Paul Mergard: Episode Description

On this episode of The Inspiration Project, Brendan Corr talks to CEO of Destiny Rescue Paul Mergard about the harsh realities of Human Trafficking, how Paul got involved with Destiny Rescue and Human Trafficking, why Human Trafficking is such a major problem, how Destiny Rescue helps to end Human Trafficking, whether Human Trafficking will ever end, how Paul became a Christian, how faith plays an important role for Paul when dealing with Human Trafficking, and how Paul reconciles his faith with God and the abuse of Children.

Episode Summary

• The harsh realities of Human Trafficking
• Why Human Trafficking exists
• How Human Trafficking has become a multi-billion dollar industry
• How Paul got involved with Destiny Rescue
• How Destiny Rescue helps to save kids and end Human Trafficking
• Whether Human Trafficking will ever end
• How Paul became a Christian
• How Paul reconciles his faith with God and the abuse of Children

WARNING: This episode contains highly sensitive information about child sex trafficking. Listener discretion is advised.

Paul Mergard: Episode Transcript

Sponsor Announcement
This podcast is sponsored by Australian Christian College, a network of schools committed to student wellbeing, character development, and academic improvement.

Introduction
Welcome to The Inspiration Project, where well-known Christians share their stories to inspire young people in their faith and life. Here’s your host, Brendan Corr.

Brendan Corr Hello everybody. Welcome to another episode of The Inspiration Project podcast, where we have a chance to talk to Christians who have made a success of their career but have also been able to incorporate the convictions of their faith. And today we’re talking with Paul Mergard. Paul first trained as an accountant with a Bachelor of Business and was an accountant with the leading firm KPMG, but he moved into international studies and international work following a Graduate Diploma in International Development. He’s been significant in leading two of our country’s largest charities; the Salvation Army and Compassion. But currently, he is CEO of Destiny Rescue, an organisation that is committed to finding ways to help people out of poverty and out of the horrific implications of people trafficking. Paul, thank you for your time this morning. It’s a delight to welcome you and to have a Christian so committed to making such a big difference in the world.

Paul Mergard
Oh, thank you, Brendan. It’s really good to be able to join you, and look forward to having a conversation about whatever we want to talk about today, I guess.

Brendan Corr
Paul, I think most people who would be listening to us would know of Destiny Rescue at least by reputation or they’d recognise that name. Before we start to dig into your background and the work that you are heavily involved in through Destiny Rescue, can you maybe explain to us what the organisation is, what are its key goals, what difference you’re trying to make in the world?

Paul Mergard
Brendan, Destiny Rescue exists to rescue children who have been sold into the sex trade around the world. We operate in 13 countries. We’ve so far rescued just over 13,339 individuals since we began in 2001. Most of those 13,000 would be children, but we primarily go out to find children who have been trafficked and rescue them. But if we do find adults, and they’re generally young adults, we will rescue them as well. Operates in 12 countries around the world. We’ve got three countries in Africa, quite a number of countries in Southeast Asia and South Asia, and then a number of countries in Latin America. And essentially, what our rescue agents do, we’ve got over 150 rescue agents put around the world, they go into some of the darkest places on the face of the planet, into bars, brothels, massage parlours, on borders, international borders, and we try to identify where kids are being trafficked and exploited. And then, work with law enforcement to get them out, get them into safety, get them into a safe environment, and then we work with them on an aftercare journey. So, that could be helping them get back into school, could be helping families start small businesses, and then also helping them deal with the trauma of what they’ve been through before they were rescued.

Brendan Corr
Sounds like an incredibly powerful place to be working. Challenging, as it obviously will be, and we’ll explore some of that. I’m conscious, Paul, that seems a very big number, more than 13,000 individual kids that your organisation has been part of intervening on behalf of. Most of the people listening to this podcast will have a family that’s middle class or upper middle class and will have heard about this sort of stuff on the news and in the media. How prevalent is the problem? Is it restricted to those dark places of the Earth, the world, or is it somewhere like Sydney?

Paul Mergard
Yeah, Brendan, it is incredibly prevalent. There are over a million children trafficked every year around the world. A lot of those are in Southeast Asia, but we would find that well over 50%, and I’m not exactly sure what the number is, but more than half of the people we would rescue have been exploited and groomed on Facebook, TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, and there are kids in Australia that also get trafficked and are also being exploited for sex. Often in Australia, it is kids who are couch-surfing, it is kids who have fallen through the cracks from some of our social welfare situations. But there are kids in Australia that are groomed by people online, people pretending to be somebody else, and they’ve got all the social media profiles set up and everything else. I was talking to a social worker the other week at one of our events and he was a youth social worker and was talking about one of his clients who was trying to find accommodation, but couldn’t find accommodation. I think she was 15 or 16, and she had a guy offer her free accommodation for sex. So, it does happen in Australia, but certainly, it is more prevalent overseas, where there is less child protection. Australia’s got some really good child protection laws and I think we have cleaned up a lot of those places that used to be quite unsafe for children in Australia, but we’re still a long way to go. But yeah, globally, there are over a million children trafficked every single year.

Brendan Corr
That is staggering. I made the comment that the 13,000 seemed like a big number, but it is a drop in the bucket compared to a million.

Paul Mergard
Yeah, it is a drop in the bucket, but I think Brendan, for those 13,000 and for their families and for those that surround them, it means everything to them because their freedom has relied on it. I’m pumped that this year we’ve rescued already over 2,000 individuals. Last year we rescued 3,080, so our rescue numbers have been growing by about 35% year-on-year, which means we are having a greater impact. And our vision is to try and rescue 100,000 children by the end of the decade. So, the pressure’s on for us to be able to do that, but we are really committed to doing everything we can to try and rescue 100,000 by the end of the decade, and we’re well on our way to doing that.

Brendan Corr
Yeah, great work. I’ll be interested to hear from you a little bit more about how you go about that risk, and how you become alerted to issues. But let me wind back, that a million kids who are subject to this abhorrent practise, ignorantly, people from a similar social background as I am, can form the view that this sort of abuse happens with one depraved person at the other end of a computer pulling strings or fostering a connection with another kid at the other end of that. But a million children sounds like it’s an industry.

Paul Mergard
It is an industry. It’s actually the fastest-growing criminal activity on the face of the planet. Human Trafficking generates over $150 billion U.S. every single year. The difference between the trafficking of children and I guess the arms trade, so guns, bombs, ammunition, and the drug trade is that children can be bought and sold multiple times a day. Whereas you sell a bomb, you use the bomb, it’s used. You buy drugs, you use drugs, it’s used once, it’s done. Unfortunately for kids, they can be five, 10, maybe even more times a day being exploited. And that’s day in, day out. And so, it is a very profitable business I guess for traffickers around the world. And again, a lot of the times the people trafficking people can just be someone that’s opportunistically came across a child in a slum community or in an impoverished country and thought, “This is a quick way to make some money.” And unfortunately, what we probably see when I travel overseas in some of the countries that we go and work in is that there are a lot of Australians, not only on the computer but in the bars that we go into that are exploiting children. And I’m actually pretty excited that we have been working. And I think last week we had an arrest. There’s been an arrest of a number of different perpetrators in Australia that we will announce officially in the coming week, that we’ve been able to work with the Australian Federal Police to ensure their arrest because we’ve been able to rescue the girl and we were able to identify the men out of the video footage and things that we were able to capture at the time of her rescue.

Brendan Corr
How do you go about helping these people? Is it whistleblowers? Is there monitoring? Are there informants? How do you get to know what’s going on?

Paul Mergard
Yeah, Brendan, it’s probably different in every country we’re in some of our countries we go into bars. We will go in and pose as customers. We’ll go in and pose as, I guess a group of guys that just are out for a good night and out for a bit of fun. And you are going in undercover, you’re trying to identify who’s in this particular establishment, and if there are children there that you suspect might be underage, we will then work with police to get them out. Other times, we’ll have tip-offs. We might have people email us, or phone us. We’ve got community leaders who will give us a tip-off that there’s something happening. So, the method of that is really varied. Up in Nepal, we’ve got a whole heap of female Nepalese border agents who work along the Nepal border. And last year, they interviewed 23,000 people crossing the Nepalese border, and we rescued 920 individuals. And so, that was a process of finding these people that were crossing the border. And the border up in Nepal is a little bit like the border between Queensland and New South Wales, a pool of gutter. And so, people are just walking across the border, they don’t need a passport, they’re not having ID checks, and you can just go across. So, it’s really easy to traffic someone across that border. Our border agents were able to stop them, interview them, ring back to the parents, and find out whether the parent or the guardians or someone at home knows that they’re crossing the border because there are a lot of people who are tricked into that. And then, once they cross the border, they’re lost for the rest of their life, most likely. So, the way we find them is really varied. We’ve also got some really new technology that’s helping us on the online sexual exploitation base, where kids are being exploited online. And we’ve got some real cutting edge technology now that’s enabling us to get into some of those dark bots on the dark web using artificial intelligence and other different methods, which we won’t go into, but that’s helping us identify Aussies that could be exploiting kids online from the perceived comfort of their lounge room. And we’re really hopeful that some of that technology in the years to come will play a leading role in identifying where Aussies are particularly exploiting kids.

Brendan Corr
I want to pick up the story of how we make a difference in this space and what role an independent organisation like yours holds, what role the might government hold, and what role might individual households and people hold. But Paul, you started life as an accountant, you started life doing audits and ledgers, and how did you find your way to this sort of work? What’s your story of being called into saving and rescuing these kids?

Paul Mergard
Yeah, I had a really unique childhood I guess growing up. My grandfather and his brother were in the Bundaberg sugarcane harvesters. So, I grew up in Bundaberg in I guess Central Queensland. I had a family history of my grandfather taking the sugarcane harvester around the world in the 1950s, ’60s, and I think ’70s, selling the sugarcane harvester. And so, he was, in the period of time where air travel was really uncommon, not like today when everyone’s used to jumping on a plane, but in the 1950s and ’60s he was in South America, he was in Africa, he was across the subcontinent selling sugarcane harvesters. And so, I grew up, I guess in a family where I had a really, particularly for a kid going up in Bundaberg, a really odd view of the world I suppose, because it was a really global view of the world. And when I finished year 12, I went as a rotary youth exchange student to Finland for a year. So when I lived up in Scandinavia, did year 12 or did their year 12 up in Finland. I got to travel a fair bit through that year through Europe and into Russia quite a number of times, because Finland borders Russia, and went in there a few times. And I came back probably with a sense of calling that maybe one day it’d be a missionary, but I got into uni. I’d deferred uni for a year and I thought, “Well, I enjoyed numbers, I enjoyed accounting at school, which for some weird reason,” and so, I went and did my bachelor’s. I was about six months into the degree and went, “I need to earn some money as well.” And so, I ended up getting a job and I ended up at KPMG, studying for my bachelor’s while working at KPMG. It was a phenomenal grounding for my life and something that I have used… Well, I use it every day. I use my accounting background and knowledge. It’s helped me in business, it’s helped me in leadership, it’s helped me understand budgeting, and it’s helped me understand… It gets a commercial side to any organisation that it’s got to be profitable or you’ve got to be breaking even to be able to survive. And then, after a number of years at KPMG, I’d been starting to do mission trips with my church and I went on a missions trip to South Africa, and then from that went on and spent a year in London, working with the Salvation Army, doing youth work and mission work in the UK and travelled again back to Russia, travelled back to South Africa, and really opened my eyes to I guess that full-time ministry space. I often think about, how I swapped numbers for people because I enjoyed doing numbers, but I enjoyed people more, and I think I found real purpose and meaning through international travel and I felt that real draw to help people in Australia engage with the rest of the world.

Brendan Corr
It does sound like you had a background that was ideally preparing you for holding a global perspective, but also one that is not just humanitarian, it is informed by something deeper, an understanding that each one of those lives that you were helping make a difference with is more than just a human, there is something unique and precious about them eternally. How did faith become part of your own experience and a driver for you to be led along this line or into this field of service?

Paul Mergard
I would still think a lot of it would come back to a real grounding that I particularly got from my grandparents, from my grandfather and my grandmother. They were incredibly faithful and generous people and really believed in people being made in the image of God. And I think for me, I remember the first weekend that I ever went into Russia, it was while I was an exchange in Finland and we’d gone across to Saint Petersburg for the weekend, and I had this sense of calling from God to the world. It was interesting. I’d gone through a really difficult period in my faith at the end of year 12, with what I’d probably talk about and describe as some spiritual abuse that happened in the church that I was part of, and manipulation and whatnot. I was fairly disillusioned with religion, but I understood my relationship with God. And it was amazing. I went to this church, I grew up in the Salvation Army and I went to this church, the Salvation Army Church in Finland. And I still remember this old lady in that church. She would’ve been in her seventies or eighties, or maybe even older, I don’t know and didn’t speak any English. Over the 12 months in Finland, I gradually learned to speak Finnish. But I got to that church-going, “I’m probably not going to go to church this year,” because I was really hurt from what had happened to me in year 12. And I walked into this church and this old lady every week would just come up, grab me, look me in the eye, give me this massive big bear hug, and she was a frail old little lady, and she would mumble words at me, which I had no idea what she was saying to me because early on in the peace I didn’t speak the language, and she just loved on me, man. And I think that year in Finland was a real pivotal time for me of understanding the difference between religion and relationship with Jesus. And it restored hope to me, I think of who God was, and then allowed God to just speak to me about who I was. And so, going to Russia, I mean, initially I felt, “Oh, maybe I’ve been called to be a missionary to Russia.” I came back home and as I went through my early twenties and whatnot just started engaging in mission activities and then went to Africa, initially just on holiday, and just fell in love with Africa. And I got to Africa and I have always felt at home when I’ve been to Africa, and I think I’ve been on the African continent 25, 26 times now, and I have this experience every single time I land. The plane will come into land and I’m just like, “I’ve come back home again.” And so, there’s been a real deep sense of calling from me to the poor. And maybe that’s because I grew up in the Salvation Army and that great focus on serving suffering humanity, but a real desire to do whatever I can do to enable people in poverty to find a better life.

Brendan Corr
Yeah, that’s amazing. And what a great story, and how like God to take you to the other side of the world to show you that there’s more to it than you might’ve known in Bundaberg or wherever home was at the time. Again, this sends that notion that he’s the God over the entire creation. Great story, Paul. Wonderful. This leads us to some of the other questions I wanted to explore with you. The idea of a global conception of the world, which God graciously allowed you to develop in your formative years. And understanding, as you’ve just explained, that you could find him even in Finland and beyond language. That there was an experience of his reality that was accessible. And now, your work is looking at the fact that the problem you are addressing is a global problem, there is a universal plague of trafficking, particularly the trafficking of children. Am I right in describing it that way? Are there universal elements of the human condition that your work is addressing?

Paul Mergard
100%. Yeah. Trafficking happens in every single culture, language, nation around the world.

Brendan Corr
So, why is that? I mean, it would be easy to write some of these things off to say it’s cultural, or it’s ideological, or it’s political, or it’s economic, but you are suggesting there’s something more fundamental.

Paul Mergard
It’s often talked about, the three great biases of the world, I guess power, sex, and money. And I think you find all three of those in trafficking. People exert control and force over another individual, using that individual to gain personal financial benefit from it, and sex. And so, I think it is horrendous, the extent of this. We often think about William Wilberforce, who we thought ended the slave trade hundreds of years ago, and yet here we are in the modern age, in 2023, and you’ve got kids all over the world, individuals all over the world being exploited for gain and some form of power. And I think that comes to a broken humanity, that we have a humanity that not everybody believes in the best of each other, not everybody believes that other people need a hand up. People like to tread on other people. People like to take advantage of other people. And I think that’s where it really all stems from.

Brendan Corr
So as a Christian, as somebody who carries that insight into the fundamental sinfulness of human nature universally and yet needs to do things very practically, you need to rescue these kids from a particular context or a particular circumstance, where do you find the balance between the notion of a salvation story and a freedom story, a practical release from the circumstances? I guess, what I’m saying is you go in and you see these kids in practical need. They’re being practically abused, manipulated, or taken advantage of, and the pressing imperative is to change those circumstances. But you know that is symptomatic of a bigger problem. And I guess, I’m asking you, does one inform the other? Does one override the other? How do you reconcile your call as a Christian to redeem the world and the need to get that kid out of a brothel?

Paul Mergard
I guess, one of the worldviews I probably grew up with growing up in the Salvation Army is William Booth’s idea and notion of Soup, Soap, and Salvation. Unless you meet people’s physical needs, then they’re not able to have their spiritual needs met. If someone is trapped in slavery, they cannot live their life in all its fullness unless they’re relieved of that situation. And so, I think there is a real human element to what we do, of trying to get people to a place where they can be safe, where they can be secure, where their basic human needs are being met. Because the average life expectancy of someone who is trafficked is about seven years. And often, you’ll find when someone has been sold into slavery, whether it be labour, trafficking, sex trafficking, debt bondage, the trafficker will often try and really break the human spirit. And that takes about six months on average, which you’d find that it’ll take until someone’s really given up their own hope. And some of that will depend on what worldview they’ve come from. I guess the Hindu background might believe in reincarnation and might believe that in this life this is their reincarnated life this time around. And so, they deserve what they’ve got. And it’s interesting. A heap of the women that I’ve seen and met and talked with, particularly through this subcontinent and that comes from that Hindu background, they’re like, “This is my lot in life, but I don’t want to do this for my kids. My hope and my prayer for my kids is that they don’t have to go through what I go through.” And so, there’s a worldview for them that is really going, “Well, you’ve done something bad in your former life, so this is your lot this time. And hopefully, in your next life, you’ll come back as something else.” I think of the Christian I believe differently to that. I believe that God creates us in his image and that we’re all created with immense worth, value and potential. I think when I go into some of those dark places around the world, you know that everybody deserves a second chance, you know that everybody deserves another opportunity at life. And my heart breaks at the depravity of men and women, but the depravity of the human soul, that would exploit people and abuse people. But then, to see the resilience and hope in people, the way that someone who has been redeemed is able to rise above the situation that they’ve been in is incredibly inspiring. And Brendan, it’s amazing to see when God puts back someone’s life, and whether they become a Christian or not, whether they say a Hindu or a Muslim or whatever they might be, but the way that I believe God is able to put someone’s life back together and build hope in them because somebody else was able to stand alongside them and go, “We believe in you and we see hope in you, and we see value in you, and you deserve freedom, and you deserve your basic human rights,” and you’re prepared to go and get that, it’s incredibly inspiring to see that.

Brendan Corr
So, there’s the other side of the story, because my question was a little esoteric and philosophical, about what’s motivating your workers or your organisation, the grand notion of redemption and the symbolic notion of addressing the wrongs of the world versus the individual experience. But you’re really saying it on the other side of the coin as well. You’ve changed the circumstances for the person who is set free, but you’ve given them much more than just a changed circumstance. You’ve given them identity, dignity and hope for a future.

Paul Mergard
Brendan, every single person on the face of the planet deserves that. It is a human right. It’s a human right for everybody to have freedom, for everyone to have an identity, for everyone to be able to control their own choices, their own agency, I guess. Where there is brokenness there is also redemption there. Where there is sin, there’s also forgiveness of sin. Where there is exploitation, there is freedom on the other side of that door. And we do live in an incredibly broken world. I feel like our world is becoming more and more broken. We live in a society that’s all about, it is all about the individual in so many ways, but it’s about individual games. It’s about, “What’s in it for me?” And our kids are taught that, “Well, what’s in it for you? You only do whatever if there’s something in it for you.” What if it’s about what’s in it for you is the fact that you actually get to be a huge blessing to somebody else, you get to actually add value to somebody else’s… I think a lot of our mental health challenges would go away if people changed their perspective, that it’s not just about you, but it’s about how you serve somebody else. And if we had a world that was more cohesive and together and supportive and loving and caring, a lot of those basic things that Jesus talked about when he walked the Earth and that’s written about in the Bible, those basic tenets of human behaviour that I think we’re created for, our world would be an incredibly different place than what it is at the moment.

Brendan Corr
Yeah. I want to come back to that notion of how the work you were doing, what implications it has for people like me, and our view of ourselves and the world. But if you bear with me, you used the reference about agency, that you were restoring agency for the people who are rescued, I wonder whether you could share some reflections about the view that… I don’t know how prevalent this is for you, but I’m sure that there must be a condescending position that those who are removed from the work you were doing by some measure of comfort will say it’s the result of choices. People have made choices and ended up in these desperate situations. They could have done something different. They didn’t have to be in that space. And you understand what I’m saying? That it is not like they can get what they deserve on it, but almost that they get what they… They could have done something different. How realistic is that view compared to the circumstances that you face?

Paul Mergard
I think, Brendan, I’ll answer the question I guess in this way. I had no control whatsoever that I was born in Australia, in Bundaberg, to a relatively global standard wealthy family, and that I wasn’t born a poor kid in Africa, Nepal, or Thailand. None of us at all have any control or say over where we are born. And so, what I find about poverty is that poverty is generally a lack of opportunity. And in a country like Australia, we have opportunity in the bucket loads. We all get to go to school. But if you’re a kid who’s growing up in a slum community around the world in a developing nation, you’ve potentially never gone to school, so you’ve never had an opportunity. And so, when people say, “Well, it was a parent that went and sold the kid and it was the parent’s fault,” I’m like, “Well, is it really choice when you are desperate to eat today and you need to put food on the table, and the only way you can find income to be able to buy a meal for your family is to go and sleep with someone?” I met a girl in Zimbabwe this year that… It was a childhood-headed household. Her parents had died of HIV and AIDS. She was trying to bring up her younger sister. And for 25 cents every day she was going to sleep with the man so that she could put food on the table for her and her sister so they could go to school. And she didn’t do that because she wanted to do it, she didn’t do it because she couldn’t work, she had nothing better to do. She did that because she was a 14-year-old girl trying to bring up her younger sister and she had no other opportunity. And that is genuinely the situation you find kids in. It’s not for choice. It’s not because they’re lazy. It’s just because they’ve had a lack of opportunity. The potential is everywhere, but opportunity is not. And if you’re unlucky enough to be born in an impoverished country, where you don’t have clean drinking water, there’s malaria, there’s a lack of food, there’s a lack of jobs, lots of exploitation, you don’t get to go to school, in some of those countries, if you’re unlucky enough to be born a girl, you’re disadvantaged because you don’t have the educational right. If you’re not the firstborn, you don’t have the privileges sometimes because the privileges might be given to one child in the family, and you just happen to be the one that wasn’t the firstborn and that you weren’t male, or whatever it might be. And that’s the reality for a lot of kids around the world. And so, they end up in a situation that they’re in just because they were unlucky enough to be born in that country. But for me, I was lucky enough to be born in Aus. It doesn’t get much luckier than being an Aussie citizen.

Brendan Corr
Amen. Like I said earlier I want to come back and ask you what are the implications of that reality for people in Australia, like myself. But before I put that question to you, and this is an unfair question to put, Paul, so I understand. It’s bigger than we can properly deal with, but at a personal level, as a Christian committed to the outworking of grace from a loving God, what struggles or what answers have you found for yourself in saying, “I see the randomness of your birth, the circumstances that you have no control over, and some born to opportunity and some born to desperate poverty and abuse?” How do you reconcile that with a loving creator?

Paul Mergard
Look, I think we are in a full-on world. We are in a world where sin exists. And I don’t believe our world is like love and the creator designed the world, so why did he send his son to atone for the world? I think one of the incredible privileges that we have as Christians is to be the hands and feet of Jesus, to be bringers of good news. Now, bringers of good news for me isn’t just about, I’ve got to go and speak with words what someone needs to believe, but Jesus went and met the poor. Jesus went and sat with the prostitutes and said, “Your sins are forgiven. Go and sin no more.” He went and healed those who were sick and gave us an incredible example of what the church is meant to be. And I look around the world today, Brendan, and I see that most of our Western institutions that are helping people, so schools, hospitals, medicine, all come out of Christian heritage. Comes out of people using the intellect that God’s given them, using the skills that God’s maybe placed in their hand, and then using that for the betterment of humanity, to try and make a difference. And I look at how the church does that around the world. I look at the rates of poverty, extreme poverty around the world has massively dropped over the last 50 years or so. And a lot of that is actually driven out of a Christian worldview, a Christian belief in the sanctity of life, and in that sense people are made in the image of God. And then, I see my personal responsibility is, “Well, what do I do with what I’ve been given for those that I can assist? Am I called to help the whole world? No, I’m not. I don’t think any of us are, but I can help those that I come in contact with.” And we often talk about, I guess, at Destiny Rescue, we use the starfish analogy in many ways, where people… A lot of listeners might’ve heard it, but someone’s walking on the beach one day and there’s a whole heap of starfish up on the sand. They’ve been washed up onto the sand. And this guy starts walking along and he throws the starfish in and throws another one in and throws another one back in the water. And someone goes, “Why are doing that? There are so many starfish on the beach. You’re not making a difference for them all.” And he’s like, “Well, it does for this one and it does for this one and it does for this one.” And I think that’s what God calls us all to play our part. I think the body of Christ is a rich tapestry of people right across the world, in some of the most inspiring places on the face of the planet. And we all get to make our world a better place. And I think by and large, we are getting to see that our world is… As difficult as it is in a lot of places with the rise of social media and technology and everything like that, at the same time, there’s an incredible rise of even people who have been at the bottom of society. So, people in impoverished nations are coming to countries like Australia now and bringing the gospel in the sense of Jesus’ love and his hope and healing, and bringing restoration and a message of hope to people. There’s this reverse trend of missionary service now, where young believers gathering back in 2016, I think it was. And I met some of the most incredible people from the Middle East and from North Africa and Asia, who were out being missionaries in Western society trying to bring the gospel into our culture and society, and really bringing hope, really trying to remind people that, “Actually, there is a God that loves you and cares for you and has a plan for your life and has real potential for you to achieve all that you could achieve.” So, I hope that answered the question.

Brendan Corr
It does. It made me think, actually. I had a conversation with Dr. Chris Watkin in a previous episode of this podcast. He’s written a book recently, Biblical Critical Theory, and one of the points he makes, which I think it echoes exactly the point you’re making, is that the doctrine of sin is actually good news. That it is heralding the fact that the brokenness we see around us is not God’s plan. That the inherent knowledge that we all carry that things should be better is right, and it’s the echo of that good creator that sets things in order that we’ve lost, is reverberating to us, saying, “Yes, that is unjust. Yes, that is unfair. Yes, that is not right.” And we are called to do something about it, which I think is fantastic. Paul, as we come to the end of our chat, I’ve been wanting to get to the implications of the world that you are making a difference in, that not many of us are able to be engaged in directly as your workers, the implications for us. You’ve spoken a little earlier about what’s expected of us, people who have been born with the opportunity of our Australian society, of our education, probably for many of our listeners, even the chance to have responded to the gospel ourselves and to know the goodness of God in our lives, what might you encourage folk from that part of the world to consider as their response to the work you are doing?

Paul Mergard
I think every single one of us, regardless, of every single person in Australia has an opportunity to make a difference in someone else’s life. And that could be as simple as caring for your next-door neighbour who’s going through a horrible week, might be going through a family situation, a health challenge, whatever it might be. I think every single one of us is called to do something for other people. The research and statistics show that people who live their lives for other people, not just for themselves, actually have better mental health, have better quality of life, and better health. I would invite your listeners to lean into that challenge to supporting others, that would be written in scriptures, that sense of doing the right thing for your other brothers and sisters around the world, for humankind, for other people around the world. Help where you can help. Discover what your passionate calling is, discover why you have uniquely been placed on the face of this planet, and then go and live your life out trying to find out how you can make that happen. One of the things I love about what I get to do at Destiny Rescue is we get to invite a whole heap of everyday, ordinary, yet incredible and extraordinary Australians to help change the lives of children around the world. And they just get to do that by being door openers. They get to do that by going and earning an income and getting their salary and then coming and going, “Well, you know what? I can’t save all these kids, but I can save some.” And it was interesting, the other week, all of our friends from our church, we went and watched the movie, Sound of Freedom, which tells the story of a child who had been rescued in South America, who had been trafficked. And at the end of it, one of the ladies in our church was talking to me, she was like, “You know, Paul,” she goes, “I haven’t got $30,000 to give to help rescue kids and all that sort of stuff. I don’t feel like I can do anything.” And I said to her, “But you know what? You could do $30 a week or $30 a month or whatever it might be that you can do and you can actually be part of enabling other people to have those opportunities so that kids that got rescued in that movie can do the same thing.” And I think that for all of us. If every single person in Australia and around the world who had the means and capacity did something… Again, I think in the scriptures, of the woman with the coin, the lady with the might, that went and gave her a really small amount, and yet Jesus held her up as an example for others to see that it wasn’t about the amount, but it was about the heart that went before it. And as you see people going, “You know what, I can’t do much, but I can do something,” you suddenly get to see people find meaning in their lives. People start to get to discover that, “Wow, I’ve actually made a difference in that person’s life and that person’s life and that person’s life.” And that, for me, is about the gospel being shared I think. That’s about people going, “Someone stood beside me in the darkest days, in the most challenging situation, when I lost a parent when I lost a child. When something went incredibly wrong in my life, I had someone to stand alongside of me.” And I think that’s redemption. That is where you get to see the gospel worked out. And I’d encourage your listeners to be part of that, be part of the solution, because we can all stand there and go, “Oh, wow, the problem’s way too big. A million kids, man, what’s the point?” Well, if it was your kid, what would you want Destiny Rescue to do? If your kid was taken, do you want us to go, “Too hard,” or, “Too many other kids taken today?” Or do you want us to, “All right, we’re going to do whatever we can and we’re going to get us whatever support we can get because there are parents all around the world that are going, ‘Will someone help me find my kid?‘”

Brendan Corr
Yeah, that’s beautiful. Paul, last question before I give you a final opportunity to plug Destiny Rescue and how people might get involved or offer financial support. Doing what you do and knowing that you and your team are making such a difference, such a positive impact against things that are so horrific, how do you balance your own sense of neediness before God, your own sense of accountability, and the need for grace? How do you not fall into, “I’m so thankful that I’m not like that,” and be justified by your good works, your good attitude, and your relatively good life? Where’s grace in your experience?

Paul Mergard
Brendan, I see grace everywhere I go. I see redemption everywhere I go. I actually pray for the pedophiles and the traffickers and the pimps that get arrested, that maybe, one, that they get locked up and they get taken off the streets so that they can’t harm other people. But my hope and prayer would be that they would find redemption, that they would find that their sinfulness and brokenness is restored and that they could find healing and salvation, I guess, in whatever… Because I don’t believe God turns his back on any of us. But I think in the sort of work I do, years and years and years ago in the early stages of my ministry life, I guess, I realised that I was giving it everything, and I gave it everything plus some more. And I realised that I need balance in my life and I need to have perspective on what God’s called me to do and what my particular role is in this lifetime. And I think that was really helpful for me, realising that I don’t have to be part of every single issue. I’m not necessarily called even to try and rescue kids from every single country or area around the world, but I can do what’s in my hands and in my control what to do.

Brendan Corr
Amen.

Paul Mergard
And I often come back to, it was Moses and his staff and God said to him… Moses was like, “Well, who am I? I can’t do anything about leading your people.” And God said, “Well, what’s in your hand?” He’s like, “My staff’s in my hand.” And God’s like, “Well, use that. Use that to lead your people.” And I think I’ve developed over the years a real healthy worldview of what’s in my hand and what can I give and what can I do. And I just get about doing that. I’ve probably made conscious decisions sometimes to go, “I love the issue that somebody else is about but it’s not my issue.” And some of your listeners would go, “Oh, human trafficking, yeah, that’s not my issue.” But there’ll be other listeners that go, “human trafficking, man, I actually feel a sense of calling. I could actually do something about this.” And we need people who are committed to dealing with the lack of education of kids in poverty around the world. We need people to deal with getting people clean drinking water and making sure that there’s great mental health support. So, every single one of us has a role to play somewhere in our society to bring good news. For me, it’s knowing that my sense of calling is to do that in this kind of environment. And who knows, maybe in time to come, it’s a different sense of calling. God might change that calling over my life at some point in the future. Or it might broaden that out to do something else. But I think there’s that real sense of knowing your identity, knowing what you’re being called to do. And if you’re not sure what it is, well what I’d say is go and try something, and start to see, “Oh, actually…” Don’t be paralysed, I guess, is what I’m trying to say. Don’t get paralysed by the fact that, “I don’t know what to do, so I don’t do anything.” But just go and do something. And then, you might find that by doing something, you get to understand that God’s actually called you to really do something in a particular area.

Brendan Corr
That is so good. Very good advice. And Paul, I can understand, I can hear in your story, that the difference you’re making is because of the difference that has been made in your heart. You’re not earning your relationship with Jesus. What you’re doing is flowing from that relationship with Jesus, and that’s a precious thing. We will be praying that God continues to equip you and empower you to lead this incredibly important work. Just as we sign off, if people did feel that they wanted to get involved, particularly with supporting Destiny Rescue, what might they do? How might they go about that?

Paul Mergard
Brendan, people can go to our website, destinyrescue.org, and we would love to invite them to sign up to become a rescue partner. Our rescue partners are just those people who go, “You know what, every month I’m going to going to support the work of Destiny Rescue.” You can choose the amount. On average, it costs us $1,800 to rescue a child. But we have got this whole huge army of rescue partners spread across the country who are just committed to ensuring that rescue can remain relentless every single day of the year. We rescue on average 16 individuals every day at the moment. And we need more people in our rescue partner army, because the more people we have in that, the more kids we could rescue. We could literally double the number of our rescues overnight if we had the funding to do it. And I was talking to a country manager in the Philippines only a week or two ago, and he was like, “We have got so many raids ready to happen. We’re just waiting for funding to come through.” So, look, I invite you people, to head to destinyrescue.org, and have a look at the links on the website to become a rescue partner. And we are absolutely committed to keeping you informed. So, stewarding your money really well and making sure as much money as we can send to Rescue goes towards rescue so we can get as many kids out as possible.

Brendan Corr
That is fantastic. Paul, I want to thank you for being courageous enough to do the work you’re doing and leading that team. Do know that the broader church is praying for you and supporting you, and I really hope that you see a little spike in some of the support that might come as people listen to your story and the passion that you bring to it. God bless you and thank you for your story.

Paul Mergard
Thank you so much, Brendan. Really appreciate the opportunity to share with all your listeners today.