back to 200 days, 200 for five years running, before covid, they had 213 days average. So I don't think we would have known that if we didn't live in our neighborhood. I don't think we would have like, you know, our neighbors wouldn't have been complaining to us. We would have lived in a middle most gringos, most North Americans. If you live in Honduras, you live in a nice neighborhood because it's safe and you're worried about your kids, and then your kids go to private schools, and you go to a private doctor, and you may have a security guard at the end of your street. You see those other people, but you don't live it the same way.
Joshua Johnson:So if you are running the Association for a more just society, if you're running something like that, justice, what is justice for you? And what does justice mean? What does it look like to have a just society?
Kurt Ver Beek:So Carlos and I run it together, first of all, and like, Carlos is the main face, the external face, and I'm kind of in the office trying to make sure everything gets done. So just so that's clear. So Nicholas Wolterstorff, I don't know if you've had him on your program, but he would be great on your program. So program. So, Christian philosopher, good friend of mine, just finished his he's 92 I think, or 93 just finished his 18th book, which is and it's really good. So Nicholas waltersdorf writes about justice a lot. He, you know, says something I think pretty much all of us know, like there's two big themes in the Bible, sort of love and justice. The character of God is clearly based on love and justice. So justice is not like some extra thing that we're adding or or that isn't important to God. And then he says, when we look in the Bible at when justice is mentioned, it's very often mentioned along with he calls the triad of the vulnerable. It's the orphan, the poor and the widow, sometimes the foreigner. So sometimes it's four, but it's almost always those three. And so he said it's clear to him that in God's heart there are like these three groups that we should be caring especially about these, these vulnerable groups. So it's important is to figure out today where we are in your town, in your church, in in our case, in Honduras, they may not be those same groups, but who are those three or four groups that are most vulnerable, and then what can we do for them? And so in the Bible, in the Old Testament, it was allow gleaning, and, you know, make sure they could meet their food needs and their economic needs, but it was also figuring out. So I think that's what justice is to us. Like, how do we protect how do we care for those people that God has identified from the very beginning of the Old Testament all the way to today, as those that are most vulnerable and often are taken advantage of. And that's what we're trying
Joshua Johnson:to do. That's a very admirable thing. I mean, it's the heart of God right to care for the most vulnerable. We often don't see that taking place, and we need to. And I think sometimes, when we we come in and we want to care for the most vulnerable, oftentimes, I think people have in their head, like old westerns, they have white hats and black hats, right? There's the the good guys and the bad guys. But when you you get into the middle of this, and you're, you're dealing with with violence and murder, corruption on on a lot of different sides. It seems to be some gray hats in the middle, and there's some some gray areas that you have to navigate. So as you're looking at maybe the ethics of justice, that we know that it's not just black and white, that there's some areas that you actually have to have discernment and discern with the Holy Spirit. What is the greater good, or the way that you should go? How do you start to discern what is. The is the way to go. And you know, can you give me example of something that was difficult to figure out?
Kurt Ver Beek:So I'll give you a quick answer that at least in my case, it's always trying to have really smart, wise people around, because I don't trust myself. One of our staff who I love Omar Rivera. He says, If you want to change the world, you need a really good team. And I think that's true, but let me give you a good example those gray hats. So So we started with violence in our neighborhood, and surprisingly successful. So a big Foundation came down and did analysis of a whole bunch 28 projects, I think, in different countries in Latin America, and said that our project was the most successful in in preventing violence. So we were very successful in one neighborhood. We spread to some other neighborhoods. But then in 2011 2000 1200s had the highest homicide rate in the world, so higher than Afghanistan, higher than Iraq, higher than Colombia, higher than Mexico. So we had 90 homicides for every 100,000 people. And when we started to figure out why it was all about drug trafficking, so it was drugs coming from Colombia, mostly, not just drug cocaine. Was one drug, cocaine coming from Colombia. It would stop in Honduras and on its way to the US. So US consumers were were driving this violence, but Honduras was the victim. And so when we started to figure out more, like, okay, so what can we do about this? We ended up figuring out that the police, and really top levels of the police, that the chiefs on down, were involved. They were on the payroll. They were they were sometimes just looking the other way, but oftentimes they were transporting these drugs in police vehicles, like they were. They were fully in so we ended up starting to put we we brought together Catholic Church. Protestant church is another one of our pieces of our model as we try and do this all in alliance. And we started pushing in 2012 to purge the police. Was the word we used, which was a strong word, even in Spanish. It's very strong. We need to clean up the police force, but we said purge. And for four years, we had this group, and we would hold events, and we were doing research and like suggestions how to fix it, but the government wasn't listening. And in 2016 we find a big, a big thing happened that pushed the President over the edge, and he called Carlos, and he said, let's let's see if you have the cojones to do what you've been whining about for four years. And so two of our staff, Carlos, and one other staff member, two pastors, joined this commission, and the government named two two members. The head pastor of this group was a pastor of a huge church in Tegucigalpa, so a very important Christian leader. And they started reviewing all the cops in the country, there were 13,000 and deciding who needed to go. In the first two weeks, they fired all of the chief of police, nine chief of police went the first two weeks like imagine that right in Chicago or New York or Kansas City, and church leaders saying you gotta fire all the police, heads of the chief of police, and then down the pastor fired police who went to his church. So imagine that they ended up firing 6000 out of the 13,000 cops. They also designed a new training program. The Swiss government helped. So it had had to be good. The Swiss were involved. They ended up training 10,000 new cops over this same three year period. So they fired 6000 trained 10,000 more, and put them into the force. And the homicide rate in the country went from 90 the last year it was 22 so like a quarter. So I think it's a good example of several things like one you said gray hats like you think the cops are the good guys, and you end up finding out the cops aren't the good guys. You end up thinking pastors and Christian people are nice and supposed to sort of stay in their lane, but the things were so bad in Honduras that the government, the police, couldn't clean up themselves. It was, it was too contaminated, so they needed outsiders to come in. And then you see the effect, right? Like, you know, 90, think, imagine nine. It was almost 4000 homicides a year, 4000 mothers crying for their children down to less than 1000 so it's still terrible, but 3000 fewer young men, mostly being killed every year.
Joshua Johnson:If I'm here in my city, I look at Kansas City, we have so many problems to. Solve. I think a lot of people are like, we don't know where to start. We solve this one problem, and then we discover there's another problem because of what we just did. And you know what? You know people are calling these macro issues. We have a poly crisis, right? There's a there's so many different crises that we're trying to solve, and then something else comes up. Was there any unintended consequences where you were like, Hey, we're solving this issue, but then something else came up? And how do you how do you start to navigate those different issues when they're like, competing crises? You kind
Kurt Ver Beek:of asked me the last question that way, and I went around it, didn't I? I'll go back to it. I'm going to start out going around it again. One of the things that we often tell ourselves and our staff is is that none of these problems are so difficult or take so long to fix. Because I think it's a message our culture tells us this is so complicated, it's going to take so long, and we have seen again and again that they're not you grab a piece and you start working on that, and it ends up it isn't that complicated, and it doesn't take that long. And oftentimes solutions are much more achievable than you would have guessed. But at the same time, you're right. When we were just getting started with this violence in our neighborhood, we ended up working with a former cop investigator who was solving homicides and helping us get these killers put in jail, but mostly unbeknownst to us, although we had some suspicions, was sort of turning another a blind eye when the cops were beating up witnesses or not beating up supposed authors of homicides in order to get them to testify or tell where someone else was. And at the national level, when we were involved in the police purge, there was all sorts of issues, some of which we thought about in advance, and some of which we won't, didn't. So like, one is, you know, should a nonprofit and pastors be in charge of this? Or should have we figured out a way that the government, because this is the government's work, not ours, and, like, I think we would be very wary to get in it again, but partly because we also paid a high cost. So so we thought that the Honduran society would be praising us and these pastors for years to come for for purging the police force and bringing down homicides. But three years ago, a new government came in, the government under which we purged the police was had serious corruption issues. In fact, the President, at that time, is in jail in New York for accepting money for drug traffickers for his campaign. So they ended up painting the opposition party painted ASj and the police purge as something very corrupt and something questionable. And so in the end, one of the pastors who was leading that ended up leaving the country and feared for his life, and now lives in Florida. And ASj has gotten lots of not a little bit for the police purge itself, but also from the government for saying we were too closely aligned with this former corrupt president. And then the ex cops that were fired have tried their very best, clearly for the last five years to say they were all really good cops and and ASj and this group fired them for political reasons. So I think it's a good example of like, maybe no one is a prophet in their own country. I still believe that we did something amazing, very, very difficult, very scary, with very positive results. But if you ask the average Honduran, they would have very mixed, probably very mixed, comments about it. And these are dealing with people and perception. And a whole country of 10 million people, and in the end, you know, I think we need to be worried less about perception and more about what we did
Joshua Johnson:totally right. Perception is hard, and it moves us into inaction when we think, you know, people are going to perceive us one way or do something else. And it moves us to inaction, if you would talk to communities, and maybe communities around the world that want to see some of these issues solved, to see justice in their own land, what would you want people to do to start what are the core tenants to. It to get started and to make a community better.
Unknown:Nice question. I've done a bunch of these. Nobody's asked me that yet. So thanks.
Kurt Ver Beek:We have, I think, a strategy that is quite simple, and we've been sharing it with others, and others have been trying it, and it's there's when I tell you it, it's gonna nothing so surprising, but it's not what most nonprofits and not what much most helping organizations do. So the first thing we start with always is research investigations, and we try and figure out, like, what's going on, what's broken here, what's working here, because there's always some things that are working. Who's responsible for the good stuff the bad stuff. And then, like, what could we do? How do we fix this? Are there models in Honduras? Are there models in other countries that could help us, and we put that together in some sort of a report and try and make it as simple and as easy to understand as possible. So what I find is lots of nonprofits jump right in with opinions and solutions, but they never really did the research. Second thing we do is we will always build an alliance, or not always, almost always, 80% of the time, I would say, around all these topics, and it's we try and get the biggest allies in the room we can. So the head of the Catholic Church, the head of the Protestant church in Honduras. And these people, traditionally don't even meet together. Sometimes they've they've never met. But we can bring them together around these big topics, World Vision, NGOs, universities. And it's not all Christians. It's, it's going to be a whole mix. What we want is in when we present our suggestions, that it is the most varied and most powerful people we can get there, right? So that's kind of our goal. We end up finding lots of them are really cool people, and wanting to do this stuff, they just needed someone to kind of help them across the line. And then the third piece is we have communications. So we have good research, good solutions, we have an alliance, and then we'll do press conferences. We'll get this stuff in the media. We'll do a tour, and it's certainly never started this way, but right now, we'll do two press conferences a week. We'll have 3040, media sources, there will be this first story or the fifth story on the evening news two or three times a week. So these are the issues Honduras cares about. These are the issues the journalists care about, sometimes just because it's sensational, sometimes because they really care. But that doesn't matter. We get it out there. And then the last piece is, is lobbying is actually sitting down with the decision makers. So we find like doing that. And it could be from, you know, your local public school is broken, well, you do this same process or, or the street lights are out, or the garbage collection is like, it could be a smaller problem, or as big a problem as you want, the immigration system in the United States, but I think those four pieces are crucial to making change.
Joshua Johnson:I mean, if I'm sitting in the United States and I'm thinking about the man, I'm thinking about the the divisions in the church and then outside of the church, and everybody wanting a little piece of the pie or getting credit for for this. How do alliances work in a way where we're unified around something, and it's not just about the credit for my organization or my thing, but it is really just for the betterment of our society.
Kurt Ver Beek:So at least we always say, I'm sure that we don't always live this out is that we are willing to be sort of the engine or the motor of these alliances doing the research, but we are not interested in being the one that gets the credit. We would say the same with government officials. Probably actually, we're better at that. Like, if some government official wants to fix this, we don't want them. We don't need them to say, this was as J's idea this, as J helped me with this. We want government officials to be able to say, like, I did this, and we would say the same with like, the churches, the world, visions, the universities. We would ideally want this to be an equal partnership, but that if any of them are willing to, like, take the lead, that we're happy. The trouble is, lots of times they're not and they don't want to be in front of the cameras. They don't want to be the spokesperson. They want to ask Jay to do that. But then I think there's always a little bit of jealousy. You know, it's they know that they don't. They didn't want to be the one in front of the camera. But then when they see one of our people in front of the camera. Are they're like, Hey, wait a minute. So it people are difficult. But I would say the thing that we often invest the most time in is alliances and going to, you know, the head pastors house, and bringing him the coffee he likes and the cookies he likes, and spending two hours listening to why he's not happy and why he's not going to go to the meetings anymore, but by the end of the two hours, like he's willing to go to the meeting again, he's going to go he's going to go to one meeting again. He's going to see how this goes, or the university president, we got to go to her office and listen to a bunch of stories to finally get to the thing, where will you come to this meeting again? And yes, you will lots of hand holding. Well done.
Joshua Johnson:It takes a lot of patience and work with people, and people are messy. It would be nice to say, here's the report. This is what we need to do. Go do it, but you're gonna have to deal with a lot of people, and people are messy and difficult. There's a lot of people that don't want to do that work. And so if you look at the back of that, that's a lot of that's a lot of work, that's a lot of hours, that's a lot of time where you think that maybe this isn't worth it, but it is worth it in the end, to get these people at the table.
Kurt Ver Beek:So and give you one quick example, so that the pastor who we would, you know, he'd be upset with us, and we'd have to bring him coffee and talk to him and and figure this out together. And you know, he's a perfectly nice person, but just we get upset about things, sometimes rightly, sometimes not. But he was also the person during the police purge that if the government was trying to, you know, say you can't fire X or Y, he would say, Well, if you won't let me fire him, I'm getting up and I'm walking out. And then they'd say, Well, we're not going to let you. And he would get up and walk out, and he'd go home, and he wouldn't come back to the meeting until they fired X or Y, so like that same thing that made him difficult sometimes for us, was he was the real power in the room that could get the government to do stuff, because the government was afraid of the Protestant church, and His power to do good was way higher than us. So like, yeah, it pays off.
Joshua Johnson:I want to know, like walking through this, like going, you know, the very beginning, you know, if you're looking at the late 80s and you're coming in now, how has this impacted your faith, your relationship with God, and your view of God, in the midst of seeing a lot of suffering of violence, but also seeing people work together, where is God in this for you, and how does your view of God shifted and changed over the years?
Kurt Ver Beek:It's a good question. So I think I've always been fairly critical of the church and the church's role. Maybe it's age, maybe it's all the stuff I've done, but I've also learned to have a lot more patience and love for the church. I mean, I've seen pastors do brave things, take leadership, not just in this issue, in the days of school and healthcare. Right now we're hunters. Is having elections in November. I would love to have people go to our website and be praying for that. And I've seen church people brave and stepping up. So I think I sort of I used to probably think that I was somehow had a better relationship with God. I understood God better, is probably true, and I feel now a little more humble in my relationship vis a vis God and others and church leaders. I think my understanding and view of justice and God's love for justice has been become much bigger its scope. This idea of brave Christians isn't new to me, but I think it means new things like and I've seen again and again like, how doing this work is attractive to to non Christians and and makes people say, like, you know, what are you? What are you doing? Why are you doing this in ways that, like trying to evangelize or talk about sort of the traditional Bible verses is not meeting there anymore. I still feel like God is. I feel very blessed for my life, the things I've been able to be a part of. And feel like lots of in all of these things, it's not because. I was so smart or we were so capable, but having a really group, a really smart group around me, and God sort of being the foundation of blessing, maybe that's even why I feel like I can say like none of these problems are so hard or so complicated, because I feel like it has been God sort of guiding us, you know, God's grace, keeping us safe, God's wisdom and guidance, like helping us figure out where to start and how to start.
Joshua Johnson:You know, we have some families and families with with young kids that really feel like they just they moved into a really violent neighborhood in Kansas City, and then they want to move to one of the most violent countries in the world with the young family. What would you say to families as they as you moved into a really violent neighborhood with your family, and they want to be brave Christians, but they also want to make sure that their you know, their kids are, are okay and safe as well. How can you be a family on mission and be brave?
Kurt Ver Beek:Questions always make 10 different things jump into my head. So so one of which is, I think we did this when our kids were very little. Wasn't something like we could talk to them about, we could decide together. So we were always worried. And even when this book came out, there their talk, the author interviewed our kids, and they were kind of sick of getting interviewed by him, and we were worried about, like, did this damage them, or did they resent us for doing that? And we talked about it. We've talked about it several times, but when the book came out, that sort of made us think about it again with them and I they're not, it's not 100% good, but it's pretty close. They're really grateful for how they grew up. And the example, Carlos gave this example in a podcast that the Holy post that his son has a tattoo all down his arm, a half sleeve, and it's all nueva suyapa, the neighborhood that we lived in and grew up in, and and our son and they weren't even that close to each other in age or friendship wise, our son also has a tattoo all on his arm, on the inside of his arm that has sort of the image of Nueva suyapa and the coordinates, like the latitude, longitude lines, and I think that's a sign of of like, how they love this neighborhood, kind of like we did, even though it wasn't always easy. So I think we've also met lots of missionaries and people who the husband or the wife really wants to do something and the spouse doesn't, and it almost always goes bad. So I do think you need some agreement. As a couple, we have a good friend, Joel hammer neck and did ministry kind of like this in Chicago, and he said, nowhere in the Gospels is the commandment be safe. And yet, if you talk to Christians about anything like this, like the one of the first things they say is, you know, well, what about your kids? What about your wife, like did you? And so I think not that you should not consider safety, but I think we often overvalue safety.
Joshua Johnson:That's a good word. A couple quick questions. Kurt one, if you go back to your 21 year old self, what advice would you give?
Kurt Ver Beek:Yeah, probably a little bit of things I was just saying, being a little less dogmatic, a little less black and white. Continue to be curious. I wouldn't change a lot actually, of my, of my trajectories, oh, that's a kind of crazy and amazing just by itself.
Joshua Johnson:That's a blessing to be able to look back and go, I was on the right path, and I thank God that I was on that path, and I am where I am now. So that's that's amazing. Anything you've been reading or watching lately, you could recommend people
Kurt Ver Beek:maybe one thing, probably lots of things that I shouldn't recommend. We we have a taste for comedies and then sort of dark, violent shows. I think that's our living in Honduras maybe has influenced that, but we just started watching a series on Netflix called Little America. And it's little vignettes like 20 minutes about stories that end up mostly being very positive, but the different experiences of living and growing up in the United States. It's. It's beautiful little pieces. So yeah, I'll recommend
Joshua Johnson:that. Yeah, Little America, that's great. Look. Kurt, this book, bear witness, that tells the story of the Association of more just society, your story, Carlos story and the story of your neighborhood and others. Yeah, it's a fantastic read, and it's a it's an incredible story, fantastic read. I highly recommend the book to many, many people. So people should go and get this and read the story, and then I really hope and pray that people will go and find what justice in their communities looks like, that they would go and care for the the triad of the vulnerable, whatever the vulnerable is in your area, in your community, so that you can do that. So there's a lot of lot of incredible things in this book. Where would you like to point people to you did mention that you loved on your website, we go there and to pray for the the elections that are coming up in Honduras and other things. Where would you like to point people to? How can they connect with you? What would you like people to know?
Kurt Ver Beek:So our English website is ASj, us.org, so that's probably the easiest thing. There's a link there about the book, so I'll clarify like we didn't commission the book. It was an independent author, not a Christian, writing about this. So he spent seven years we don't like everything in the book. We like most everything in the book. So if you go on the website, you can see an interview with him and with Carlos, and with I telling you a little bit more our side of the story and and learn all about the organization at www as J us.org,
Joshua Johnson:perfect well. Kurt, thank you for sharing your story today. Thank you for walking us through what Justice looks like, especially in the middle of things that really seem too daunting for us to take care of. But there are issues that actually can be solved and that we could be brave. Christians can step in to take action, to see justice happen, to care for the vulnerable. It was fantastic. I really hope that a lot of people are inspired to live in a way where we can join God's heart for the most vulnerable in the world. So thank you. That's fantastic.
Kurt Ver Beek:Thank you very much. Joshua, you
