They Are Not Forgotten: A Conversation with the Compassionate Hope Team
This interview with members of Compassionate Hope, including its founder, Al Henson, explores the organization’s mission and how you can become involved.
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esus Rejected at Nazareth
14 Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and news about him spread through the whole countryside. 15 He was teaching in their synagogues, and everyone praised him.
16 He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. He stood up to read, 17 and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written:
18 “The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
19 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
Pastor Paul Lawler: Ahead of this interview, I want to frame what we’re going to do by reading the words that Jesus quoted from Isaiah 61—the day His ministry went public. That’s significant, because He came into a synagogue and declared the tone of His ministry, a tone that remains in play today.
Based on the words of Jesus in Luke 4:14-19, He was lifting up the reality that the gospel, the good news, has the power to transform a life. Not only the power to save you, but the power to transform you. He described it with phrases like setting the captive free and healing the woundedness that happens in a broken world.
It’s for this reason, and many more reasons, that when we crafted the mission statement of Christ Church:
We exist to glorify God and make disciples of Jesus Christ among all peoples.
We also recognized there’s a spirit in which we need to carry those things out. That’s why we wrote a vision statement to accompany our mission. The vision describes the spirit in which we want to express the ministry of Jesus Christ:
By the power of the Holy Spirit, we will be a gospel-centered community who magnifies Jesus Christ as we worship passionately, love extravagantly, and witness boldly while serving the poor, the oppressed, and the marginalized, spreading scriptural holiness in our city and to the nations for the spiritual awakening of all.
But as God calls us to serve, His call is not just for our city, but it’s for the world. Sometimes, in our thinking, we might ask: Why would we serve over there when there are so many needs here? May I answer that question? This is not only what Jesus has asked us to do, but also what He has commanded us to do. To have a local heart and to have a global heart. I like to blend those two words. I call it glocal. We are to have glocal hearts as followers of Jesus — a heart for the nations, for the unreached people groups of the entire earth, for the oppressed throughout the earth.
We have some very special guests from Compassionate Hope who are expressing that global ministry by reaching the least of these in regions of the earth where people are suffering incredible oppression, and where the love of God through His gospel is setting the captives free.
The Compassionate Hope team includes Dr. Al Henson, founder of the Compassionate Hope Foundation. They have more than 40 locations and more than 80 homes. This is a global outreach concentrated in Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar, and the Philippines. This brother, one of the dearest brothers in my life, describes him this way because of the grace of God working in his heart: holy, hidden, and humble. I think you’ll understand that as we journey forward.
Al, share a little bit about yourself.
Dr. Al Henson, Founder, Compassionate Hope Foundation
Al Henson: It’s a joy to be here with you. Thank you, Paul. He is a heart-brother — a friend in the true meaning of Scripture, where a friend would lay down his life for you. We love you, and we rejoice over what God has called you to be: sons and daughters of God, and servants of the Lord.
I am the consequence of a godly woman praying that God would give her a son who would follow after Jesus in a hard and deep way. By the time I was nine years old, I had preached my first message. I had read through the Bible probably four or five times. I knew then that God’s call upon my life was to the people — to love people, to minister, to shepherd by the Spirit, the Word of God, and the love of God.
But I went to war with God. And the way I went to war with Him is I simply began to do everything I could do in the church — to be a good brother, a good servant, a good church member. But the war was this: God didn’t want my service. He wanted me. He wanted me to deny self and take up the cross, to lay my life down. 1 John 3:16 says, “If Jesus laid down his life for us, ought we not also lay down our lives for one another?” (1 John 3:16)
So at 21, I came to a place of surrender — a submission. Not just a “yes, Lord,” but a full embrace of the cross of Jesus. I want to die to my will, my plans, my hopes, my dreams. I only want Your life, Your way, Your love, Your will for my life.
Long story short, I began to grow and develop in the Lord. I entered into ministry, planted ministries and churches in America, and began to go to the nations — making disciples, planting churches. One of my spiritual gifts is mercy. If you ever fall, I’m the person you want to talk to when you make a mistake, because I drip with the mercies of God. And we all need the mercies of the Lord.
My heart, through the years and decades of planting churches and making disciples in these countries, began to — I almost couldn’t handle it. The burden. The love. The care. The concern for the children. Especially the least of these. More specifically, the children who were being abused, abandoned, rejected, suffering sexual abuse, and trafficking.
Out of that, I stepped away from roles I’d held in the kingdom for decades, and we birthed Compassionate Hope Foundation. From that point to now, we started with one home and a few children. Now it’s a thousand children in 80-something homes, 47 locations. Seven of those are Villages of Hope, not just homes. And hundreds and hundreds have now graduated from universities, vocational schools, and colleges.
The heart of it came from 1 Corinthians, where God says He will take the foolish to confound the wise (1 Corinthians 1:27). These children the world is abandoning and tossing aside — God says: I love them. I want them. And they will become My army of servants and soldiers in these countries of great darkness. That is our calling, our heart, and our vision.
Pastor Paul: Al, thank you. I want to frame some of the context that makes the trafficking of children the dark, perfect storm that it is in this part of the world — the role of extreme poverty and the absence of the light of the gospel that we take for granted in Western culture. Would you comment more on the plague of human trafficking?
Al Henson: Maybe the best way to do that is with an example. In Thailand — I can’t verify this beyond government statistics — over 50% of all tourist dollars in the country are involved directly or indirectly in human trafficking. Foreigners coming for the boys, for the girls. The government estimated that in Thailand alone, there are 10 million children who are vulnerable and at high risk of some kind of exploitation or atrocity.
Steven will speak in a moment, and I want to note that the Philippines is the number one country in the world for OSEC — online sexually exploited children. Number one in the world. A large part of that is because of poverty, and because they speak English. A man on the other side of the world can type a command — “Do this, do that” — and they can understand it.
We birthed some Homes of Hope 12 months ago in Cambodia and a Village of Hope there. I always want to honor our partners — there’s no “I” in this, it’s an us working together. Tim Tebow and his wife, Demi, and the Tim Tebow Foundation are one of our key partners. Tim has a great opportunity to be a voice for the voiceless, and they often supply the funding needed for us to carry out the rescues and the Homes of Hope.
In Cambodia, because of the poverty there, many parents have abandoned their children to go to Thailand to work. There are thousands and thousands of abandoned, homeless children who become prey to traffickers, to exploitation, to abuse.
Pastor Paul: The last time I was with Al in Thailand, he said, “Paul, we’re going to take a moment to pray, and I want you to see where human beings — children — are being sold.” So we took time to pray for God to guard our own hearts, and then we walked through a section of Bangkok where human beings were on the street like a meat market, being sold. Based upon Jesus’ words about what the gospel is about, how can His church be indifferent to this kind of injustice happening on our watch?
Al, would you introduce the rest of your team?
Al Henson: This is my youngest son, Steven, and his wife, Kathleen. Steven is our director of the Compassionate Hope Foundation in the Philippines. Steve, I’ll let you share for a moment, and then you can introduce the two young ladies here.
Steven Henson, Director, Compassionate Hope, Philippines
Good morning, everyone. My wife Kathleen and I are full-time missionaries in the Philippines — spending around 10 months out of every year there, serving the Lord.
My wife reminded me just before we came here: “You remember Paul and Missy prayed for us in 2016, just before we went into the mission field?” In 2017, we went. There were no homes, we had no children, and we didn’t have a clear mission of what God wanted us to do. But we knew we wanted to serve the least of these. We just didn’t know who that was going to be.
But we went anyway.
As we went, God orchestrated different situations and opened the door to show us how horrendous online sexual abuse and trafficking were in the Philippines. So we started researching, praying, and connecting with partners — asking, what is this atrocity that’s going on? And this was 2017.
We found out that through poverty, technology, and greed, the Philippines had become the number one place in the world where online abuse and exploitation were happening. Part of the reason is technology itself — the Philippines is one of the largest call center hubs in the world. And because of ties to the United States, the Philippines began learning English over a hundred years ago. English is the second most common language there.
Online exploitation involves a few things. There is demand. The United States is the number one place in the world where people are downloading live-streamed images of children being abused online. It’s a global issue.
And because of something in my pocket — a cell phone — it’s been made very easy. Through Facebook, WhatsApp, or any number of platforms, a video call can happen anywhere. Live streaming has become one of the most common forms of this exploitation.
So God called us to the least of these — to help rescue, redeem, and restore children who are being abused. We do that by working with the FBI, NCMEC, Interpol, and other organizations to track down the people downloading this content and arrest them. But there are also children on the other side of the world who are being harmed. We get to be the hands, the feet, and the boots on the ground — arriving hours after a rescue to receive those children.
We’ve been a part of hundreds of rescues and operations.
Today I have the honor of introducing what Tim Tebow calls the MVPs — the Most Vulnerable People. We have two MVPs with us. I want to introduce you to Tina and to Ellie. They’re from the Philippines, and my wife and I had the honor of safeguarding them into our Village of Hope many years ago.
Ellie will share her testimony, but before that, I want to share something about her. When Tim Tebow founded his foundation, he came up with several core values — Christian values about believing in Christ first. After he met Ellie, he added what he calls a “plus one.” Ellie had written a poem about monsters chasing her, and Tim added that plus one because of it: monsters are chasing, so we have to be at our best.
Take that to heart. Monsters are chasing — in the darkness, after our children, after our ministries, after everything. We have to be at our best to combat the evils that are coming against us, because there is a lot of evil around us. And so today, we’ll listen to Ellie’s powerful testimony.
Tina’s Testimony
Ellie’s Testimony
Hi, my name is Ellie, and I am a survivor of online exploitation. I say that now, not in shame, but as a testament to my victory, because today I stand firm in safety and confidence in my Savior Jesus Christ.
When I was being exploited online, I cried out to be rescued, and God heard my plea. The Bible says, “I waited patiently for the Lord. He turned to me and heard my cry. He lifted me out of the pit of despair, out of the mud and the mire, and set my feet on solid ground.” (Psalm 40:1–2, NLT) And He truly did that for me.
God sent people to rescue me, along with my younger sisters and my cousins — one of whom was just 25 days old. At first, everything was terrifying: the police, the questions, the uncertainty. Because the very family we trusted was the one who hurt us, I believed that most people were monsters. I truly did not believe that real love could even exist.
A few hours after our rescue, all six of us arrived at the Compassionate Hope Tebow Village of Hope. It was a safe place, but I did not feel safe. My shame whispered that everything was my fault. I believed that if the leaders ever knew my dark secrets — the sickening things I had been forced to do — they would reject me. So I learned how to fake a smile, but it was an emotional mask hiding my deep pain.
But day after day, love met me. Slowly. Patiently. The leaders at the Village of Hope poured unconditional love into me until, for the first time, I began to feel safe. That safety allowed me to open my heart to one of the home’s leaders. She told me that God was the true rescuer, healer, and lover of my soul.
Not long after, I found myself wrapped in her arms, sobbing, and all the fear, shame, anger, and pain I had locked deep inside finally poured out. That glorious day, my incredible God came and rescued me. Not only from my past, but from my shame, my anger, and my pain. That day, He gave me a brand new life. The Bible says, “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.” (2 Corinthians 5:17) That day, I became new.
Through God’s Word and His promises, I began to understand that I was no longer broken, unwanted, or defined by what had been done to me. I was adopted as a daughter of the King. I was welcomed into the loving family of God.
Now, God is using my healing to help others. I am not just a survivor. I am an overcomer. Today, I am in my fourth year of Bible college. I have the incredible privilege of encouraging younger survivors and teaching them about the gospel, about forgiveness, faith, hope, and God’s unstoppable love. My life has a purpose greater than my pain.
Jesus said, “Let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.” (Matthew 5:16) That is my prayer — that my life would shine His light so others may find hope.
I am so grateful to everyone who made my rescue and healing possible. And now, it is my deepest desire to help rescue the next child who is still crying out in the darkness, waiting to be saved.
Al Henson: The Dream, the Gospel, and the Call
Al Henson: Let’s give the Lord a hand for the power of the gospel.
My wife, Susan, and I will have been married for 53 years soon. When I was in my mid-50s, we began to pray: What is the last part of our life going to look like? And whether you call it a dream or a vision, I found myself in a dark room. It was an Asian-type room — a bamboo hut with a dirt floor. It was dark.
And all of a sudden, I heard whimpering and crying. I could tell it was a little girl. Then a light began to come into the room, and I realized that God was with me.
And I could hear the Lord: “Just listen. I want you to listen.”
“Does anyone see me? Does anyone value me? Who am I? Does anyone hear me? Does anyone care? What am I like? What is life about? Please — somebody tell me. Somebody rescue me.”
After the voice of that crying little girl quieted, the Father looked at me and said:
“I love her. I hear her. I see her. I care about her. And through the power of the gospel — the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ — I can come and enter into her and save her and redeem her and heal her and restore her. You go find her, son, my servant. Go find her. I will help you. Leverage your walk with Me and your wisdom and your experience and your testimony, and call others. I will put together around you a team — people who will pray and people who will go and people who will give and people who will surrender — in churches and bodies of Christ that will stand with you. Stand with Me for that little girl. And then the next one. And the next one. And the next one.”
So we just said yes, Lord. Humbly, we would be honored to carry the gospel and the light and the love of God into some of the darkest places in the world.
My final word comes back to the gospel.
It is the gospel of Jesus that redeemed you and saved you. That same gospel is still saving you — every day giving you victory in the battle over pride and selfishness and foolishness with your time, your talents, and your treasures. Giving you freedom from fear, shame, condemnation, pain, and woundedness, that you might be free to love God, to worship God, and to go love others. Free to wash the feet and serve the people in your neighborhood, in your community, in your city, and into the nations — among the least of these.
So my call to you is this: are you living the gospel? I pray God will help you understand what I mean when I say that. Are you living the gospel? Your light will be very dim, and the message of the gospel will almost be weakened in your life, unless you are living it. But oh, when you are living the gospel — denying self, taking up the power of the death and resurrection of Christ — your light begins to shine brighter and brighter and brighter.
May God lead us all.
I do want to offer one final word of honor. To Paul and Missy, and his brother Patrick, for the visits God moved them to make, to love us and pray for us, and serve as ambassadors with courage. Their mother had passed away, and they wanted a way to honor her. These two brothers funded the opening of two Homes of Hope in Thailand in honor of their mother: Patricia B. Hammond Home One and Patricia B. Hammond Home Two. But mostly, they did it to glorify and honor God.
I just thank God for people like Paul and Missy — and now the opportunity to be with you, who are beginning to love us and gain God’s heart. Maybe God would have you, in some way, be a part of what He is doing.
Pastor Paul: Reflect + Respond
Pastor Paul: In light of the gospel depth of what has been shared, posture your heart and ask: Lord, in light of what I’ve heard, what are You saying to me, and how should I respond?
The Word says, “My sheep know Me. They know My voice.” (John 10:27). Before you move on, please create some space for God to speak. Let’s bow our heads and do so.
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