11th November, 2006
DAVID ADAMS

One only has to hear part of Wess Stafford’s life story to see why he’s such a powerful advocate for children.

These days the president of global child advocacy ministry, Compassion International, Dr Stafford’s childhood was essentially split between two worlds: one, a poor village in West Africa where he saw firsthand the devastating effect poverty would have on the lives of his young friends; the other, a boarding school where he faced physical, sexual and mental abuse.

'CHILD CHAMPION': American Wess Stafford, president of Compassion International, says there needs to be a paradigm shift in the way we see children.   “We have to realise that some things that are very, very important are not big but are too small to ignore.”

“I maintain I was probably Compassion’s president-in-training when I was like five-years-old,” the 57-year-old reflects.

“God knew what He ultimately had for my life and He allowed me to be raised in a little African village in the Ivory Coast as the son of missionaries...I tell people now that everything I needed to know to lead this thing, I learned from the poor in a little African village around the campfires and out in the fields and in the swamps...

“I know poverty - it was a very poverty stricken village and I know the values of these people. I lost probably half of my boyhood friends between the ages of five and 15 (when I came to America) and later I learned it was from poverty - they died from things like measles and malaria - things children shouldn’t have to die from - and I didn’t know it. I just knew that I was crying myself to sleep hundreds of nights as a little boy at the loss of my friends.”

But Dr Stafford believes the other half of his story - the half he kept hidden for so much of his life - equally led him to where he is today.

“I understand how painful it is when a child is abused in any number of ways because part of my year, every year, as a boy, I was sent off to a very cruel boarding school for missionary children...” he says.

“I was abused in everyone you can abuse a child - I was sexually abused, I was physically beaten virtually every day, I was spiritually abused - and I didn’t talk about it for 35 years...”

It was those experiences - coupled with the realisations that arose from them: that there were medicines which could have prevented the needless deaths of his friends; that children shouldn’t suffer such abuse at the hands of any adult - which were instrumental in bringing Dr Stafford to work for Compassion International about 30 years ago.

The organisation’s origins go back to 1952 when US evangelist Everett Swanson returned from a preaching trip to South Korea and began himself mobilising efforts to help the nation’s orphans.

Compassion International now sponsors more than 774,000 children across the world and partners with more than 3,600 churches in some of the world’s poorest regions.

Dr Stafford, who has two adult daughters of his own, believes Compassion’s mission to lift up children most in need is about as “close to the heart of God as they can get”.

Reciting his list of sponsor children (and it’s a long list), he says he prays for them every day and has watched as they have grown up to become the likes of businessmen, pastors and architects living in countries ranging from from India, Haito and Ecuador.

“These children grow up, that’s the amazing thing about believeing in them when they’re small - you can help shape what they become,” he says.

Dr Stafford was recently in Australia to attend the opening of the organisation’s new national headquarters in Newcastle, New South Wales. It was his fifth or sixth visit to country - he first came about 28 years ago - and it came, coincidentally, about a year after he released his book Too Small To Ignore: Why Children Are The Next Big Thing.

With 50,000 copies now sold around the world (all royalties are going to help children), it’s a deeply personal text and one which Dr Stafford says was extremely painful for him to write given it was the first time in 35 years he had spoken about his abuse as a child. Inside its pages, he spells out his passion to help children and at the same time relates some of his own amazing story.

“Why I try and do in this book is awaken God’s people ultimately to the importance of the children among them,” explains Dr Stafford. “It’s very rare that you find people who don’t particularly love children but the vast majority - especially in our churches and our mission efforts - really don’t take them as seriously as I think our Scriptures call on us to take them.

“We love them, but we don’t really believe in them. I think it’s Proverbs 13:8 that says ‘Speak up for those who can’t speak for themselves’ and essentially what I’ve tried to do in Too Small To Ignore is to give a voice to people - the little ones - who really can’t speak for themselves.”

Dr Stafford says that while it’s the big, powerful and loud things which make headlines in today’s world, there is, when it comes to the way we see childre, a need for a paradigm shift.

“We have to realise that some things that are very, very important are not big but are too small to ignore.”

While children make up nearly half of the world’s population - a half which includes the poorest of the poor, Dr Stafford says that with “virtually anything that goes wrong in our society - any society, Australian or American or Indian” - it’s children who ultimately pay the greatest price for it.

“Whatever the ill of society is, it tends to spiral downward, I guess, and kids are the ones who pay the biggest price,” he says.

This includes famines, disease, wars and our sins - whether they be the sins of commission (those things that we do - such as sex crimes against children) or the sins of omission (those things that we know we should do but don’t deal with properly - such as the breakup of families).

“When our homes fall apart, often it’s the little ones who blame themselves - ‘If I’d only been a more obedient little daughter, mummy and daddy would still love each other’,” he says. “And they carry the scars - in many cases - for the rest of their lives.”

Yet he adds that despite the awareness that not only do children make up half the world’s population and but that, according to missiologists, 80 per cent of people who give their lives to Christ do so while they’re aged between four and 14 years, many missions still overlook children.

“Most mission organisations spend less than 10 per cent of their efforts reaching and discipling children,” he notes. “And you would think the churches would do better because every other person in the hallways of a church is a child. But it’s a very rare church that spends more than 15 per cent of it’s budget on its children. “

Dr Stafford, who believes that we have been “spirtually blinded” to the plight of children, says there is a need for a paradigm shift and it needs to occur both on the spiritual front but also in caring for the poor, for those with material needs.

“There’s 2,100 verses in the Bible that talk about God’s heart for the poor and what He expects of us,” he notes. “That’s more verses, I’m told, than on Heaven and Hell combined. And yet in the United States - I don’t know if Australia is different - but recent research that we’ve done shows that 85 per cent of American Christians have never heard their pastor speak about poverty or the poor...

“We have somehow decided to live in this world as Christians pretending like this isn’t going on or, if it is going on, that God doesn’t have any specific mandate on us. But I become very worried, because I believe we are the first generation that will stand before our Lord one day - and Matthew 25 makes it pretty clear that we will - and not say ‘I didn’t know - I didn’t know that it was going on’ or ‘I didn’t know that you cared about it’ or ‘I didn’t know that you expected me to do something about it’. And the Lord is going to say ‘Well, whatever you did to one of the least of these - to these little ones, to these too small to ignore ones - mysteriously and wondrously, you did it to me.’”

As well as change in the way we view the poor, the paradigm shift Dr Stafford talks about would include honoring those who work with children in churches.

“The hardest volunteer to find in churches is someone to minister to the children,” he notes, adding that if people truly understood the priority of children in the Kingdom of God and that the time to impact them is when they’re small - and their soul is “like wet cement” and open to impressions, they would be “lined up for the privilege of working in the nursery”.

Dr Stafford says that Christians who understand this need to respond to it. While that may mean sponsoring children, it could also simply entail speaking words of encouragement into a child’s life. He suggests that every meeting with a child - no matter how brief - should be seen as a ”divine appointment”.

“I maintain in the book that a single moment with a child, even a brief moment, is enough to launch a child’s life - a single kind word, a single act of kindness, a single compliment. I maintain that most of us who are somehow useful in the world...if you stopped and ask yourself ‘Who do I owe this to? Who believed in me before I believed in myself?’, you can usually trace it back to somebody...”

“You can launch a life with a single kind word,” he says, pausing for just a moment. “And, of course, you can also destroy a life with a single act of cruelty or a single unkind word.”

- www.compassion.com.au