Vineyard Spotlight: John Aureli and the Sugar Land Vineyard
This week the Justice Response/VAST team continues our January ‘Vineyard Spotlight’ series in which we will hear from pastors, churchplanters, ministry leaders and activists who are working in the area of Justice Ministry in order to help empower others to engage.
Today is Part 1 of 2 of our interview with John Aureli at the Sugar Land Vineyard in Texas. John is the associate pastor of compassion ministries at the Vineyard Church of Sugar Land in Texas. A native of the Boston-area, John and his wife Arleta came to the Houston-area six years ago and have two children, Gabriella and Elias. John is a graduate of Houston Baptist University (MA theological studies) and Eastern University (BS in Management and Health Administration). His experience with non-profits such as Geneva Global and the Salvation Army have been instrumental in creating and assessing ministry activities with the Vineyard Community in Sugar Land. When we interviewed John, he had just returned from leading a ministry team to Haiti through our sister VineyardUSA ministry MercyResponse. Teams from Vineyard and other churches are now working with MercyResponse in Haiti serving and rebuilding communities after the devastating earthquake in 2010. Check out MercyResponse website for more!
How did you first get involved in the human trafficking aspect of Justice ministry?
A woman in our church had a small group that continued to meet concerning being an advocate for women and the poor. She really opened my eyes to the issue and I was introduced to a local group in town called “The Houston Rescue and Restore Coalition.” How did you personally begin to get involved?
I attended an information lunch at a local hospital that was educating ER nurses and Docs about the signs of a potential trafficked person. We found out about a bus tour that the organization was hosting that took you through areas of the city and alleged store fronts where trafficking activity was under investigation. We soon found out just how central Houston was to the issue. Being on the Interstate 10 corridor and a major gulf port, Houston has a diverse population that is spread through a sprawl of a city limit that is larger than the state of Rhode Island. There are plenty of places to hide. Although we knew that there might be other churches involved in the issue we felt like knowing about the issue made us responsible to respond in some way.
I know you all have been involved in some creative ministry-endeavours, can you share some of what you all have engaged in at the practical ministry-level?
Houston Rescue and Restore mostly operates as an advocacy group, raising funds for educational seminars and billboards but also for local outreaches that gathered street kids who were high on the scale as potential victims. There was one evening with HRR that we went out to local bars in at-risk areas distributing coasters with information on how to identify and report a trafficked person.
We also invited a speaker to an evening event at our church that opened our eyes to what was going on. You could see the anger and frustration boiling to the surface, not just that such an activity was going on in our back yards but that there was little we could do to stop it. We were not investigators or police or federal agents. We were a church that was broken for those who were being bought and sold losing their humanity in every moment. We weren’t satisfied with purchasing fair trade items or sharing awareness. Those are both great things but our church wanted action.
As a pastor I was embarrassed and frustrated. The issue is so clear and so pronounced and so graphic but we had no tracks to ride on to fight it, no solution, no relief effort that would claim back lives to the Kingdom.
So we needed to change our strategy. Keep advocating for those who were enslaved, keep aware of the ways we were ignorantly participating in slave labor by the things we were purchasing. The statistics were harrowing when it came to those who returned back to their traffickers after they were freed. We knew we could be intentional to keep children from becoming runaways and therefore lower the percentage of teens who would then become trafficked.
So our strategy has become multi-dimensional. On one side we teach ESL (English as a Second Language) to discourage our internationally diverse population from being taken advantage. The hope is that an English-speaker can understand a little bit better if someone is trying to steal from them or sell them services that will eventually enslave them. Even a few words can help.
On another side, we have gotten involved in our city’s school mentoring program for at-risk youth. Just this past summer we gave backpacks and school supplies, family photos, vision screenings, food, and a hair cut at a single day event that drew 1/3 of our school system while making sure that the 2/3 who didn’t come still received what they needed to start.
We try to help widows and single moms with keeping their homes in healthy conditions. We keep in touch with the local code enforcement officers who tell us when there is a property that is looking poor with a potential family at risk to see how we can help them. We participate in food co-ops so that families can have less expensive food and larger quantities and a benevolence program that participates responsibly and generously when trafficked individuals have come to our doors.
[Check back Thursday for Part 2 of our Vineyard Spotlight series with John Aureli]