“These are My daughters, and I want you to do something about it.”
God spoke those words to David and Beth Grant as they looked on the horrors of the sex trafficking industry in Bombay, India. Longtime missionaries, the Grants had been involved in Asia for many years but had never entered the red light district they visited that day, And that rhema moment marked the start of Project Rescue, an Assemblies of God World Mission ministry they founded in 1997—long before people were talking about sex trafficking, much less doing anything about it.
“You walk by brothels where you’ve got 12-year-old girls standing outside inviting men into the brothels, provocatively dressed, heavily made up—and their eyes were dead,” David says. “They were like walking dead girls. … Our hearts broke, tears began to flow down our faces, and we said, ‘God, this is the vision you’ve just birthed in our heart.'”
The Grants returned to the U.S. and started telling churches about the millions of girls caught up in this horrific industry and their new plan to help. When someone sent them a check “for the prostitutes,” David says they made one thing clear: “It’s not for the prostitutes. It’s for prostituted women. …. It is what is done to them; it’s not what they have chosen to do. These people have been trapped; they’ve been enslaved. They never chose to do this.”
For the last 25 years, David says, he and Beth have been involved with teams all over the world, “reaching out in dozens and dozens of nations and now on four continents to reach out, restore and rescue a whole generation of young women.”
“The needs of a sex trafficked woman or child are complete,” Beth says. “The destruction, the slavery is not just physical. God has created us body, mind and spirit—we are complexly made. And tragically, sexual slavery and that kind of violence destroys the whole person.
“And so if we’re going to help a woman or child have a new future, you just can’t take her physically from a place of slavery to another place; you have to address the needs of the whole person,” she explains. “So often, the first step is a safe place of shelter. But in those shelters, there has to be medical care. There has to be trauma counseling; there has to be education … whatever is appropriate for them. And so this is a very integrated, holistic ministry to the whole person.”
Beth adds that through Project Rescue, she and David have learned that moving a girl physically out of sex trafficking is only the start of their work. “Only Jesus can take the slavery out of the girl’s heart and mind and spirit,” she says. “Something has to happen spiritually. So part of the very heart of Project Rescue is an introduction to the person of Jesus.”
To learn more about the life-changing work God is doing through David and Dr. Beth Grant and Operation Rescue, listen to this entire episode of the Strang Report podcast here, and check out the Grants’ book, Beyond the Soiled Curtain. Be sure to subscribe to the Strang Report on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast platform and share with others who want to hear more stories that inspire people in the power of the Holy Spirit. {eoa}
