Mike McDonald | Executive Director and Founder of Hear the Cry: Compassion and Justice | hearthecry.org
I had the rare privilege to interview a dear friend and man of God who is making a difference around the world. Please come along and hear his journey and the amazing things he is doing, both locally and globally. It will rock your world!
Ann: Hi Mike, I am thrilled to have the opportunity to meet with you today. Hear the Cry is near and dear to my heart. With the sale of each of my books, I am donating a percentage to this incredible organization. That’s how much I believe in what they are doing. I want all my readers to understand the heart of this life changing organization. Thank you for letting me have a glimpse into your story.
Ann: Okay, let’s dive right in (with a big smile on my face). Mike, can you tell me a little about your background and how you started Hear the Cry?
Mike: Wow, that’s a loaded question! Let’s see, I need to go back to the beginning. I grew up in a small ski town called Nelson, up in British Columbia. I really had a Jerry Springer type situation growing up. My mom was with a guy named Joe who had two daughters she was raising after his wife had left him. My mom wanted kids and Joe didn’t want any more kids, so my mom left him for my biological dad, Ken. Together they had two kids, yours truly, then my little brother. Ken, however, was promiscuous, out sleeping around. When my mom found out, she gave him an ultimatum, you can either stay here and raise your kids, or you leave and never see your kids again. He left when I was about three and a half years old.
Mom then met a guy named Bill. They married and he was my stepdad until I was 19 years old. He was non-involved and an abusive kind of guy. He sexually abused his daughter, even the foster kids and the Japanese kids we had living with us, as well as our babysitters. It was basically a wake of destructive behavior. I never really connected to him, or for that matter, had a relationship with him. I lived a pretty independent life growing up. My mom was manic-depressive/bi-polar to add to the mix, being pretty sick. Some years were better than others, but yeah, I think my childhood was that of having to be very independent.
We didn’t have much money, so I had to raise and earn all my money to play sports, pay school fees, even to buy school pictures, you know, that kind of stuff. At 10 years old, I got my first job. Nelson has a large Amish community, which meant the Salvation Army had lots of cheap suits. I bought my first suit for a couple of bucks from my allowance of $2.50 per week and applied for jobs in town. I got a job at the Sewing Center sorting out their bills, and…I was paid $5.00 an hour! So, at 10 years old I had a job making good money. I bought all my friends (just kidding), but it gave me a very independent, entrepreneurial spirit. By age 17, I graduated early and moved immediately to Calgary, a bigger city in Canada. I got a job in a clothing store at the mall. Yes, this is all part of my story.
On my first week on the job, the store manager was fired for stealing from the store safe. The owners felt like they couldn’t trust the staff that were already there, so at 17 years old and on my first week of the job, the owners felt like I was the only one for the job, or…the only one they could trust. I reminded them that I was only 17, but they told me as long as I didn’t steal, I was better than the last guy. So, at 17 years old, I was managing a clothing store at the mall in Calgary. I fired the entire staff because they were all stealing, too, hired new employees, and what do you know, sales and profits went up! I managed the store for one and a half years, but started looking around seeing other people in their 30’s, 40’s and 50’s working in the mall and decided I didn’t want to do that for the rest of my life, so I quit my job and went to Turkey. What any 18-year-old would do…
I was in Turkey for a month and a half wanting to find myself. I grew up in the Bahai religion. My mom was Bahai because Bill was Bahai. When my mom went through her divorce with my biological dad, they attended a very conservative Christian church. She was ex-communicated by the church and very hurt after having a husband who cheated on her many times. The Bahai’s reached out and opened their arms to her during that time.
While in Turkey, I met a missionary named Mark, from Australia and he shared Jesus with me for the first time. I didn’t know any Christians or Jesus people. When I came home from Turkey, I decided I wanted to get a job to figure out what I wanted to be. I thought I wanted to be a teacher. The best way to achieve that was to go to school, but my parents didn’t have the money to pay for an education. I figured that to pay for an education I needed to get a job in a restaurant getting tips to pay for my schooling. I quickly got a job at a restaurant where the manager took me under his wing and became my very first father figure. He asked if I wanted to manage restaurants. I said no, but he continued to mentor me. Next thing I knew, I was managing and starting to own restaurants in Canada and down into Washington and Oregon. I managed the Cucina Cucina Restaurant at Washington Square and started going to Imago Dei Church (a great local church). I felt like God was saying (not in an audible way), but saying, it’s time to serve a different community. I quit my job and started working at the church where I was soon introduced to Phil and John Mark Comer and my future wife, Melissa, all in one night!
Ann: Melissa is kind of special…!
Mike: She’s amazing!!! It was a pretty pivotal moment to meet my future bosses and wife all in one night at a random house party at Phil’s home. Phil learned what I was doing at Imago Dei and we met several times before he offered me a job here at Solid Rock, now A Jesus Church. I began by leading the House Churches, which later opened the door for me to step into the role of leading Hear the Cry – serving local and global justice geared ministries around the world.
A side note…at 14 years old, my mom wasn’t super well, and also growing up Bahai, she sent both my younger brother and me to China for about two months. That created a huge love and desire within me for other cultures, the world, and one of being very independent. As well, when I was four years old, my mom and Bill went on their honeymoon leaving us kids to go to India. Bill was a really great photographer and he had taken all these photos from all over India. I didn’t sleep well as a kid, so I would put the slides into the slide machine to just watch over and over again. Yes, it was the old slide machine, you know, the old light box? I poured over those pictures overwhelmed by the people I didn’t understand, the colors coming alive on the screen and wondering about their stories. From an early age, I had a huge love and desire for India…as well as for photography! My grandpa was a really great photographer, too.
All these lead to a great passion and love for capturing what I see. So to do what I am doing now is basically because of my past history. It has really built into me the passions that drive me. Specifically, weaving the injustice and the working with the organizations we partner with in fighting sex trafficking, abuse, and gender inequality. I think my background also plays a big part of what drives me from the abuse I saw in our own home through Bill. I want to end the injustice and will continue to have a big desire to fight this all over the world.
Ann: Wow, I am in tears now. Can you share with me about the inception of Hear the Cry?
Mike: Hear the Cry started as the church, which was Solid Rock at the time, wanted to give 10% of every dollar received as a sort of a tithe to the ‘least of these.’ To the injustices, whether that was from a lack of education, or for people who couldn’t go to school because of their financial situations in a lot of these countries, or from the lack of water or food…these funds started amassing.
We had this one ministry in India we were working with called Happy Home. When I first started working with Hear the Cry, we had only this one ministry, but quite a bit of money in the bank account to do things. The money wasn’t being spent because they didn’t have anyone to organize what we could do both locally and globally.
As we started doing more things in the community and the church grew in numbers, we would share stories in the different countries of what God was doing there and people saw where the money was going and it continued to grow. I have a dear friend, Bob Goff, who was doing great work in Uganda, and I started doing a lot with him and more and more people got involved. One of the things I love with Hear the Cry is the fact that we have never asked for money. It’s one of the beautiful things about Hear the Cry – I am thankful we are in a non-profit where people see the funds that are being given go out to where God is working in these communities. The teams continued to grow as we shared the stories. I have lots of great people who are working with Hear the Cry.
That’s kind of how it all got started. We have 30 trips still to come this year all around the world with over 300 to 500 people going out to serve. We have over a $1.5 million that is given to the different organizations.
Ann: Wow! Mike, I know we have talked about this before, but when you are looking at all the areas around the world and the many partnerships you are serving, what is an area that you think needs the most help right now?
Mike: I think it’s almost cliché because it’s been in the world for a while, but right now, people are seeing it on the news for the first time. It’s not new, it’s been around for a long time. It’s the refugee crisis. The Syrian Crisis has been going on since 2011. We are just hearing about it now because of a couple events that have taken place. Obviously, with ISIS, it is a massive thing, but there were terrorists before that. The refugee situation, when people are displaced out of their culture, their understanding, their families and moved to an entirely new place where they don’t have citizenship, they don’t have the opportunity to work, they don’t have the opportunity to survive, their kids can’t go to school, which then creates more and more of a situation.
The average time a family or person will spend in a refugee camp is 17 years! Not a week, or two, but 17 years! This puts into perspective the person who gets out in one year versus the person that is generational, sometimes up to five generations. So, the refugee camps that visited in Rwanda have been there for 70 years are third and fourth generations with no schools, no economy, no way to get out. Take for instance the Congolese refugees living in a refugee camp in Rwanda; we have 10 students who are going to the University. Three of them got the highest test scores in the nation on their acceptance exams going into the University. We are talking about students without writing paper, their science room is a mud hut, and one chalkboard. The brilliance of some of these kids who are getting left behind is because no one is stepping out to help. These are just the ones we found. I just think about the thousands upon thousands of other kids out there, kids around the world, that can shape and change the world.
Whether it’s in the Middle East where we are involved with a bunch of camps in the northern region. These people just want to be home. They don’t feel accepted. Sometimes, for example, refugees here in Portland, they have lived here for 10 years and have never been invited into the home of an American. They feel like they don’t exist. There is so much we could do to help, whether it is ignorance, fear, or whatever, we need to change this. There really is so much we can do on a small scale that would make such a difference.
Ann: This breaks my heart. Thank you for sharing a little about this with our readers. I understand a little about this from stories my mother-in-law shared with me after arriving in the United States from France and being treated like an outcast. If people couldn’t understand her, they treated her like she didn’t exist. Yes, we need so desperately to change this. Can you tell me what is happening in Central and South America right now?
Mike: I mean, gosh, that’s a very large region, and add in the islands. Wow. But in most of these places that were very farm rich, the kind of regions and countries where many of these farmers and workers get exploited, there is an underground, not talked about kind of slavery that is happening in these places.
Whether it is chocolate or coffee…I think right now coffee is the largest economy of a grown good. We buy these cups of coffee for $4 or $5 and these farmers get paid pennies for their work. That’s just part of a larger situation, but there are families that are stuck in financial turmoil where it looks like their children might die from starvation. That’s when they start doing things where their kids go into the sex trade.
This is a massive problem all over the world, but specifically in poverty stricken areas. No one wakes up one day and says they want to sell their kids into the sex trade business…this is not a normal way of thinking. But because of the systems in place and the ways we abuse them, and especially here in the United States, yes, it is happening right in front of us.
Bolivia is one of the places I will bring up many times…it is running a large sex trade business with children because there is no other way or option out for some of these people. This breaks my heart. The ages you can’t even fathom. Some people don’t believe this is happening and think this is just a big sham, but believe me, I have sat and walked through the brothels of Thailand, of Haiti, and in many other places around the world where you see 10, 11, and 12-year-olds working in these brothels. At five years old, I have seen kids getting prepared for this world with make-up and earrings. They are being brought up to be sold at nine years old into the brothels. This stuff is real and it’s mostly happening in places that the world is forgetting about.
1 comment
[…] Did you miss Part 1? Read it here. […]