An exciting turn:

“As a Christian, I can’t be satisfied knowing there are people living in such a condition,” says Mercer, 37, a onetime youth pastor at an evangelical church near Portland and the founder and director of a fledgling non-profit called Compassion First. “As a Christian, I’m a steward of the image of God. And every person on the face of the earth bears that image. I became responsible for Eka the day I met her.”

Mercer, as he befriends sex slaves such as Eka and works to establish a rehabilitation and education network for them, is showing what evangelical Christianity increasingly looks like in the new century, and in the new paradigm.

If you’re a Southeast Asian brothel keeper or an American retailer benefiting from slave labor — and, yes, slavery flourishes today in both forms — this face of Christianity is most inconvenient. These are the people who refuse to look away and keep their mouths shut.