Exodus Cry - The Prayer Movement to End Slavery

When Dave Fiquette first came to Tel Aviv, all he wanted to do was shine the light of Jesus on broken people by passing out a few thermoses of coffee and tea to the city’s population of drug addicts and dealers.  At that time, there was no ministry, organization, or outreach, government sponsored or otherwise, to help street women. It wasn’t long before the street women found him, knocking on his door and asking for simple things like a bite to eat or a new pair of shoes. They didn’t even seem to notice he was a man, gladly napping on his couch.  That was years ago.

His current ministry is the Door of Hope, a homeless mission in the basement of a building located in the heart of Tel Aviv’s red light district, home to 200 houses of prostitution. The men and women that live here live a jungle-existence, focused simply on survival.    It’s one thing to know that current trafficking trends are characterized by Israeli women lured into drug addictions and debt bondage, but its another thing to visit the Door of Hope in Tel Aviv and see it played out before your very eyes. But it is fully another thing to live, eat, breathe, and sleep the reality of the door of hope like Dave does.

Each day, the Door of Hope shelter opens its doors at 9:30.  Haggard prostitutes stumble in from a night of sex work.  Here she can doff her filthy street clothes, and exchange them for clean ones from the Door of Hope’s vast clothes room.  The clothes room, easily the size of a modest apartment, is just one wing of the 8000 square foot basement facility that Dave oversees.  It also features a kitchen with diner-style seating, and a room with about 15 beds, all shapes and sizes.  

The women that visit the Door of Hope are some of the most broken people on the earth. Many of them consume $300 in drugs per day, and service up to 30 clients.  But they’re still broke, still on the streets, and a hairs breadth away from death every single day. The Door of Hope is their only oasis. Here, a woman can sleep in an actual bed without the fear of being raped, or having her stuff stolen, or being murdered.  It is a spartan luxury, just a notch above survival, but even these basic necessities are only made possible by the arduous labor of Dave and his team.

There’s no door on the bathroom here, and mirrors are deliberately positioned everywhere so that every corner can be seen at all times by ministry team.  Heroin addicts will use the even the flimsiest privacy to shoot up, and drugs are prohibited here at the door of hope.  This may seem like little more than glorified baby sitting, but Dave is in the business of trying to save these women from themselves. But then, he knows he needs saved from himself. It happens to be the only way he can effectively reach these people.

“The secret is that you have to really really know that the only difference between you and [a street prostitute] is God’s grace.  For me, I understand how a person gets in a situation like that.  If you can’t get to that, then you come at them from above, from a point of pride and judgment, and the women know. I have to make sure I’m not forcing an agenda.  The girls need to know that I love them, but I don’t love what they do, that I’m not trying to make them into what I want them to be.”  

I noticed while we talked that Dave would slip in and out of talking about the girls and himself.  To me it was the greatest evidences that the “us” and “them” line had been obliterated in his psyche, that he so identified with their brokenness, that talking about theirs inexorably led to his. “I have a girl that came down here, 23 years old, BEAUTIFUL, face like an angel.  And it’s like, if Jesus doesn’t do something, how’s she going to get out of this? Her life is over. So here’s what I preach: I say, you’ve got to surrender your life to God like you’ve surrendered your life to drugs. You can’t pray to get off drugs so that you can have the house and the kids and the perfect little life.  You’ve got to say to yourself, I’m dead if I don’t turn my life over to God.  It’s like when my mother killed herself and I cried out, God! I’m on the express train to hell! Dave is killing Dave! It’s not that I have a problem, I am the problem.”  That last part is his mantra, and if he were a motivational speaker, it might make a great title to a book.  But the only person he’s trying to motivate is himself.  He’s just trying to make it through today. 

Dave has  learned to get gut wrenchingly raw with God.  It’s the only way to keep a shred of sanity when he’s faced with the senseless waste of body and soul that he encounters in his ministry.  The fact is, he’s angry and doesn’t try to hide the fact that he’s angry. 

“In a lot of ways I think I am bitter,” he said when I asked how he keeps his heart alive. A large part of the emotional toll taken by this work is just feeling the wearisome ire of spirit and soul. “I have to weigh my anger a lot and ask, is this godly anger or not?  I can get so bitter at God, like, why are you letting these people die? And you know what, this is going to sound funny, but I had to realize that God watches me use the toilet. Am I hiding anything from him? Is it like he doesn’t know what’s in my head and heart? I’ve learned to get real with God.”  For Dave, being in touch with his own anger and frustration keeps the overwhelming task of helping these broken women in fresh perspective.  “I’ve learned to see that if I can’t fix myself, I’m not fixing the girls.  Dave’s too much for Dave, so if I’m not my problem, then the girls aren’t my problem. What weighs down the professionals is the fact that professional skills don’t overcome the kingdom of darkness.  It’s like, my mother had a 152 point IQ, and went to all the best psychologists, and guess what? She killed herself.” He makes a sound like a game show buzzer. “That doesn’t work.”

Dave finds that many Christians are predisposed to what he calls a humanitarian mindset.  What he means is that  Christians approach social justice issues with a simplistic framework: victims and bad guys.  Dave, on the other hand,  subscribes to more of a hand-to-hand combat style of orthodoxy; it’s nothing like not new kind that’s almost narcissistic in its cultural, but that of the cling to the old rugged cross variety (one of my favorite things about him, actually).  For him, a humanitarian mindset misses the point that all have fallen short and are consequently in danger of hell.  But its more than a theological quibble to him because it’s only in the unadulterated gospel message of spiritual salvation he finds real power to deliver women from their very dangerous, very earthly problems.  

“When people think of a pimp, they usually want to shoot him up like a lethal weapon movie or something.  I can’t look at him that way; I have to look at the pimp and see that he’s just as much of a victim as the girl he’s prostituting. It says in Ephesians, we don’t wrestle against flesh and blood, but people come down here and look at all the flesh and blood and lose track of the greater problem behind it all.”  Which is another way of saying that Dave picks his battles, and the ones he picks he fights with prayer. He doesn’t inject the message of Jesus into every ladle of soup, or hand out tracks with every pair of pants (which would be a blatant infringement of Israel’s strict laws against proselytizing).  He waits, He listens, He prays, He loves. And when a girl opens the door, he tells her the truth and gives her a gospel of repentance.   Dave has found that when Christians give the wrong message to a hurting woman, they can actually ruin her chances of finding the real help that Jesus offers.

“I’ll give you an example.  I had a girl named Karen (not her real name) at the Door of Hope.  She was a jewish girl from California who died on the streets at just 27 years old.  I had a chance before she died to tell her about Jesus, and you want to know what she said to me?  She said, I’ve already done that. She said, when I was in California, I sat in a circle of people who said that all I needed to do was pray a prayer; I invited Jesus into my life but here I am, 8 years later, and I’m still shooting heroin into my neck. Now she’s dead. I could never get the gospel through to her.” Dave blames the humanitarian-gospel. “Believers just present Jesus like some big social worker, like a McDonald’d drive thru big mac with a convenient solution to every problem. And then they come here and get angry about the pimps.  We can’t take our cues from the media and from politicians and join their cause and say, poor little victim! let’s rescue her! We’ve got to realize that the pimps, the politicians, and the prostitutes-- they’ll all spend eternity in Hell.  The only difference is one or the other will be a little more miserable here before they die.”

A common expression of a humanitarian mindset is a propensity to try and make distinction between a trafficking victim and an ordinary prostitute.  In Dave’s world, that’s  too narrow of a distinction, one that doesn’t take into account the common patterns of abuse and manipulation suffered by women in a broad spectrum of sexual exploitation.  From what he’s seen, every woman in prostitution is enslaved in some way.

“No woman wants to do this,” he said. “It’s not in the build of a woman.  Woman are emotionally stimulated sexually, verses men who are stimulated visually. This lifestyle is automatically against her nature.  Think of the worst kind of scene in a movie for women.  It’s not blood and guts.  It’s a rape scene.  And these women are living that every day.” Dave explained to me how a woman in Tel Aviv typically gets into prostitution.  Her story almost always starts with a broken family.  Her sex life almost always begins with being raped as a little girl by a father or brother.  A woman that emerges from her childhood with that kind of baggage is a woman who believes she is nothing more than a piece of meat.  What follows is further destructive behavior, and a series of bad choices in relationships.  She gets into drugs, and then gets raped by her boyfriends.  And the boyfriend can be as addicting as a drug. While most of the women in prostitution that Dave deals with on a regular basis are on drugs, drugs are not always the catalyst for crisis. The crisis  could be she needs to pay rent, or maybe  her boyfriend is short on cash and she wants to help, but when it does it,  her boyfriend is more than eager to pimp her out.  Thus begins her life of street prostitution.  This lifestyle so predictable and echoed so many times in the stories of so many women, that it obfuscates the distinction between a woman selling her body by choice verses another forced to sell her body.  These women are slaves as much as any human trafficking victim.

“To me,” Dave said, “human trafficking is a lot more than sexual slavery.  Basically, human trafficking is the use of the human soul for business.  That’s how the book of Revelation defines it, when its talking about Babylon.  So if that’s the case, these gigantic corporations are trafficking people when they’re harnessing human souls for productivity’s sake.  If I wanted to get even deeper, its how Satan is trafficking people world wide for his schemes.”  And this translates into bondage on an entirely different level.  Dave explained to me that a woman has sex with one man, she opens herself to everything in him spiritually.  The reality is that these women are having sexual contact with about 1000 men every month. They’re demonically bound, a force stronger than the strength of the undertow of their messed up lives or the chemical addiction to the drugs.  Dave sees the battle as mostly spiritual, but finds very few Christians who understand this reality.

“You know, people think that you can just come in and talk to them and pray a simple prayer.  Believers have these preset concepts of how salvation works, but they’ve never dealt with a sexual slave. It’s not just a matter of repentance. It’s an issue of deep bondage.  It takes a lot of prayer for her to get free, and I don’t even mean her prayer-- I mean people behind the scenes praying for her.”  

At the very least, Dave is. He has a living faith, and incarnational approach to his ministry.  He believes he’s walking out simple gospel obedience in a very complex context, but beyond even that, he believes he’s being Jesus to them.  He’s living out the love of Jesus day by day.  But often that doesn’t look the way people think it should.

“Most christians have a pretty mild picture of Jesus in their head, sort of a bearded woman.  They picture a man so effeminate that the sheep standing nearby looks vicious compared to him. But when you come down here, all you find is angry dave in the midst of the insanity, not even sure how he’s alive.” He said to me, “Look man, this isn’t Mary Poppins stuff. These women are street criminals.  They steal. They fight.  Like, if a girl starts a fight, I have to drag her up the stairs in a headlock and throw her back out on the street.  Now, some people look at that and ask is that Jesus? “ Of course its a valid question, but it’s not one that can be answered from the spectator’s vantage point.  And that’s not to say that his methodology couldn’t be criticized. But the criticisms seem petty in the light of Dave’s regimented lifestyle, waking at 4 AM, praying for 2 hours with his team every day just to open the doors, and a commitment to spending time in the word to maintain his sanity. 

But even that level of insanity pales in comparison to what Dave and the Door of Hope staff must do every single evening at 6pm: wake the sleeping prostitutes and send them back out onto the street, back to their drug habit, back to the clients, back to the very real possibility that they will never see them alive again.  If the shelter had more money, and more team members, it could maybe stay open 24/7, but it doesn’t lack for heart.  At closing time, you suddenly see why Dave is angry: he’s heart broken.  He is a man who faces his limitations each and every day.  He wants to do more, but he can’t.  All he can do is pray.

I asked Dave how we could pray for him and the Door of Hope, and here was his answer: “You can pray as if a terrorist had taken you captive and you’re his hostage.  There’s a difference when you pray, O God, please let Mary get an A on the test, or please help me pick the right flowers for the party, verses if a terrorist is threatening to blow you up.  Pray that way.”  In addition, he asked people to pray for more people-- millions of people, even-- to pray for the Door of Hope team, and for God to send good, solid workers.  Lastly, he wants to be a light to the nation of Israel and the world.