What is Justice, Anyway?

Over the past few weeks I’ve been watching the Netflix show, House of Cards. It’s a fictional drama about the ruthless, cut throat world of Washington politics.

As I’m watching the show on my iPad a few things become apparent. First, things in Washington can’t possibly be as interesting for 99.99% of the people who work in our government. Second, when it comes to something that happens on a global scale, my definition of a concept like “seeking justice” might be very different than someone else’s.

This week, I’m in the Dominican Republic, learning about the work of the International Justice Mission. They are headquarted in Washington and as a person who lives in San Diego… that’s back east enough to somehow be related in my brain.

I first learned about IJM at a youth ministry conference in 2002. One night Gary Haugen delivered a keynote that blindsided me. Here I was at a conference to learn about how to better minister to the 20 teenagers in my youth group and a man gets on stage, making an argument that I should care and participate (somehow) in educating students about the realities of modern day slavery.

In retrospect, few 40 minute talks have impacted my life as much as Gary’s did that night. He put words to thoughts I’d had but had no concept for what to do with. And, more importantly, he awakened in me the reality that prayer is a verb. Sure, I can pray for the oppressed. But what if God didn’t want me to merely pray, but to act?

What is Justice, Anyway?

Today, I’m starting at the beginning. For as much as I admire, have been impacted by, and cognitively know about IJM’s work  or even from third-party reports like in Half the Sky, (Not to mention Kristen’s having visited their field office in Phnom Phen last summer) I’ve never taken the time to investigate their work myself.

Thinking like Frank Underwood for a minute I know that my definition of justice might be different from yours. And IJM’s definition of justice… both in how they define it and what they do in response to injustices they identify… might be different from mine.

So that’s where I’m starting. If my week is going to be all about exploring the work of the International Justice Mission, today I’m going to start with seeking to understand what they mean by justice.

Are we talking about my kind of justice? Are we talking about a justice defined in a systematic theology course? Are we talking about some version of Frank Underwood’s kind of justice? Or are we talking about a different kind of justice altogether.