August 15, 2025 • 48 mins
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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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Kurt Ver Beek (00:00):
One of the things that we often tell ourselves and
(00:02):
our staff is is that none ofthese problems are so difficult
or take so long to fix. BecauseI think it's a message our
culture tells us this is socomplicated, it's going to take
so long. And we have seen againand again that they're not you
grab a piece and you startworking on that, and it ends up
it isn't that complicated, andit doesn't take that long, and
(00:24):
oftentimes solutions are muchmore achievable than you would
have guessed.
Joshua Johnson (00:42):
Hello and welcome to the shifting culture
podcast in which we haveconversations about the culture
we create and the impact we canmake. We long to see the body of
Christ look like Jesus. I'm yourhost. Joshua Johnson, what do
you think about when you thinkabout justice? Do you picture
small local acts of kindness,like food drives, micro loans,
neighborhood cleanups. Well,those things matter, but what
(01:03):
happens when the real barriersto change are violence and
corruption and broken systems?
Well, my guest today, KurtVerbeek, has spent decades in
Honduras wrestling with thosebigger questions, from moving
his family into one of thecountry's most violent
neighborhoods to helping lead anationwide police purge. Kurt's
story is one of proximity andpersistence and of refusal to
let fear have the last word. Inour conversation, we talk about
(01:25):
what it means to be a braveChristian, why solutions to
complex problems might be closerthan we think, and how caring
for the most vulnerable canreshape a society. So join us.
Discover God's heart for loveand justice. Be brave and move
towards the vulnerable. Here ismy conversation with Kurt.
Verbeek Kurt, thank you forcoming on shifting culture. It's
(01:47):
an honor to have you here. Sowelcome.
Kurt Ver Beek (01:51):
Thank you so pleasure to be here. Yeah, I'd
love to start with
Joshua Johnson (01:55):
the story. So how does a sociologist from the
Midwest just happen to findhimself at the front lines of
justice and one of the mostviolent neighborhoods in
Honduras.
Kurt Ver Beek (02:07):
Well, you make it sound very dramatic, but the
story probably wasn't. So mywife and I met and got married,
went to Calvin University andwere married soon after we
graduated. This is back in 1986so that's what you did. Very
happy I did. And then we gotoffered an internship to go to
(02:28):
Costa Rica, and so we went therefor a couple of years, and then
they offered us a job inHonduras. So we went there for
six years, and then I went backand got a PhD. And then we
thought it would be really coolto start a semester in Honduras
program to teach collegestudents all this stuff we
should have known before we wentto Central America the first
(02:51):
time. And while we were doingthat, one of my best friends,
Honduran Carlos, moved up tothis very poor, rough
neighborhood, and we had alwaysthought that something like that
would be cool, and so we decidedto do it too, and and things
went from there.
Joshua Johnson (03:09):
So as you moved into the neighborhoods, and
you're looking, how do we alignourselves, how do we how do we
become part of this neighborhoodand help and be a people of of
help in this place and make abetter neighborhood. What were
some of the things that you werestarting to try? What were your
ideas coming in?
Kurt Ver Beek (03:29):
Yeah, so it's a nice little meshing of things.
God does things this way, Ioften find so we had flirted
with the idea of moving to aneighborhood like that, but we
never had, because we were kindof scared. We'd gone to a church
there for eight years, but wehadn't moved up there, and then
(03:50):
Carlos moved up there, and thatsort of like made it seem okay
and and safe to try. Then I werethere. Was also the first year I
was teaching college students,Calvin Wheaton, Biola students,
those students we were talkingabout, like, you know, how to
help poor people, basically. Andso we talked about the
(04:12):
traditional things, microenterprises and agriculture
programs and health programs.
And then, I'm not exactly surewhy, but I included a textbook
that had a bunch of these macroissues like violence and
corruption and sort of issues atthe at the government level. And
we started talking about that,and we said, you know, the
(04:32):
students were saying, there's1000s of orphanages in Honduras.
There's hundreds of microenterprise organizations, what
Christian organizations areworking on issues like violence,
what Christian or and I,honestly, I couldn't come up
with a single one. So we have1000s of organizations doing the
same thing, and none of themaddressing these big issues. So
(04:54):
Carlos and Joanne, my wife, andI decided to start this
organization. Nation, but weweren't really even thinking
about our neighborhood at thatpoint. The neighborhood came in,
I think, because of necessity,and that wasn't part of the
plan,
Joshua Johnson (05:11):
right? So what was the necessity? Why was it
something that it had to happen?
Kurt Ver Beek (05:17):
Our kids went to Carlos' school right in our
neighborhood, and they went toschool one day and got sent home
right away, and we didn't reallyknow why, but Carlos came over
that night and said that one ofthe fathers of my kids
classmates had been killed thatmorning. So he he sold fruits
and vegetables out of a back ofa pickup truck it was going down
(05:39):
about 430 in the morning to buymore fruits and vegetables, and
three guys with ski masks cameand and stole his money. And
after they took his money, theyshot him in the head in front of
his wife and kids and the thewife had gone to Carlos office
that afternoon and said she knewwho it was, and there were three
(05:59):
witnesses who were willing totestify, which was also crazy.
So we knew who the guys were,and we had witnesses willing to
testify. So right there, Carlosand 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'relike, 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 ofthe bad guys or friends with
(06:23):
them, so don't do that, butwe'll help you like we'll help
you find someone you can trust.
And Weeks went by, and in theend, they robbed they didn't
know it, an off duty policeofficer and killed him, and then
the police responded in mass,two of them were captured, three
were killed. And when Carlos andI sat down a week or so later,
(06:44):
we were like, Boy, those thoseguys were really violent. You
know, they, Carlos says theykilled X and Y and Z around my
church. And I said, Well, Ididn't even know about x and y
and z, but I know about a, b andc by my church. And we ended up
counting that they had killed 13people after we knew who they
were, we could have saved 13people if we would have known,
(07:07):
if we would have done something,basically. And so we ended up
coming up with this idea that ifwe hired an ex cop, who we
trusted was a Christian, was ouridea, and a lawyer, then the cop
would know who are the good copsand who are the bad cops, and so
that cop would be our littlebridge of trust to the police.
The year we started thatprogram, our neighborhood had
(07:32):
almost 50 homicides, and threeyears later, it had only eight.
Joshua Johnson (07:37):
Wow, you know these micro issues you're you're
thinking that if you havecharity, if you have micro
enterprise, if you could, youknow, teach farming, subsistence
farming, so people could say,but if there's corruption and
violence and things there, moneycan get stolen. They can't get
off the ground. They can't dothese things that going upstream
(08:00):
is something that most peopledon't do when they're trying to
solve problems. I think, ifyou're looking around the world,
I mean, we're looking at microissues everywhere, these macro
issues are something that isreally difficult. How did you
start to even wrap your headaround solving a macro issue and
thinking that, man, if we justhave an ex cop, if we have a
(08:21):
lawyer, things are going to be alittle bit better, and then we
could actually help in thesethis neighborhood in other ways
as well.
Kurt Ver Beek (08:29):
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 badguys found out we had our kids
and our wives lived in thisneighborhood too, and so we were
scared, but we felt like we hadto do something. I think that
those 13 lives weighed heavilyon us. So again, I think it was
(08:50):
necessity, and I can give you acouple examples, like we helped
start a pillow business. A womanwas making pillows in her house
and was doing really well, andshe had, in the end, three
employees, and then the gangshowed up and started to extort
money from her, and got to thepoint she was paying the gang
more than her total profits, andshe had to shut it down. So I
(09:14):
think those are the things thatpeople often don't understand,
and probably we would not haveeven gone there, except for this
woman showing up in Carlosoffice and saying, you have to
do it. But then once we starteddown that road, we're like,
well, this, this makes sense.
Like, how can we do this inother topics? But also, how can
(09:36):
we do it at a larger scale?
Joshua Johnson (09:40):
There's a few times already you said we were
scared, but you did it anyways.
You're scared, but you did itanyways. You talk, you talk
about making brave Christians,people that are brave, that you
know, one of the sayings that mywife and I have, it's one of our
lifelong sayings, is to defyfear and to do something that's
def. Call even in the face offear and being scared, what does
(10:01):
it mean for you to be a braveChristian, to stand up in a
place where it is there is a lotof fear. It is scary. How do we
how do people become a braveChristian?
Kurt Ver Beek (10:14):
A bunch of answers to that. One story I
often tell is Jesus tells usquite clearly, right? Love our
neighbors as ourselves, which Ithink is sometimes people over
emphasize love your neighbors,and sometimes people mostly we
over emphasize love ourselves.
So we keep those two in balanceso we don't do crazy things. But
when I would walk my daughterwas, you know, 1516, years old,
(10:37):
and I would walk my daughter toyouth group at the church and
walk her home. I would walk herbecause it wasn't so safe. Young
men would be standing on thecorners, and they would say
stuff to me, and even a coupletimes they got me riled up
enough that I like started. Ithey started it, but I really
started like something Ishouldn't have. What I always
(11:00):
would tell people is it seemsclear to me biblically, that you
know, if I love my daughter, Iwill do almost anything for her,
like to protect her, to keep hersafe. So what does that mean? If
my daughter is in in your housein Kansas City and and she's at
risk. I would want you to lovemy daughter the way I do like I
(11:23):
probably wouldn't expect thesame, but I would expect a lot,
because it's my daughter. And ifyour daughter is in Honduras
visiting me, I know you wouldexpect me to do that. And so how
do we live more like that?
Right? That every young woman inmy neighborhood is someone's
(11:43):
daughter who loves them likethat. So our mission statement
is brave Christians trying tomake the Honduran systems work
for the most vulnerable. Andjust that term brave Christians,
like, if you go out in thestreet, I'm in Grand Rapids,
Michigan, you're in Kansas City,and we ask people like, describe
a Christian, and they'll give abunch of words, loving, nice or
(12:04):
hypocritical. Mean, you know,depends who you're talking to. I
don't I bet you. I would bet alot of money. Not a single
person would say brave, theaverage, and maybe even average
person in the pew, maybe even99% of people in the pew. But if
you look at the Bible, the lifeof the prophets, the life of
Jesus, the life of the apostles,like that is a characteristic
(12:27):
that jumps out at youimmediately. So we both in
Honduras and in the states aretrying to reclaim that. Like,
let's see what it's like if weindividuals live this out to be
brave Christians. And I oftenfinally say, Yeah, that's true.
Like, I need to talk to mycoworker, you know, like the
desk next door about Jesus.
Like, that's how much brave,that's how far brave goes. But I
(12:48):
think it's way more than that.
And I think that talking hasweight when we are living a life
that's different when, like, theway we use our money, the way we
use our time, where we live, orsomething that is, is cure,
makes people curious, makes theminner.
Joshua Johnson (13:06):
Being brave as well, is doing what Jesus did,
is moving into the neighborhoodof 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. Soif you think that what you're
trying to do in different areas,in Honduras, the Association for
(13:27):
a more just society, how doesproximity and being in the
neighborhood actually help? Andwhere maybe has Christian
charity or work missed the mark.
Kurt Ver Beek (13:41):
First of all, like it didn't start out like it
ended right? So we, we said, mywife and I said, Let's do it for
a year and we'll just see how itgoes. And I really thought it
was going to be terrible, right?
It was going to be scary, it wasgoing to be stinky, it was going
to be like, all, almost all badthings, was my impression, but
we're going to try it, and westill live there. 25 years
(14:03):
later, we're still living in thesame in the same house, in the
same neighborhood, and we loveit. So it's not suffering for
Jesus anymore. It really neverwas, but we thought it was going
to be. So I think that'simportant, and I think that
would be lots of other people'sexperience when you take those
risks. I think we almost alwaysthink it's going to be bad, and
(14:24):
I think not always, but lots ofthe time it isn't. But I do
think, I mean, the story ofviolence is a good one, but I
can give you one more. When wemoved in our neighborhood, kids
go to public schools. 2 millionkids in the public schools, and
we would see these kids, andthey would be like, never in
(14:46):
school, and they're like, what'sgoing on and and so we started
asking our neighbors and Sundayschool and on the street, and
they're like, Well, you know,teacher didn't show up today,
and teachers are on strike, andthere's. Training today,
supposedly so. And it ended upwe did some research and kids
were only getting 110 days ofschool. And so kids are supposed
(15:07):
to get 200 days of school, 205hour days. And so you imagine,
like missing half of the days ofschool. Let's say you're doing
your kids are learning fractionsor multiplication division, and
if they only get half of thatlike then they then they get the
seventh grade, eighth grade,12th grade, they don't know the
(15:28):
basics. So it's super damagingto kids learning. So we, not
just us, we got together withthe Catholic Church, Protestant
church, World Vision, a bunch oforganizations, and we started a
campaign, 200 days of school.
And it became like a nationalthing, and everybody was talking
(15:48):
about it, and we ended upgetting schools to back to 200
days, 200 for five yearsrunning, before covid, they had
213 days average. So I don'tthink we would have known that
if we didn't live in ourneighborhood. I don't think we
would have like, you know, ourneighbors wouldn't have been
complaining to us. We would havelived in a middle most gringos,
(16:10):
most North Americans. If youlive in Honduras, you live in a
nice neighborhood because it'ssafe and you're worried about
your kids, and then your kids goto private schools, and you go
to a private doctor, and you mayhave a security guard at the end
of your street. You see thoseother people, but you don't live
it the same way.
Joshua Johnson (16:29):
So if you are running the Association for a
more just society, if you'rerunning something like that,
justice, what is justice foryou? And what does justice mean?
What does it look like to have ajust society?
Kurt Ver Beek (16:44):
So Carlos and I run it together, first of all,
and like, Carlos is the mainface, the external face, and I'm
kind of in the office trying tomake sure everything gets done.
So just so that's clear. SoNicholas Wolterstorff, I don't
know if you've had him on yourprogram, but he would be great
on your program. So program. So,Christian philosopher, good
(17:04):
friend of mine, just finishedhis he's 92 I think, or 93 just
finished his 18th book, which isand it's really good. So
Nicholas waltersdorf writesabout justice a lot. He, you
know, says something I thinkpretty much all of us know, like
there's two big themes in theBible, sort of love and justice.
(17:25):
The character of God is clearlybased on love and justice. So
justice is not like some extrathing that we're adding or or
that isn't important to God. Andthen he says, when we look in
the Bible at when justice ismentioned, it's very often
mentioned along with he callsthe triad of the vulnerable.
(17:47):
It's the orphan, the poor andthe widow, sometimes the
foreigner. So sometimes it'sfour, but it's almost always
those three. And so he said it'sclear to him that in God's heart
there are like these threegroups that we should be caring
especially about these, thesevulnerable groups. So it's
important is to figure out todaywhere we are in your town, in
(18:10):
your church, in in our case, inHonduras, they may not be those
same groups, but who are thosethree or four groups that are
most vulnerable, and then whatcan we do for them? And so in
the Bible, in the Old Testament,it was allow gleaning, and, you
know, make sure they could meettheir food needs and their
economic needs, but it was alsofiguring out. So I think that's
(18:32):
what justice is to us. Like, howdo we protect how do we care for
those people that God hasidentified from the very
beginning of the Old Testamentall the way to today, as those
that are most vulnerable andoften are taken advantage of.
And that's what we're trying
Joshua Johnson (18:50):
to do. That's a very admirable thing. I mean,
it's the heart of God right tocare for the most vulnerable. We
often don't see that takingplace, and we need to. And I
think sometimes, when we we comein and we want to care for the
most vulnerable, oftentimes, Ithink people have in their head,
like old westerns, they havewhite hats and black hats,
(19:10):
right? There's the the good guysand 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 besome gray hats in the middle,
and there's some some gray areasthat you have to navigate. So as
(19:35):
you're looking at maybe theethics of justice, that we know
that it's not just black andwhite, that there's some areas
that you actually have to havediscernment and discern with the
Holy Spirit. What is the greatergood, or the way that you should
(19:55):
go? How do you start to discernwhat is. The is the way to go.
And you know, can you give meexample of something that was
difficult to figure out?
Kurt Ver Beek (20:07):
So I'll give you a quick answer that at least in
my case, it's always trying tohave really smart, wise people
around, because I don't trustmyself. One of our staff who I
love Omar Rivera. He says, Ifyou want to change the world,
you need a really good team. AndI think that's true, but let me
(20:29):
give you a good example thosegray hats. So So we started with
violence in our neighborhood,and surprisingly successful. So
a big Foundation came down anddid analysis of a whole bunch 28
projects, I think, in differentcountries in Latin America, and
said that our project was themost successful in in preventing
(20:49):
violence. So we were verysuccessful in one neighborhood.
We spread to some otherneighborhoods. But then in 2011
2000 1200s had the highesthomicide rate in the world, so
higher than Afghanistan, higherthan Iraq, higher than Colombia,
higher than Mexico. So we had 90homicides for every 100,000
(21:09):
people. And when we started tofigure out why it was all about
drug trafficking, so it wasdrugs coming from Colombia,
mostly, not just drug cocaine.
Was one drug, cocaine comingfrom Colombia. It would stop in
Honduras and on its way to theUS. So US consumers were were
driving this violence, butHonduras was the victim. And so
(21:33):
when we started to figure outmore, like, okay, so what can we
do about this? We ended upfiguring out that the police,
and really top levels of thepolice, that the chiefs on down,
were involved. They were on thepayroll. They were they were
sometimes just looking the otherway, but oftentimes they were
transporting these drugs inpolice vehicles, like they were.
(21:54):
They were fully in so we endedup starting to put we we brought
together Catholic Church.
Protestant church is another oneof our pieces of our model as we
try and do this all in alliance.
And we started pushing in 2012to purge the police. Was the
word we used, which was a strongword, even in Spanish. It's very
(22:15):
strong. We need to clean up thepolice force, but we said purge.
And for four years, we had thisgroup, and we would hold events,
and we were doing research andlike suggestions how to fix it,
but the government wasn'tlistening. And in 2016 we find a
big, a big thing happened thatpushed the President over the
edge, and he called Carlos, andhe said, let's let's see if you
(22:38):
have the cojones to do whatyou've been whining about for
four years. And so two of ourstaff, Carlos, and one other
staff member, two pastors,joined this commission, and the
government named two twomembers. The head pastor of this
group was a pastor of a hugechurch in Tegucigalpa, so a very
important Christian leader. Andthey started reviewing all the
(23:00):
cops in the country, there were13,000 and deciding who needed
to go. In the first two weeks,they fired all of the chief of
police, nine chief of policewent the first two weeks like
imagine that right in Chicago orNew York or Kansas City, and
church leaders saying you gottafire all the police, heads of
(23:22):
the chief of police, and thendown the pastor fired police who
went to his church. So imaginethat they ended up firing 6000
out of the 13,000 cops. Theyalso designed a new training
program. The Swiss governmenthelped. So it had had to be
(23:42):
good. The Swiss were involved.
They ended up training 10,000new cops over this same three
year period. So they fired 6000trained 10,000 more, and put
them into the force. And thehomicide rate in the country
went from 90 the last year itwas 22 so like a quarter. So I
(24:03):
think it's a good example ofseveral things like one you said
gray hats like you think thecops are the good guys, and you
end up finding out the copsaren't the good guys. You end up
thinking pastors and Christianpeople are nice and supposed to
sort of stay in their lane, butthe things were so bad in
Honduras that the government,the police, couldn't clean up
(24:24):
themselves. It was, it was toocontaminated, so they needed
outsiders to come in. And thenyou see the effect, right? Like,
you know, 90, think, imaginenine. It was almost 4000
homicides a year, 4000 motherscrying for their children down
to less than 1000 so it's stillterrible, but 3000 fewer young
(24:51):
men, mostly being killed everyyear.
Joshua Johnson (24:54):
If I'm here in my city, I look at Kansas City,
we have so many problems to.
Solve. I think a lot of peopleare like, we don't know where to
start. We solve this oneproblem, and then we discover
there's another problem becauseof what we just did. And you
know what? You know people arecalling these macro issues. We
have a poly crisis, right?
(25:15):
There's a there's so manydifferent crises that we're
trying to solve, and thensomething else comes up. Was
there any unintendedconsequences where you were
like, Hey, we're solving thisissue, but then something else
came up? And how do you how doyou start to navigate those
different issues when they'relike, competing crises? You kind
Kurt Ver Beek (25:39):
of asked me the last question that way, and I
went around it, didn't I? I'llgo back to it. I'm going to
start out going around it again.
One of the things that we oftentell ourselves and our staff is
is that none of these problemsare so difficult or take so long
to fix. Because I think it's amessage our culture tells us
this is so complicated, it'sgoing to take so long, and we
(26:00):
have seen again and again thatthey're not you grab a piece and
you start working on that, andit ends up it isn't that
complicated, and it doesn't takethat long. And oftentimes
solutions are much moreachievable than you would have
guessed. But at the same time,you're right. When we were just
getting started with thisviolence in our neighborhood, we
(26:20):
ended up working with a formercop investigator who was solving
homicides and helping us getthese killers put in jail, but
mostly unbeknownst to us,although we had some suspicions,
was sort of turning another ablind eye when the cops were
(26:42):
beating up witnesses or notbeating up supposed authors of
homicides in order to get themto testify or tell where someone
else was. And at the nationallevel, when we were involved in
the police purge, there was allsorts of issues, some of which
we thought about in advance, andsome of which we won't, didn't.
(27:03):
So like, one is, you know,should a nonprofit and pastors
be in charge of this? Or shouldhave we figured out a way that
the government, because this isthe government's work, not ours,
and, like, I think we would bevery wary to get in it again,
but partly because we also paida high cost. So so we thought
(27:25):
that the Honduran society wouldbe praising us and these pastors
for years to come for forpurging the police force and
bringing down homicides. Butthree years ago, a new
government came in, thegovernment under which we purged
(27:45):
the police was had seriouscorruption issues. In fact, the
President, at that time, is injail in New York for accepting
money for drug traffickers forhis campaign. So they ended up
painting the opposition partypainted ASj and the police purge
as something very corrupt andsomething questionable. And so
(28:07):
in the end, one of the pastorswho was leading that ended up
leaving the country and fearedfor his life, and now lives in
Florida. And ASj has gotten lotsof not a little bit for the
police purge itself, but alsofrom the government for saying
(28:28):
we were too closely aligned withthis former corrupt president.
And then the ex cops that werefired have tried their very
best, clearly for the last fiveyears to say they were all
really good cops and and ASj andthis group fired them for
political reasons. So I thinkit's a good example of like,
(28:51):
maybe no one is a prophet intheir own country. I still
believe that we did somethingamazing, very, very difficult,
very scary, with very positiveresults. But if you ask the
average Honduran, they wouldhave very mixed, probably very
mixed, comments about it. Andthese are dealing with people
(29:17):
and perception. And a wholecountry of 10 million people,
and in the end, you know, Ithink we need to be worried less
about perception and more aboutwhat we did
Joshua Johnson (29:30):
totally right.
Perception is hard, and it movesus into inaction when we think,
you know, people are going toperceive us one way or do
something else. And it moves usto inaction, if you would talk
to communities, and maybecommunities around the world
that want to see some of theseissues solved, to see justice in
their own land, what would youwant people to do to start what
(29:54):
are the core tenants to. It toget started and to make a
community better.
Unknown (30:05):
Nice question. I've done a bunch of these. Nobody's
asked me that yet. So thanks.
Kurt Ver Beek (30:11):
We have, I think, a strategy that is quite simple,
and we've been sharing it withothers, and others have been
trying it, and it's there's whenI tell you it, it's gonna
nothing so surprising, but it'snot what most nonprofits and not
what much most helpingorganizations do. So the first
thing we start with always isresearch investigations, and we
(30:33):
try and figure out, like, what'sgoing on, what's broken here,
what's working here, becausethere's always some things that
are working. Who's responsiblefor the good stuff the bad
stuff. And then, like, whatcould we do? How do we fix this?
Are there models in Honduras?
Are there models in othercountries that could help us,
and we put that together in somesort of a report and try and
make it as simple and as easy tounderstand as possible. So what
(30:56):
I find is lots of nonprofitsjump right in with opinions and
solutions, but they never reallydid the research. Second thing
we do is we will always build analliance, or not always, almost
always, 80% of the time, I wouldsay, around all these topics,
and it's we try and get thebiggest allies in the room we
(31:16):
can. So the head of the CatholicChurch, the head of the
Protestant church in Honduras.
And these people, traditionallydon't even meet together.
Sometimes they've they've nevermet. But we can bring them
together around these bigtopics, World Vision, NGOs,
universities. And it's not allChristians. It's, it's going to
(31:37):
be a whole mix. What we want isin when we present our
suggestions, that it is the mostvaried and most powerful people
we can get there, right? Sothat's kind of our goal. We end
up finding lots of them arereally cool people, and wanting
to do this stuff, they justneeded someone to kind of help
them across the line. And thenthe third piece is we have
(32:00):
communications. So we have goodresearch, good solutions, we
have an alliance, and then we'lldo press conferences. We'll get
this stuff in the media. We'lldo a tour, and it's certainly
never started this way, butright now, we'll do two press
conferences a week. We'll have3040, media sources, there will
(32:22):
be this first story or the fifthstory on the evening news two or
three times a week. So these arethe issues Honduras cares about.
These are the issues thejournalists care about,
sometimes just because it'ssensational, sometimes because
they really care. But thatdoesn't matter. We get it out
there. And then the last pieceis, is lobbying is actually
(32:46):
sitting down with the decisionmakers. So we find like doing
that. And it could be from, youknow, your local public school
is broken, well, you do thissame process or, or the street
lights are out, or the garbagecollection is like, it could be
a smaller problem, or as big aproblem as you want, the
(33:07):
immigration system in the UnitedStates, but I think those four
pieces are crucial to makingchange.
Joshua Johnson (33:16):
I mean, if I'm sitting in the United States and
I'm thinking about the man, I'mthinking about the the divisions
in the church and then outsideof the church, and everybody
wanting a little piece of thepie or getting credit for for
this. How do alliances work in away where we're unified around
(33:37):
something, and it's not justabout the credit for my
organization or my thing, but itis really just for the
betterment of our society.
Kurt Ver Beek (33:48):
So at least we always say, I'm sure that we
don't always live this out isthat we are willing to be sort
of the engine or the motor ofthese alliances doing the
research, but we are notinterested in being the one that
gets the credit. We would saythe same with government
officials. Probably actually,we're better at that. Like, if
(34:10):
some government official wantsto fix this, we don't want them.
We don't need them to say, thiswas as J's idea this, as J
helped me with this. We wantgovernment officials to be able
to say, like, I did this, and wewould say the same with like,
the churches, the world,visions, the universities. We
would ideally want this to be anequal partnership, but that if
(34:35):
any of them are willing to,like, take the lead, that we're
happy. The trouble is, lots oftimes they're not and they don't
want to be in front of thecameras. They don't want to be
the spokesperson. They want toask Jay to do that. But then I
think there's always a littlebit of jealousy. You know, it's
they know that they don't. Theydidn't want to be the one in
(34:56):
front of the camera. But thenwhen they see one of our people
in front of the camera. Arethey're like, Hey, wait a
minute. So it people aredifficult. But I would say the
thing that we often invest themost time in is alliances and
going to, you know, the headpastors house, and bringing him
(35:16):
the coffee he likes and thecookies he likes, and spending
two hours listening to why he'snot 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 themeeting again, he's going to go
he's going to go to one meetingagain. He's going to see how
this goes, or the universitypresident, we got to go to her
(35:36):
office and listen to a bunch ofstories to finally get to the
thing, where will you come tothis meeting again? And yes, you
will lots of hand holding. Welldone.
Joshua Johnson (35:48):
It takes a lot of patience and work with
people, and people are messy. Itwould be nice to say, here's the
report. This is what we need todo. Go do it, but you're gonna
have to deal with a lot ofpeople, and people are messy and
difficult. There's a lot ofpeople that don't want to do
that work. And so if you look atthe back of that, that's a lot
(36:10):
of that's a lot of work, that'sa lot of hours, that's a lot of
time where you think that maybethis isn't worth it, but it is
worth it in the end, to getthese people at the table.
Kurt Ver Beek (36:20):
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 andtalk to him and and figure this
out together. And you know, he'sa perfectly nice person, but
just we get upset about things,sometimes rightly, sometimes
not. But he was also the personduring the police purge that if
(36:43):
the government was trying to,you know, say you can't fire X
or Y, he would say, Well, if youwon't let me fire him, I'm
getting up and I'm walking out.
And then they'd say, Well, we'renot going to let you. And he
would get up and walk out, andhe'd go home, and he wouldn't
come back to the meeting untilthey fired X or Y, so like that
same thing that made himdifficult sometimes for us, was
(37:06):
he was the real power in theroom that could get the
government to do stuff, becausethe government was afraid of the
Protestant church, and His powerto do good was way higher than
us. So like, yeah, it pays off.
Joshua Johnson (37:29):
I want to know, like walking through this, like
going, you know, the verybeginning, you know, if you're
looking at the late 80s andyou're coming in now, how has
this impacted your faith, yourrelationship with God, and your
view of God, in the midst ofseeing a lot of suffering of
violence, but also seeing peoplework together, where is God in
(37:51):
this for you, and how does yourview of God shifted and changed
over the years?
Kurt Ver Beek (37:56):
It's a good question. So I think I've always
been fairly critical of thechurch and the church's role.
Maybe it's age, maybe it's allthe stuff I've done, but I've
also learned to have a lot morepatience and love for the
church. I mean, I've seenpastors do brave things, take
(38:18):
leadership, not just in thisissue, in the days of school and
healthcare. Right now we'rehunters. Is having elections in
November. I would love to havepeople go to our website and be
praying for that. And I've seenchurch people brave and stepping
up. So I think I sort of I usedto probably think that I was
(38:42):
somehow had a betterrelationship with God. I
understood God better, isprobably true, and I feel now a
little more humble in myrelationship vis a vis God and
others and church leaders. Ithink my understanding and view
(39:03):
of justice and God's love forjustice has been become much
bigger its scope. This idea ofbrave Christians isn't new to
me, but I think it means newthings like and I've seen again
and again like, how doing thiswork is attractive to to non
(39:24):
Christians and and makes peoplesay, like, you know, what are
you? What are you doing? Why areyou doing this in ways that,
like trying to evangelize ortalk about sort of the
traditional Bible verses is notmeeting there anymore. I still
(39:45):
feel like God is. I feel veryblessed for my life, the things
I've been able to be a part of.
And feel like lots of in all ofthese things, it's not because.
I was so smart or we were socapable, but having a really
group, a really smart grouparound me, and God sort of being
(40:07):
the foundation of blessing,maybe that's even why I feel
like I can say like none ofthese problems are so hard or so
complicated, because I feel likeit has been God sort of guiding
us, you know, God's grace,keeping us safe, God's wisdom
and guidance, like helping usfigure out where to start and
(40:31):
how to start.
Joshua Johnson (40:33):
You know, we have some families and families
with with young kids that reallyfeel like they just they moved
into a really violentneighborhood in Kansas City, and
then they want to move to one ofthe most violent countries in
the world with the young family.
What would you say to familiesas they as you moved into a
(40:53):
really violent neighborhood withyour family, and they want to be
brave Christians, but they alsowant to make sure that their you
know, their kids are, are okayand safe as well. How can you be
a family on mission and bebrave?
Kurt Ver Beek (41:13):
Questions always make 10 different things jump
into my head. So so one of whichis, I think we did this when our
kids were very little. Wasn'tsomething like we could talk to
them about, we could decidetogether. So we were always
worried. And even when this bookcame out, there their talk, the
(41:36):
author interviewed our kids, andthey were kind of sick of
getting interviewed by him, andwe were worried about, like, did
this damage them, or did theyresent us for doing that? And we
talked about it. We've talkedabout it several times, but when
the book came out, that sort ofmade us think about it again
with them and I they're not,it's not 100% good, but it's
(41:59):
pretty close. They're reallygrateful for how they grew up.
And the example, Carlos gavethis example in a podcast that
the Holy post that his son has atattoo all down his arm, a half
sleeve, and it's all nuevasuyapa, the neighborhood that we
(42:20):
lived in and grew up in, and andour son and they weren't even
that close to each other in ageor friendship wise, our son also
has a tattoo all on his arm, onthe inside of his arm that has
sort of the image of Nuevasuyapa and the coordinates, like
(42:41):
the latitude, longitude lines,and I think that's a sign of of
like, how they love thisneighborhood, kind of like we
did, even though it wasn'talways easy. So I think we've
also met lots of missionariesand people who the husband or
(43:02):
the wife really wants to dosomething and the spouse
doesn't, and it almost alwaysgoes bad. So I do think you need
some agreement. As a couple, wehave a good friend, Joel hammer
neck and did ministry kind oflike this in Chicago, and he
said, nowhere in the Gospels isthe commandment be safe. And
(43:23):
yet, if you talk to Christiansabout anything like this, like
the one of the first things theysay is, you know, well, what
about your kids? What about yourwife, like did you? And so I
think not that you should notconsider safety, but I think we
often overvalue safety.
Joshua Johnson (43:42):
That's a good word. A couple quick questions.
Kurt one, if you go back to your21 year old self, what advice
would you give?
Kurt Ver Beek (43:50):
Yeah, probably a little bit of things I was just
saying, being a little lessdogmatic, a little less black
and white. Continue to becurious. I wouldn't change a lot
actually, of my, of mytrajectories, oh, that's a kind
of crazy and amazing just byitself.
Joshua Johnson (44:10):
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 amnow. So that's that's amazing.
Anything you've been reading orwatching lately, you could
recommend people
Kurt Ver Beek (44:26):
maybe one thing, probably lots of things that I
shouldn't recommend. We we havea taste for comedies and then
sort of dark, violent shows. Ithink that's our living in
Honduras maybe has influencedthat, but we just started
watching a series on Netflixcalled Little America. And it's
(44:47):
little vignettes like 20 minutesabout stories that end up mostly
being very positive, but thedifferent experiences of living
and growing up in the UnitedStates. It's. It's beautiful
little pieces. So yeah, I'llrecommend
Joshua Johnson (45:02):
that. Yeah, Little America, that's great.
Look. Kurt, this book, bearwitness, that tells the story of
the Association of more justsociety, your story, Carlos
story and the story of yourneighborhood and others. Yeah,
it's a fantastic read, and it'sa it's an incredible story,
fantastic read. I highlyrecommend the book to many, many
(45:25):
people. So people should go andget this and read the story, and
then I really hope and pray thatpeople will go and find what
justice in their communitieslooks like, that they would go
and care for the the triad ofthe vulnerable, whatever the
vulnerable is in your area, inyour community, so that you can
(45:47):
do that. So there's a lot of lotof incredible things in this
book. Where would you like topoint people to you did mention
that you loved on your website,we go there and to pray for the
the elections that are coming upin Honduras and other things.
Where would you like to pointpeople to? How can they connect
with you? What would you likepeople to know?
Kurt Ver Beek (46:08):
So our English website is ASj, us.org, so
that's probably the easiestthing. There's a link there
about the book, so I'll clarifylike we didn't commission the
book. It was an independentauthor, not a Christian, writing
about this. So he spent sevenyears we don't like everything
(46:30):
in the book. We like mosteverything in the book. So if
you go on the website, you cansee an interview with him and
with Carlos, and with I tellingyou a little bit more our side
of the story and and learn allabout the organization at www as
J us.org,
Joshua Johnson (46:49):
perfect well.
Kurt, thank you for sharing yourstory today. Thank you for
walking us through what Justicelooks like, especially in the
middle of things that reallyseem too daunting for us to take
care of. But there are issuesthat actually can be solved and
that we could be brave.
Christians can step in to takeaction, to see justice happen,
(47:12):
to care for the vulnerable. Itwas fantastic. I really hope
that a lot of people areinspired to live in a way where
we can join God's heart for themost vulnerable in the world. So
thank you. That's fantastic.
Kurt Ver Beek (47:28):
Thank you very much. Joshua, you
One of the things that we often tell ourselves and
(00:02):
our staff is is that none ofthese problems are so difficult
or take so long to fix. BecauseI think it's a message our
culture tells us this is socomplicated, it's going to take
so long. And we have seen againand again that they're not you
grab a piece and you startworking on that, and it ends up
it isn't that complicated, andit doesn't take that long, and
(00:24):
oftentimes solutions are muchmore achievable than you would
have guessed.
Joshua Johnson (00:42):
Hello and welcome to the shifting culture
podcast in which we haveconversations about the culture
we create and the impact we canmake. We long to see the body of
Christ look like Jesus. I'm yourhost. Joshua Johnson, what do
you think about when you thinkabout justice? Do you picture
small local acts of kindness,like food drives, micro loans,
neighborhood cleanups. Well,those things matter, but what
(01:03):
happens when the real barriersto change are violence and
corruption and broken systems?
Well, my guest today, KurtVerbeek, has spent decades in
Honduras wrestling with thosebigger questions, from moving
his family into one of thecountry's most violent
neighborhoods to helping lead anationwide police purge. Kurt's
story is one of proximity andpersistence and of refusal to
let fear have the last word. Inour conversation, we talk about
(01:25):
what it means to be a braveChristian, why solutions to
complex problems might be closerthan we think, and how caring
for the most vulnerable canreshape a society. So join us.
Discover God's heart for loveand justice. Be brave and move
towards the vulnerable. Here ismy conversation with Kurt.
Verbeek Kurt, thank you forcoming on shifting culture. It's
(01:47):
an honor to have you here. Sowelcome.
Kurt Ver Beek (01:51):
Thank you so pleasure to be here. Yeah, I'd
love to start with
Joshua Johnson (01:55):
the story. So how does a sociologist from the
Midwest just happen to findhimself at the front lines of
justice and one of the mostviolent neighborhoods in
Honduras.
Kurt Ver Beek (02:07):
Well, you make it sound very dramatic, but the
story probably wasn't. So mywife and I met and got married,
went to Calvin University andwere married soon after we
graduated. This is back in 1986so that's what you did. Very
happy I did. And then we gotoffered an internship to go to
(02:28):
Costa Rica, and so we went therefor a couple of years, and then
they offered us a job inHonduras. So we went there for
six years, and then I went backand got a PhD. And then we
thought it would be really coolto start a semester in Honduras
program to teach collegestudents all this stuff we
should have known before we wentto Central America the first
(02:51):
time. And while we were doingthat, one of my best friends,
Honduran Carlos, moved up tothis very poor, rough
neighborhood, and we had alwaysthought that something like that
would be cool, and so we decidedto do it too, and and things
went from there.
Joshua Johnson (03:09):
So as you moved into the neighborhoods, and
you're looking, how do we alignourselves, how do we how do we
become part of this neighborhoodand help and be a people of of
help in this place and make abetter neighborhood. What were
some of the things that you werestarting to try? What were your
ideas coming in?
Kurt Ver Beek (03:29):
Yeah, so it's a nice little meshing of things.
God does things this way, Ioften find so we had flirted
with the idea of moving to aneighborhood like that, but we
never had, because we were kindof scared. We'd gone to a church
there for eight years, but wehadn't moved up there, and then
(03:50):
Carlos moved up there, and thatsort of like made it seem okay
and and safe to try. Then I werethere. Was also the first year I
was teaching college students,Calvin Wheaton, Biola students,
those students we were talkingabout, like, you know, how to
help poor people, basically. Andso we talked about the
(04:12):
traditional things, microenterprises and agriculture
programs and health programs.
And then, I'm not exactly surewhy, but I included a textbook
that had a bunch of these macroissues like violence and
corruption and sort of issues atthe at the government level. And
we started talking about that,and we said, you know, the
(04:32):
students were saying, there's1000s of orphanages in Honduras.
There's hundreds of microenterprise organizations, what
Christian organizations areworking on issues like violence,
what Christian or and I,honestly, I couldn't come up
with a single one. So we have1000s of organizations doing the
same thing, and none of themaddressing these big issues. So
(04:54):
Carlos and Joanne, my wife, andI decided to start this
organization. Nation, but weweren't really even thinking
about our neighborhood at thatpoint. The neighborhood came in,
I think, because of necessity,and that wasn't part of the
plan,
Joshua Johnson (05:11):
right? So what was the necessity? Why was it
something that it had to happen?
Kurt Ver Beek (05:17):
Our kids went to Carlos' school right in our
neighborhood, and they went toschool one day and got sent home
right away, and we didn't reallyknow why, but Carlos came over
that night and said that one ofthe fathers of my kids
classmates had been killed thatmorning. So he he sold fruits
and vegetables out of a back ofa pickup truck it was going down
(05:39):
about 430 in the morning to buymore fruits and vegetables, and
three guys with ski masks cameand and stole his money. And
after they took his money, theyshot him in the head in front of
his wife and kids and the thewife had gone to Carlos office
that afternoon and said she knewwho it was, and there were three
(05:59):
witnesses who were willing totestify, which was also crazy.
So we knew who the guys were,and we had witnesses willing to
testify. So right there, Carlosand 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'relike, 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 ofthe bad guys or friends with
(06:23):
them, so don't do that, butwe'll help you like we'll help
you find someone you can trust.
And Weeks went by, and in theend, they robbed they didn't
know it, an off duty policeofficer and killed him, and then
the police responded in mass,two of them were captured, three
were killed. And when Carlos andI sat down a week or so later,
(06:44):
we were like, Boy, those thoseguys were really violent. You
know, they, Carlos says theykilled X and Y and Z around my
church. And I said, Well, Ididn't even know about x and y
and z, but I know about a, b andc by my church. And we ended up
counting that they had killed 13people after we knew who they
were, we could have saved 13people if we would have known,
(07:07):
if we would have done something,basically. And so we ended up
coming up with this idea that ifwe hired an ex cop, who we
trusted was a Christian, was ouridea, and a lawyer, then the cop
would know who are the good copsand who are the bad cops, and so
that cop would be our littlebridge of trust to the police.
The year we started thatprogram, our neighborhood had
(07:32):
almost 50 homicides, and threeyears later, it had only eight.
Joshua Johnson (07:37):
Wow, you know these micro issues you're you're
thinking that if you havecharity, if you have micro
enterprise, if you could, youknow, teach farming, subsistence
farming, so people could say,but if there's corruption and
violence and things there, moneycan get stolen. They can't get
off the ground. They can't dothese things that going upstream
(08:00):
is something that most peopledon't do when they're trying to
solve problems. I think, ifyou're looking around the world,
I mean, we're looking at microissues everywhere, these macro
issues are something that isreally difficult. How did you
start to even wrap your headaround solving a macro issue and
thinking that, man, if we justhave an ex cop, if we have a
(08:21):
lawyer, things are going to be alittle bit better, and then we
could actually help in thesethis neighborhood in other ways
as well.
Kurt Ver Beek (08:29):
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 badguys found out we had our kids
and our wives lived in thisneighborhood too, and so we were
scared, but we felt like we hadto do something. I think that
those 13 lives weighed heavilyon us. So again, I think it was
(08:50):
necessity, and I can give you acouple examples, like we helped
start a pillow business. A womanwas making pillows in her house
and was doing really well, andshe had, in the end, three
employees, and then the gangshowed up and started to extort
money from her, and got to thepoint she was paying the gang
more than her total profits, andshe had to shut it down. So I
(09:14):
think those are the things thatpeople often don't understand,
and probably we would not haveeven gone there, except for this
woman showing up in Carlosoffice and saying, you have to
do it. But then once we starteddown that road, we're like,
well, this, this makes sense.
Like, how can we do this inother topics? But also, how can
(09:36):
we do it at a larger scale?
Joshua Johnson (09:40):
There's a few times already you said we were
scared, but you did it anyways.
You're scared, but you did itanyways. You talk, you talk
about making brave Christians,people that are brave, that you
know, one of the sayings that mywife and I have, it's one of our
lifelong sayings, is to defyfear and to do something that's
def. Call even in the face offear and being scared, what does
(10:01):
it mean for you to be a braveChristian, to stand up in a
place where it is there is a lotof fear. It is scary. How do we
how do people become a braveChristian?
Kurt Ver Beek (10:14):
A bunch of answers to that. One story I
often tell is Jesus tells usquite clearly, right? Love our
neighbors as ourselves, which Ithink is sometimes people over
emphasize love your neighbors,and sometimes people mostly we
over emphasize love ourselves.
So we keep those two in balanceso we don't do crazy things. But
when I would walk my daughterwas, you know, 1516, years old,
(10:37):
and I would walk my daughter toyouth group at the church and
walk her home. I would walk herbecause it wasn't so safe. Young
men would be standing on thecorners, and they would say
stuff to me, and even a coupletimes they got me riled up
enough that I like started. Ithey started it, but I really
started like something Ishouldn't have. What I always
(11:00):
would tell people is it seemsclear to me biblically, that you
know, if I love my daughter, Iwill do almost anything for her,
like to protect her, to keep hersafe. So what does that mean? If
my daughter is in in your housein Kansas City and and she's at
risk. I would want you to lovemy daughter the way I do like I
(11:23):
probably wouldn't expect thesame, but I would expect a lot,
because it's my daughter. And ifyour daughter is in Honduras
visiting me, I know you wouldexpect me to do that. And so how
do we live more like that?
Right? That every young woman inmy neighborhood is someone's
(11:43):
daughter who loves them likethat. So our mission statement
is brave Christians trying tomake the Honduran systems work
for the most vulnerable. Andjust that term brave Christians,
like, if you go out in thestreet, I'm in Grand Rapids,
Michigan, you're in Kansas City,and we ask people like, describe
a Christian, and they'll give abunch of words, loving, nice or
(12:04):
hypocritical. Mean, you know,depends who you're talking to. I
don't I bet you. I would bet alot of money. Not a single
person would say brave, theaverage, and maybe even average
person in the pew, maybe even99% of people in the pew. But if
you look at the Bible, the lifeof the prophets, the life of
Jesus, the life of the apostles,like that is a characteristic
(12:27):
that jumps out at youimmediately. So we both in
Honduras and in the states aretrying to reclaim that. Like,
let's see what it's like if weindividuals live this out to be
brave Christians. And I oftenfinally say, Yeah, that's true.
Like, I need to talk to mycoworker, you know, like the
desk next door about Jesus.
Like, that's how much brave,that's how far brave goes. But I
(12:48):
think it's way more than that.
And I think that talking hasweight when we are living a life
that's different when, like, theway we use our money, the way we
use our time, where we live, orsomething that is, is cure,
makes people curious, makes theminner.
Joshua Johnson (13:06):
Being brave as well, is doing what Jesus did,
is moving into the neighborhoodof 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. Soif you think that what you're
trying to do in different areas,in Honduras, the Association for
(13:27):
a more just society, how doesproximity and being in the
neighborhood actually help? Andwhere maybe has Christian
charity or work missed the mark.
Kurt Ver Beek (13:41):
First of all, like it didn't start out like it
ended right? So we, we said, mywife and I said, Let's do it for
a year and we'll just see how itgoes. And I really thought it
was going to be terrible, right?
It was going to be scary, it wasgoing to be stinky, it was going
to be like, all, almost all badthings, was my impression, but
we're going to try it, and westill live there. 25 years
(14:03):
later, we're still living in thesame in the same house, in the
same neighborhood, and we loveit. So it's not suffering for
Jesus anymore. It really neverwas, but we thought it was going
to be. So I think that'simportant, and I think that
would be lots of other people'sexperience when you take those
risks. I think we almost alwaysthink it's going to be bad, and
(14:24):
I think not always, but lots ofthe time it isn't. But I do
think, I mean, the story ofviolence is a good one, but I
can give you one more. When wemoved in our neighborhood, kids
go to public schools. 2 millionkids in the public schools, and
we would see these kids, andthey would be like, never in
(14:46):
school, and they're like, what'sgoing on and and so we started
asking our neighbors and Sundayschool and on the street, and
they're like, Well, you know,teacher didn't show up today,
and teachers are on strike, andthere's. Training today,
supposedly so. And it ended upwe did some research and kids
were only getting 110 days ofschool. And so kids are supposed
(15:07):
to get 200 days of school, 205hour days. And so you imagine,
like missing half of the days ofschool. Let's say you're doing
your kids are learning fractionsor multiplication division, and
if they only get half of thatlike then they then they get the
seventh grade, eighth grade,12th grade, they don't know the
(15:28):
basics. So it's super damagingto kids learning. So we, not
just us, we got together withthe Catholic Church, Protestant
church, World Vision, a bunch oforganizations, and we started a
campaign, 200 days of school.
And it became like a nationalthing, and everybody was talking
(15:48):
about it, and we ended upgetting schools to back to 200
days, 200 for five yearsrunning, before covid, they had
213 days average. So I don'tthink we would have known that
if we didn't live in ourneighborhood. I don't think we
would have like, you know, ourneighbors wouldn't have been
complaining to us. We would havelived in a middle most gringos,
(16:10):
most North Americans. If youlive in Honduras, you live in a
nice neighborhood because it'ssafe and you're worried about
your kids, and then your kids goto private schools, and you go
to a private doctor, and you mayhave a security guard at the end
of your street. You see thoseother people, but you don't live
it the same way.
Joshua Johnson (16:29):
So if you are running the Association for a
more just society, if you'rerunning something like that,
justice, what is justice foryou? And what does justice mean?
What does it look like to have ajust society?
Kurt Ver Beek (16:44):
So Carlos and I run it together, first of all,
and like, Carlos is the mainface, the external face, and I'm
kind of in the office trying tomake sure everything gets done.
So just so that's clear. SoNicholas Wolterstorff, I don't
know if you've had him on yourprogram, but he would be great
on your program. So program. So,Christian philosopher, good
(17:04):
friend of mine, just finishedhis he's 92 I think, or 93 just
finished his 18th book, which isand it's really good. So
Nicholas waltersdorf writesabout justice a lot. He, you
know, says something I thinkpretty much all of us know, like
there's two big themes in theBible, sort of love and justice.
(17:25):
The character of God is clearlybased on love and justice. So
justice is not like some extrathing that we're adding or or
that isn't important to God. Andthen he says, when we look in
the Bible at when justice ismentioned, it's very often
mentioned along with he callsthe triad of the vulnerable.
(17:47):
It's the orphan, the poor andthe widow, sometimes the
foreigner. So sometimes it'sfour, but it's almost always
those three. And so he said it'sclear to him that in God's heart
there are like these threegroups that we should be caring
especially about these, thesevulnerable groups. So it's
important is to figure out todaywhere we are in your town, in
(18:10):
your church, in in our case, inHonduras, they may not be those
same groups, but who are thosethree or four groups that are
most vulnerable, and then whatcan we do for them? And so in
the Bible, in the Old Testament,it was allow gleaning, and, you
know, make sure they could meettheir food needs and their
economic needs, but it was alsofiguring out. So I think that's
(18:32):
what justice is to us. Like, howdo we protect how do we care for
those people that God hasidentified from the very
beginning of the Old Testamentall the way to today, as those
that are most vulnerable andoften are taken advantage of.
And that's what we're trying
Joshua Johnson (18:50):
to do. That's a very admirable thing. I mean,
it's the heart of God right tocare for the most vulnerable. We
often don't see that takingplace, and we need to. And I
think sometimes, when we we comein and we want to care for the
most vulnerable, oftentimes, Ithink people have in their head,
like old westerns, they havewhite hats and black hats,
(19:10):
right? There's the the good guysand 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 besome gray hats in the middle,
and there's some some gray areasthat you have to navigate. So as
(19:35):
you're looking at maybe theethics of justice, that we know
that it's not just black andwhite, that there's some areas
that you actually have to havediscernment and discern with the
Holy Spirit. What is the greatergood, or the way that you should
(19:55):
go? How do you start to discernwhat is. The is the way to go.
And you know, can you give meexample of something that was
difficult to figure out?
Kurt Ver Beek (20:07):
So I'll give you a quick answer that at least in
my case, it's always trying tohave really smart, wise people
around, because I don't trustmyself. One of our staff who I
love Omar Rivera. He says, Ifyou want to change the world,
you need a really good team. AndI think that's true, but let me
(20:29):
give you a good example thosegray hats. So So we started with
violence in our neighborhood,and surprisingly successful. So
a big Foundation came down anddid analysis of a whole bunch 28
projects, I think, in differentcountries in Latin America, and
said that our project was themost successful in in preventing
(20:49):
violence. So we were verysuccessful in one neighborhood.
We spread to some otherneighborhoods. But then in 2011
2000 1200s had the highesthomicide rate in the world, so
higher than Afghanistan, higherthan Iraq, higher than Colombia,
higher than Mexico. So we had 90homicides for every 100,000
(21:09):
people. And when we started tofigure out why it was all about
drug trafficking, so it wasdrugs coming from Colombia,
mostly, not just drug cocaine.
Was one drug, cocaine comingfrom Colombia. It would stop in
Honduras and on its way to theUS. So US consumers were were
driving this violence, butHonduras was the victim. And so
(21:33):
when we started to figure outmore, like, okay, so what can we
do about this? We ended upfiguring out that the police,
and really top levels of thepolice, that the chiefs on down,
were involved. They were on thepayroll. They were they were
sometimes just looking the otherway, but oftentimes they were
transporting these drugs inpolice vehicles, like they were.
(21:54):
They were fully in so we endedup starting to put we we brought
together Catholic Church.
Protestant church is another oneof our pieces of our model as we
try and do this all in alliance.
And we started pushing in 2012to purge the police. Was the
word we used, which was a strongword, even in Spanish. It's very
(22:15):
strong. We need to clean up thepolice force, but we said purge.
And for four years, we had thisgroup, and we would hold events,
and we were doing research andlike suggestions how to fix it,
but the government wasn'tlistening. And in 2016 we find a
big, a big thing happened thatpushed the President over the
edge, and he called Carlos, andhe said, let's let's see if you
(22:38):
have the cojones to do whatyou've been whining about for
four years. And so two of ourstaff, Carlos, and one other
staff member, two pastors,joined this commission, and the
government named two twomembers. The head pastor of this
group was a pastor of a hugechurch in Tegucigalpa, so a very
important Christian leader. Andthey started reviewing all the
(23:00):
cops in the country, there were13,000 and deciding who needed
to go. In the first two weeks,they fired all of the chief of
police, nine chief of policewent the first two weeks like
imagine that right in Chicago orNew York or Kansas City, and
church leaders saying you gottafire all the police, heads of
(23:22):
the chief of police, and thendown the pastor fired police who
went to his church. So imaginethat they ended up firing 6000
out of the 13,000 cops. Theyalso designed a new training
program. The Swiss governmenthelped. So it had had to be
(23:42):
good. The Swiss were involved.
They ended up training 10,000new cops over this same three
year period. So they fired 6000trained 10,000 more, and put
them into the force. And thehomicide rate in the country
went from 90 the last year itwas 22 so like a quarter. So I
(24:03):
think it's a good example ofseveral things like one you said
gray hats like you think thecops are the good guys, and you
end up finding out the copsaren't the good guys. You end up
thinking pastors and Christianpeople are nice and supposed to
sort of stay in their lane, butthe things were so bad in
Honduras that the government,the police, couldn't clean up
(24:24):
themselves. It was, it was toocontaminated, so they needed
outsiders to come in. And thenyou see the effect, right? Like,
you know, 90, think, imaginenine. It was almost 4000
homicides a year, 4000 motherscrying for their children down
to less than 1000 so it's stillterrible, but 3000 fewer young
(24:51):
men, mostly being killed everyyear.
Joshua Johnson (24:54):
If I'm here in my city, I look at Kansas City,
we have so many problems to.
Solve. I think a lot of peopleare like, we don't know where to
start. We solve this oneproblem, and then we discover
there's another problem becauseof what we just did. And you
know what? You know people arecalling these macro issues. We
have a poly crisis, right?
(25:15):
There's a there's so manydifferent crises that we're
trying to solve, and thensomething else comes up. Was
there any unintendedconsequences where you were
like, Hey, we're solving thisissue, but then something else
came up? And how do you how doyou start to navigate those
different issues when they'relike, competing crises? You kind
Kurt Ver Beek (25:39):
of asked me the last question that way, and I
went around it, didn't I? I'llgo back to it. I'm going to
start out going around it again.
One of the things that we oftentell ourselves and our staff is
is that none of these problemsare so difficult or take so long
to fix. Because I think it's amessage our culture tells us
this is so complicated, it'sgoing to take so long, and we
(26:00):
have seen again and again thatthey're not you grab a piece and
you start working on that, andit ends up it isn't that
complicated, and it doesn't takethat long. And oftentimes
solutions are much moreachievable than you would have
guessed. But at the same time,you're right. When we were just
getting started with thisviolence in our neighborhood, we
(26:20):
ended up working with a formercop investigator who was solving
homicides and helping us getthese killers put in jail, but
mostly unbeknownst to us,although we had some suspicions,
was sort of turning another ablind eye when the cops were
(26:42):
beating up witnesses or notbeating up supposed authors of
homicides in order to get themto testify or tell where someone
else was. And at the nationallevel, when we were involved in
the police purge, there was allsorts of issues, some of which
we thought about in advance, andsome of which we won't, didn't.
(27:03):
So like, one is, you know,should a nonprofit and pastors
be in charge of this? Or shouldhave we figured out a way that
the government, because this isthe government's work, not ours,
and, like, I think we would bevery wary to get in it again,
but partly because we also paida high cost. So so we thought
(27:25):
that the Honduran society wouldbe praising us and these pastors
for years to come for forpurging the police force and
bringing down homicides. Butthree years ago, a new
government came in, thegovernment under which we purged
(27:45):
the police was had seriouscorruption issues. In fact, the
President, at that time, is injail in New York for accepting
money for drug traffickers forhis campaign. So they ended up
painting the opposition partypainted ASj and the police purge
as something very corrupt andsomething questionable. And so
(28:07):
in the end, one of the pastorswho was leading that ended up
leaving the country and fearedfor his life, and now lives in
Florida. And ASj has gotten lotsof not a little bit for the
police purge itself, but alsofrom the government for saying
(28:28):
we were too closely aligned withthis former corrupt president.
And then the ex cops that werefired have tried their very
best, clearly for the last fiveyears to say they were all
really good cops and and ASj andthis group fired them for
political reasons. So I thinkit's a good example of like,
(28:51):
maybe no one is a prophet intheir own country. I still
believe that we did somethingamazing, very, very difficult,
very scary, with very positiveresults. But if you ask the
average Honduran, they wouldhave very mixed, probably very
mixed, comments about it. Andthese are dealing with people
(29:17):
and perception. And a wholecountry of 10 million people,
and in the end, you know, Ithink we need to be worried less
about perception and more aboutwhat we did
Joshua Johnson (29:30):
totally right.
Perception is hard, and it movesus into inaction when we think,
you know, people are going toperceive us one way or do
something else. And it moves usto inaction, if you would talk
to communities, and maybecommunities around the world
that want to see some of theseissues solved, to see justice in
their own land, what would youwant people to do to start what
(29:54):
are the core tenants to. It toget started and to make a
community better.
Unknown (30:05):
Nice question. I've done a bunch of these. Nobody's
asked me that yet. So thanks.
Kurt Ver Beek (30:11):
We have, I think, a strategy that is quite simple,
and we've been sharing it withothers, and others have been
trying it, and it's there's whenI tell you it, it's gonna
nothing so surprising, but it'snot what most nonprofits and not
what much most helpingorganizations do. So the first
thing we start with always isresearch investigations, and we
(30:33):
try and figure out, like, what'sgoing on, what's broken here,
what's working here, becausethere's always some things that
are working. Who's responsiblefor the good stuff the bad
stuff. And then, like, whatcould we do? How do we fix this?
Are there models in Honduras?
Are there models in othercountries that could help us,
and we put that together in somesort of a report and try and
make it as simple and as easy tounderstand as possible. So what
(30:56):
I find is lots of nonprofitsjump right in with opinions and
solutions, but they never reallydid the research. Second thing
we do is we will always build analliance, or not always, almost
always, 80% of the time, I wouldsay, around all these topics,
and it's we try and get thebiggest allies in the room we
(31:16):
can. So the head of the CatholicChurch, the head of the
Protestant church in Honduras.
And these people, traditionallydon't even meet together.
Sometimes they've they've nevermet. But we can bring them
together around these bigtopics, World Vision, NGOs,
universities. And it's not allChristians. It's, it's going to
(31:37):
be a whole mix. What we want isin when we present our
suggestions, that it is the mostvaried and most powerful people
we can get there, right? Sothat's kind of our goal. We end
up finding lots of them arereally cool people, and wanting
to do this stuff, they justneeded someone to kind of help
them across the line. And thenthe third piece is we have
(32:00):
communications. So we have goodresearch, good solutions, we
have an alliance, and then we'lldo press conferences. We'll get
this stuff in the media. We'lldo a tour, and it's certainly
never started this way, butright now, we'll do two press
conferences a week. We'll have3040, media sources, there will
(32:22):
be this first story or the fifthstory on the evening news two or
three times a week. So these arethe issues Honduras cares about.
These are the issues thejournalists care about,
sometimes just because it'ssensational, sometimes because
they really care. But thatdoesn't matter. We get it out
there. And then the last pieceis, is lobbying is actually
(32:46):
sitting down with the decisionmakers. So we find like doing
that. And it could be from, youknow, your local public school
is broken, well, you do thissame process or, or the street
lights are out, or the garbagecollection is like, it could be
a smaller problem, or as big aproblem as you want, the
(33:07):
immigration system in the UnitedStates, but I think those four
pieces are crucial to makingchange.
Joshua Johnson (33:16):
I mean, if I'm sitting in the United States and
I'm thinking about the man, I'mthinking about the the divisions
in the church and then outsideof the church, and everybody
wanting a little piece of thepie or getting credit for for
this. How do alliances work in away where we're unified around
(33:37):
something, and it's not justabout the credit for my
organization or my thing, but itis really just for the
betterment of our society.
Kurt Ver Beek (33:48):
So at least we always say, I'm sure that we
don't always live this out isthat we are willing to be sort
of the engine or the motor ofthese alliances doing the
research, but we are notinterested in being the one that
gets the credit. We would saythe same with government
officials. Probably actually,we're better at that. Like, if
(34:10):
some government official wantsto fix this, we don't want them.
We don't need them to say, thiswas as J's idea this, as J
helped me with this. We wantgovernment officials to be able
to say, like, I did this, and wewould say the same with like,
the churches, the world,visions, the universities. We
would ideally want this to be anequal partnership, but that if
(34:35):
any of them are willing to,like, take the lead, that we're
happy. The trouble is, lots oftimes they're not and they don't
want to be in front of thecameras. They don't want to be
the spokesperson. They want toask Jay to do that. But then I
think there's always a littlebit of jealousy. You know, it's
they know that they don't. Theydidn't want to be the one in
(34:56):
front of the camera. But thenwhen they see one of our people
in front of the camera. Arethey're like, Hey, wait a
minute. So it people aredifficult. But I would say the
thing that we often invest themost time in is alliances and
going to, you know, the headpastors house, and bringing him
(35:16):
the coffee he likes and thecookies he likes, and spending
two hours listening to why he'snot 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 themeeting again, he's going to go
he's going to go to one meetingagain. He's going to see how
this goes, or the universitypresident, we got to go to her
(35:36):
office and listen to a bunch ofstories to finally get to the
thing, where will you come tothis meeting again? And yes, you
will lots of hand holding. Welldone.
Joshua Johnson (35:48):
It takes a lot of patience and work with
people, and people are messy. Itwould be nice to say, here's the
report. This is what we need todo. Go do it, but you're gonna
have to deal with a lot ofpeople, and people are messy and
difficult. There's a lot ofpeople that don't want to do
that work. And so if you look atthe back of that, that's a lot
(36:10):
of that's a lot of work, that'sa lot of hours, that's a lot of
time where you think that maybethis isn't worth it, but it is
worth it in the end, to getthese people at the table.
Kurt Ver Beek (36:20):
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 andtalk to him and and figure this
out together. And you know, he'sa perfectly nice person, but
just we get upset about things,sometimes rightly, sometimes
not. But he was also the personduring the police purge that if
(36:43):
the government was trying to,you know, say you can't fire X
or Y, he would say, Well, if youwon't let me fire him, I'm
getting up and I'm walking out.
And then they'd say, Well, we'renot going to let you. And he
would get up and walk out, andhe'd go home, and he wouldn't
come back to the meeting untilthey fired X or Y, so like that
same thing that made himdifficult sometimes for us, was
(37:06):
he was the real power in theroom that could get the
government to do stuff, becausethe government was afraid of the
Protestant church, and His powerto do good was way higher than
us. So like, yeah, it pays off.
Joshua Johnson (37:29):
I want to know, like walking through this, like
going, you know, the verybeginning, you know, if you're
looking at the late 80s andyou're coming in now, how has
this impacted your faith, yourrelationship with God, and your
view of God, in the midst ofseeing a lot of suffering of
violence, but also seeing peoplework together, where is God in
(37:51):
this for you, and how does yourview of God shifted and changed
over the years?
Kurt Ver Beek (37:56):
It's a good question. So I think I've always
been fairly critical of thechurch and the church's role.
Maybe it's age, maybe it's allthe stuff I've done, but I've
also learned to have a lot morepatience and love for the
church. I mean, I've seenpastors do brave things, take
(38:18):
leadership, not just in thisissue, in the days of school and
healthcare. Right now we'rehunters. Is having elections in
November. I would love to havepeople go to our website and be
praying for that. And I've seenchurch people brave and stepping
up. So I think I sort of I usedto probably think that I was
(38:42):
somehow had a betterrelationship with God. I
understood God better, isprobably true, and I feel now a
little more humble in myrelationship vis a vis God and
others and church leaders. Ithink my understanding and view
(39:03):
of justice and God's love forjustice has been become much
bigger its scope. This idea ofbrave Christians isn't new to
me, but I think it means newthings like and I've seen again
and again like, how doing thiswork is attractive to to non
(39:24):
Christians and and makes peoplesay, like, you know, what are
you? What are you doing? Why areyou doing this in ways that,
like trying to evangelize ortalk about sort of the
traditional Bible verses is notmeeting there anymore. I still
(39:45):
feel like God is. I feel veryblessed for my life, the things
I've been able to be a part of.
And feel like lots of in all ofthese things, it's not because.
I was so smart or we were socapable, but having a really
group, a really smart grouparound me, and God sort of being
(40:07):
the foundation of blessing,maybe that's even why I feel
like I can say like none ofthese problems are so hard or so
complicated, because I feel likeit has been God sort of guiding
us, you know, God's grace,keeping us safe, God's wisdom
and guidance, like helping usfigure out where to start and
(40:31):
how to start.
Joshua Johnson (40:33):
You know, we have some families and families
with with young kids that reallyfeel like they just they moved
into a really violentneighborhood in Kansas City, and
then they want to move to one ofthe most violent countries in
the world with the young family.
What would you say to familiesas they as you moved into a
(40:53):
really violent neighborhood withyour family, and they want to be
brave Christians, but they alsowant to make sure that their you
know, their kids are, are okayand safe as well. How can you be
a family on mission and bebrave?
Kurt Ver Beek (41:13):
Questions always make 10 different things jump
into my head. So so one of whichis, I think we did this when our
kids were very little. Wasn'tsomething like we could talk to
them about, we could decidetogether. So we were always
worried. And even when this bookcame out, there their talk, the
(41:36):
author interviewed our kids, andthey were kind of sick of
getting interviewed by him, andwe were worried about, like, did
this damage them, or did theyresent us for doing that? And we
talked about it. We've talkedabout it several times, but when
the book came out, that sort ofmade us think about it again
with them and I they're not,it's not 100% good, but it's
(41:59):
pretty close. They're reallygrateful for how they grew up.
And the example, Carlos gavethis example in a podcast that
the Holy post that his son has atattoo all down his arm, a half
sleeve, and it's all nuevasuyapa, the neighborhood that we
(42:20):
lived in and grew up in, and andour son and they weren't even
that close to each other in ageor friendship wise, our son also
has a tattoo all on his arm, onthe inside of his arm that has
sort of the image of Nuevasuyapa and the coordinates, like
(42:41):
the latitude, longitude lines,and I think that's a sign of of
like, how they love thisneighborhood, kind of like we
did, even though it wasn'talways easy. So I think we've
also met lots of missionariesand people who the husband or
(43:02):
the wife really wants to dosomething and the spouse
doesn't, and it almost alwaysgoes bad. So I do think you need
some agreement. As a couple, wehave a good friend, Joel hammer
neck and did ministry kind oflike this in Chicago, and he
said, nowhere in the Gospels isthe commandment be safe. And
(43:23):
yet, if you talk to Christiansabout anything like this, like
the one of the first things theysay is, you know, well, what
about your kids? What about yourwife, like did you? And so I
think not that you should notconsider safety, but I think we
often overvalue safety.
Joshua Johnson (43:42):
That's a good word. A couple quick questions.
Kurt one, if you go back to your21 year old self, what advice
would you give?
Kurt Ver Beek (43:50):
Yeah, probably a little bit of things I was just
saying, being a little lessdogmatic, a little less black
and white. Continue to becurious. I wouldn't change a lot
actually, of my, of mytrajectories, oh, that's a kind
of crazy and amazing just byitself.
Joshua Johnson (44:10):
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 amnow. So that's that's amazing.
Anything you've been reading orwatching lately, you could
recommend people
Kurt Ver Beek (44:26):
maybe one thing, probably lots of things that I
shouldn't recommend. We we havea taste for comedies and then
sort of dark, violent shows. Ithink that's our living in
Honduras maybe has influencedthat, but we just started
watching a series on Netflixcalled Little America. And it's
(44:47):
little vignettes like 20 minutesabout stories that end up mostly
being very positive, but thedifferent experiences of living
and growing up in the UnitedStates. It's. It's beautiful
little pieces. So yeah, I'llrecommend
Joshua Johnson (45:02):
that. Yeah, Little America, that's great.
Look. Kurt, this book, bearwitness, that tells the story of
the Association of more justsociety, your story, Carlos
story and the story of yourneighborhood and others. Yeah,
it's a fantastic read, and it'sa it's an incredible story,
fantastic read. I highlyrecommend the book to many, many
(45:25):
people. So people should go andget this and read the story, and
then I really hope and pray thatpeople will go and find what
justice in their communitieslooks like, that they would go
and care for the the triad ofthe vulnerable, whatever the
vulnerable is in your area, inyour community, so that you can
(45:47):
do that. So there's a lot of lotof incredible things in this
book. Where would you like topoint people to you did mention
that you loved on your website,we go there and to pray for the
the elections that are coming upin Honduras and other things.
Where would you like to pointpeople to? How can they connect
with you? What would you likepeople to know?
Kurt Ver Beek (46:08):
So our English website is ASj, us.org, so
that's probably the easiestthing. There's a link there
about the book, so I'll clarifylike we didn't commission the
book. It was an independentauthor, not a Christian, writing
about this. So he spent sevenyears we don't like everything
(46:30):
in the book. We like mosteverything in the book. So if
you go on the website, you cansee an interview with him and
with Carlos, and with I tellingyou a little bit more our side
of the story and and learn allabout the organization at www as
J us.org,
Joshua Johnson (46:49):
perfect well.
Kurt, thank you for sharing yourstory today. Thank you for
walking us through what Justicelooks like, especially in the
middle of things that reallyseem too daunting for us to take
care of. But there are issuesthat actually can be solved and
that we could be brave.
Christians can step in to takeaction, to see justice happen,
(47:12):
to care for the vulnerable. Itwas fantastic. I really hope
that a lot of people areinspired to live in a way where
we can join God's heart for themost vulnerable in the world. So
thank you. That's fantastic.
Kurt Ver Beek (47:28):
Thank you very much. Joshua, you
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