On this episode of the Denison Forum Podcast, Dr. Mark Turman sits down with Mike Brickley, CEO of Families Set Free—a ministry working to rescue Christian families trapped in bonded labor in Pakistan’s brick kilns. Mike shares how God led him from the world of Silicon Valley business to a calling that now brings freedom to thousands.
Together, they unpack the realities of modern-day slavery, the spiritual and systemic forces behind it, and how the gospel is making a tangible difference. You’ll hear stories of hope, transformation, and the power of ordinary people stepping into extraordinary obedience.
To learn more or to join this redemptive work, visit FamiliesSetFree.org.
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Topics
- (00:29): Reflecting on service and sacrifice
- (03:03): Introducing Mike Brickley
- (03:58): Mike’s background and faith journey
- (06:56): The plight of brick kiln workers in Pakistan
- (09:36): Rescue efforts and success stories
- (14:48): Daily life in the brick kilns
- (22:21): Modernizing brick kilns to end slavery
- (25:56): Rehabilitation and support for freed families
- (28:34): Challenges and future plans
- (30:56): Success stories of freed families
- (36:26): How to get involved and support
Resources
- Ask Us Anything: [email protected]
- How has Denison Forum impacted your faith?
- Families Set Free
- What is biblical righteousness?
- Is the church serious about justice?
- What does it mean to hunger and thirst for righteousness?
About Michael Brickley
Michael Brickley is the CEO of Families Set Free, a ministry dedicated to rescuing Christians trapped in brick-making slave camps in Pakistan. Over the last three years, the organization has rescued more than 7,000 individuals and started over 1,400 small businesses to help freed families achieve independence.
Through faith-filled determination and innovative strategies, Mike has helped eliminate over 90,000 years of combined slavery, restoring hope and dignity to countless families.
About Dr. Mark Turman
Mark Turman, DMin, serves as the Executive Director of Denison Forum, where he leads with a passion for equipping believers to navigate today’s complex culture with biblical truth. He is best known as the host of The Denison Forum Podcast and the lead pastor of the Possum Kingdom Chapel, the in-person congregation of Denison Ministries.
Dr. Turman is the coauthor of Sacred Sexuality: Reclaiming God’s Design and Who Am I? What the Bible Says About Identity and Why it Matters. He earned his undergraduate degree from Howard Payne University in Brownwood, Texas, and received his Master of Divinity from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth. He later completed his Doctor of Ministry at George W. Truett Theological Seminary at Baylor University in Waco.
Before joining Denison Forum, Mark served as a pastor for 35 years, including 25 years as the founding pastor of Crosspoint Church in McKinney, Texas.
Mark and his high school sweetheart, Judi, married in 1986. They are proud parents of two adult children and grandparents to three grandchildren.
About Denison Forum
Denison Forum exists to thoughtfully engage the issues of the day from a biblical perspective through The Daily Article email newsletter and podcast, The Denison Forum Podcast, as well as many books and additional resources.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
NOTE: This transcript was AI-generated and has not been fully edited.
Dr. Mark Turman: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Denison Forum Podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Mark Turman, and executive director for Denison Forum. Thank you for tuning in today and being a part of this conversation. As always, it is our goal, our hope to equip you and others to think live and serve in such a way that God can use you to cultivate.
Flourishing communities and families and churches. And I know that that’s a big part of why you’re listening today and today we’re gonna focus on that part that we talk about at the end, about serving in such a way that God can use us as that salt and light that he wants us to be. You know, probably this scripture James 1 27 says this pure and undefiled religion before God the father is this, to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself unstained from the world.
You [00:01:00] may also remember what Jesus talked about right before he was arrested. I remember. Almost 40 years ago, listening to my pastor talk about what Jesus taught in Matthew 25 when he talked about giving a cup of cold water to someone who was thirsty or going and visiting someone in prison. My pastor preached this powerful message that God was calling us as the body of Christ, as the people of God to do little things for little people with little or no thought for reward.
That we do that in Jesus’ name so that we can be a part of what he’s doing in the world. Now to set up our conversation today, I am gonna introduce my guest and conversation partner in just a second, but I wanna ask you to do this as a thought exercise. Here’s what I’d like you to do. I’d like you to think about the worst job you’ve ever had or the worst job you could ever imagine having.
Now that might be mowing grass, [00:02:00] which was my first job. It might be busing or waiting tables. I had a little bit of experience when I was younger helping to roof a couple of houses. In the middle of the summer, that’s probably the worst job that I can think ever having to work all year round trying to put roofs on houses.
But I want you to imagine what is the worst job you’ve ever had or could imagine having? And then I want you to imagine that somebody requires you to keep that job for the rest of your life, whether you want to or not. With that as a background. Listen again to the words of Jesus. When he started his ministry in his own hometown, he read from the book of Isaiah, he said, the spirit of the Lord is on me because he an he has anointed me to preach the good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free the oppressed, because this [00:03:00] is the year of the Lord’s favor. So keep all that in mind as I introduced to you my new friend Michael Brickley, which is a fun name in so many ways. Mike has an interesting background and career.
Today he is the president of a ministry called Families Set Free that we want to talk to him about and we want you to know about. So Mike, welcome to the Denison Forum Podcast. How are you?
Michael Brickley: It’s great to be here. I’m doing very well. Thanks.
Dr. Mark Turman: We’re glad to have you. And for our audience’s sake, Mike is in the country of Pakistan right now and that may actually present us with some technological challenges because the internet in, in Pakistan’s not quite what it is in the US right, Mike?
Michael Brickley: That’s correct. We’re gonna try.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah, we’re gonna do our best. So anyway, we are global in nature today. Mike, tell us a [00:04:00] little bit about you, first of all, so that our audience can get to know you a little bit of your personal story, where you’re from, what your you know, business or educational background is.
A little bit about your faith story. Tell us a little bit about who Mike Brickley is.
Michael Brickley: I’m a, I’m an old Silicon Valley business guy. Okay. I’ve had many different, jobs and opportunities and companies that I actually got to start in Silicon Valley. I was chairman of Silicon Valley Bank in its early years, which focused on helping technology companies.
I ran a financial services company that grew a lot and then actually even work with Elon Musk and his brother Kimball in their first startup. Wow. Many, many years ago. So I’ve had some very interesting rocket rides on a personal basis. I I came to faith when somebody gave me a Bible and I’d never read it before.
Yeah. And when I actually read the pure words of the gospel and the pure words of [00:05:00] scripture. I came to faith, I found truth. And what became interesting from that is from there, I ended up spending 20 years running a ministry called Pocket Testament League, which shared millions and millions of little pocket Bibles all over the world for other people to read and come to faith.
So God doesn’t waste anything that ever happens to us. He’s got a, he’s got a purpose. Yeah, that, that awesome. And I’ve been retired multiple times. I’ve been retired multiple times. And the most recent time I was retired for four whole days. My, my wife said to me, laughingly, we’ve been married a long time.
And she said, you know, I promise for better or for worse, but I didn’t promise for lunch and you know, you need to go find something to do. And so I was praying, I was praying for that. And yeah. And God found me something very interesting and amazing to do.
Dr. Mark Turman: Wow. Okay. Thanks for sharing. So tell me real quick, how old were you when your friend handed you a Bible or whoever it was that handed you a Bible?
How old were you? I [00:06:00] was
Michael Brickley: 30. Okay. I was 30 and right in the height of my business career. And but it was just the pure, pure words of the Lord, just grabbed my heart. It was so wonderful when you reached it. All right.
Dr. Mark Turman: I love, I love hearing that, that’s similar to my story. It was about a decade earlier in my life when I was 17 or so when a friend handed me my first bible and said, start here.
Yeah. And just, yeah. So we have that similarity. What part of the world are you from and where do you live now?
Michael Brickley: I, I am originally from the East coast, new England, and when I married my wife who was from California and I went out there to marry her, I found out you don’t have to shovel rain. So I, we moved out there and that’s how we ended up in Silicon Valley.
And that’s where I, I lived now in California.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. Tell us about the the new adventure that God [00:07:00] started you on. And if I remember from our previous conversation about two, two and a half years ago God tapped you on the shoulder and said, I’ve got something for you.
Michael Brickley: Yeah, it was just absolutely, you know, these God things are always never what you expect.
And I was talking to a man from Pakistan and he was asking for a donation. He wanted me to provide little gift boxes. For the slave children in Pakistan. I said, what do you mean slave children? He explained to me then in, in Pakistan that if you’re, especially if you’re part of a minority group or if you’re poor if you need medical care for a loved one, the only way you’ll get it is you go to one of these brick making factories.
They’ll give you the money so that you can get your wife or kids in the hospital, but you have to agree to move your entire family. Into the brick making factory and make a thousand bricks outta mud every day till your debt’s paid off.
Dr. Mark Turman: Wow. So
Michael Brickley: people do that, and when they get in there, they find out they’re never paid enough to pay off their debt.
[00:08:00] They can never get out. And what’s worse, what’s worse is that when they die, their children inherit this debt. So it’s passed down from generation to generation to generation. Wow. So when I, when I heard that I, I, I did some research and I found out that in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, there are 240 million people.
There were only 4 million Christians in the entire count co country. So it’s a tiny, tiny minority. But of the 4 million Christians. 1 million them. 1 million are in these brick making slave camps. And when I looked at that, I said, that’s not okay. When would that be okay? That 25% of a population in a country would be slaves.
So I, I went back to my friend and I said, look we can get coloring books and crayons and toys for these children, but if there are brothers and sisters. Shouldn’t we get ’em out of there? I mean, if we ever got any of ’em out of there. And [00:09:00] he said to me, he said we’ve gotten a few out and, and when we get ’em out, we get the kids in school and we connect ’em to church and, and we find ’em a new place to live and maybe get ’em a small business.
He said, but it’s really, really, really expensive.
Dr. Mark Turman: Hmm.
Michael Brickley: I said how expensive is. He said it’s different for every family, but on average to say rescue a whole family of five people pay off their debt and set ’em free it, it might cost $500. Oh my gosh. And I said, wait a minute. I started doing the math.
I went, you’re telling me for about a hundred dollars a piece, we could set a Christian free from slavery? He said, yes. Wow. So I went to the Lord and I went, okay, God, I don’t know if this is what you want me to do, but. I’ll work on it. And my plan was to rescue, say, a hundred people in the next 12 months.
We got a hundred people out in the first 30 days. And then in the last two and a half years, we actually now have rescued 11,000 people from these slave camps. [00:10:00] Wow. And we’ve started 2,500 small businesses when we have ended 130,000 years of combined slavery. Wow. It’s amazing story.
Dr. Mark Turman: Amazing. Yeah. They just, yeah.
So there’s, there’s 10 questions jumping in my brain right now yeah. Yeah. My, my first question is, Mike, did you have any connection or passion for Pakistan before this initial conversation?
Michael Brickley: None at all. It was, and, and I will tell you it’s not been on my bucket list of a place to go. Yeah. But so it was a really it was a real shock.
It’s like Pakistan, do I really want to get involved there? But when you sense the Lord pulling you, you have no choice. And so I go this is like my third trip in the last six months. Wow. So I find myself here quite a bit. Yeah. And it only took me 39 hours to get here. Only when I left on Saturday
Dr. Mark Turman: only.
Yeah. Yeah. Tell us tell us a little bit more, ’cause it, in some of [00:11:00] this, it almost, it sounds like an extreme version of of what we’ve talked about in the United States is payday lending. Um mm-hmm. But an even more extreme version is it because. No one else will lend these families money.
And so the brick kills, the brick People are the only ones willing to do this kind of financing. And is, is this whole system basically legal in the country of Pakistan?
Michael Brickley: It’s actually been illegal. It’s not been legal for over 30 years, but there has been no enforcement of it. Yeah. I will tell you, the brick kill owners perform a service.
They are a lender. Of last resort. One of the things I was doing when I was here in Pakistan is working with the government to come up with some options so that the families don’t have to go into these brick hills. But I will tell you one of the things we do [00:12:00] is we do all of our slave rescues live on Zoom.
Okay. And people can actually be sitting in their living room while we go into the slave camp and talk to the family. You can actually ask the family questions that we’re rescuing yeah. And then be with us when we negotiate their freedom with the slave owner. It’s so moving. It is so moving because these stories of human beings are just incredible.
I talk to the kids now and it’s been really wonderful. I, I talk to the kids maybe from eight to 14, and I ask them, I go, you know, ’cause they’ve never, they’ve never seen tv, they’ve never had electricity, they’ve never been in a car. And I ask ’em, I say, tell me if you could be anything when you grow up, if you could ever get outta here, what would you like to be?
And the first thing that happens, they get a big smile because no one’s ever asked them that question before. ’cause they never thought they could ever get out. And then the second is, [00:13:00] some of ’em say, I want to be a doctor. I want to be a nurse. I wanna be a teacher. I wanna be a military officer. I wanna fly.
Those things that I see up in the sky, Passover head, it’s, God puts a desire in all these young hearts to do something because right now it’s never fulfilled. We’re getting ’em out. And our, our mission, by the way, is to get every single one of our brothers and sisters out of these camps in Pakistan.
Every single one. Yeah. Wow.
Dr. Mark Turman: What a, what a great, great plan and mission. Mike, you used the term slave and slave owner. Do the Pakistanis use that language as well? Do they, do they accept that kind of description?
Michael Brickley: Actually, no. And they find it offensive. And I don’t actually use that term a lot other than what I’m trying to convey, what’s really going on.
If they call it bonded labor, that’s the technical [00:14:00] term. And interestingly I’m an old banker, and so bonded labor was a good thing. You wanted bonded labor. You actually, that was an insurance policy you had on your employees. If you had financial services. But they find that, that that’s just a non acceptable term, and I understand that and I honor them.
I, we certainly don’t want to get them angry with us. But, but I talked to ’em and I said you know, one of the reasons we call it this modern day slavery is nobody ever gets out. I’ve been running around over there now talking to lots of people, nobody ever escapes. And the fact that it’s passed down generation to generation, right?
It’s hard to not call it slavery.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. When, when people have no options and no opportunity of freedom, then that, that’s at least a fundamental definition of slavery.
Michael Brickley: Right.
Dr. Mark Turman: Mike, tell us a little bit more about what it is like for a family to live in the brick kill in that community. Do they get to live as a family?
Are they separated? [00:15:00] What, what is kind of a day, what is a day like for a family of three or four or five people that have been put into this situation?
Michael Brickley: The average family size that we see is about five people. And their day kind of goes like this, somewhere between one and two o’clock in the morning.
They get up before the heat and start making bricks. Wow. And they’ll make bricks. Through the heat of the day, sometimes till seven o’clock at night. And just make bricks nonstop. And what they do is usually they have the children bring piles of mud along this big line and they have a, a metal form that will actually stick the mud in the form and put it on the ground and it’ll, it’ll make bricks mean that’s what they do all day.
However if they have problems like they’re sick or their wife’s pregnant, there’s very little leniency. I’ve had children tell me how they were beaten with sticks because they weren’t making bricks fast enough, and we’ve had horrific [00:16:00] stories of people being murdered, thrown into the brick kiln to be burned alive.
And we had one 8-year-old son was murdered just because they weren’t making. Bricks fast enough. We had one, one woman wasn’t making bricks fast enough, they cut off her arm. So we’re talking brutal stuff. And if you’re pregnant, you, you work and make bricks up until the day you give birth. The very next day you’re expected to be making bricks or you’ll be beaten.
Wow. And there’s some like any. Any group of people, there’s some people that are actually very decent to their people in the brick kiln, but it’s not a common situation, at least from the experiences that that I’ve seen. So they will work and they will work until they die every day.
That’s all they will do. No hope. They’re called worthless slaves every day. It’s a, it’s a very brutalizing operation. And then they live on the brick kiln and usually about about a 10 by [00:17:00] 12 brick hut with no door no electricity. A lot of times there’ll be one bed and everybody else will sleep in the dirt.
No clean water, no sanitation. These are very, very, it’s a very, very hostile environment. I can’t even imagine how anybody does it. I will tell you one story when I, I re, I was there a few weeks ago and rescued a, a family. There was a woman, she’s about from her forties and she’s standing there and I noticed a tear going down Her cheek we’re about ready to rescue her and her children were kind of running around her.
And I went up to her to ask what was going on, and she said, you know, I was born a slave in the slave camp. My husband was also born here a slave. Our children were born slaves.
Dr. Mark Turman: Wow.
Michael Brickley: She said, every single day for the last 20 years, my husband and I together [00:18:00] have been praying, God, get us outta here.
Dr. Mark Turman: Hmm.
Michael Brickley: And then the tears started pouring out of both eyes like a fire hose.
And she said, I, I can’t believe today is the day that God is answering our prayers. Yeah. And we just can’t even imagine that kind of faith and, and the experiences that they, they go through. It’s really, really difficult. They don’t get to go to doctors. There’s just, it’s just, it’s amazing that they’re even alive.
God is, I think, watching over them to preserve them, but it’s a very, very difficult place. Yeah.
Dr. Mark Turman: And I, I can imagine people listening to our conversation thinking this, this sounds a lot like Israel in the Old Testament when they were enslaved by the Egyptians. That this whole making of bricks and all of that.
Mike, do you have any sense of a couple of things, like [00:19:00] how many of these brick kill businesses are spread across Pakistan and how long has this situation, how has, has it been decades, has it been centuries that this reality has grown up?
Michael Brickley: I, I think it’s been going on since the time of Exodus. Just what you were saying, there were a million Jews in brick making slave camps back then when Moses got them out.
And by the way, I believe the same God that got the million Jews outta brick making slave camps in Egypt will get a million Christians outta brick making slave camps in Pakistan. I actually believe absolutely. Yeah. That God is waiting for his people to rise up and say Enough already. Set our people free, I think.
I think he’s really, because what I found is while we move around in these brick camps, God moves around. I mean, we see him moving [00:20:00] everywhere that we go and I think he’s just waiting. You know, the, the church in Pakistan has basically been abandoned by the worldwide church. They are in a really difficult situation, and part of what I hope will happen is we rescue all these people, is we might be able to, to connect the universal church with the church in Pakistan because we want to get all these people into into a place of faith.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. And I, and Mike, if I’m hearing you for these families, they’re, they’re, they’re barely surviving day by day. Like you said, in addition to just basic sanitation, those types of things, children have no opportunity of schooling or anything like that. And, and they’re, they’re barely just surviving day over day is what it sounds like.
Michael Brickley: Yeah. It’s worse, worse than that. That families tell us that many nights they go to bed without eating at all for the whole day, and that’s after making bricks for 12, 14 hours in [00:21:00] the, in the hot sun. Wow. So there’s a, it’s just a really, really difficult environment we can’t even imagine. You know, I, I, I’ve been there in many of these different brick kilns and been there on the rescues and talk to the people, and it’s it’s pretty, it’s pretty amazing that, that they’re able to ever smile.
In fact, we actually got a group out from this one horrific brick kiln. They were so traumatized, they didn’t know how to laugh or smile anymore. Wow. We actually had to get them out of their of the camp. We got them into a school where. They were sleeping on a concrete floor, but they were sleeping soundly because they were no longer being terrorized.
And we had to bring people and teach ’em how to laugh. We, we did some real simple things like played musical chairs with ’em, and then we actually had ’em practice laugh. Ha ha ha. Because they didn’t know how to do it. They just couldn’t do it.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah, yeah. Didn’t, yeah. It been so long since they heard it yeah.
Mike, tell me [00:22:00] that you said there was like thousands of these brick kills across the country.
Michael Brickley: There’s 20,000 brick kilns in Pakistan. Wow. Wow. So it’s a big, big business. Pakistan makes 45 billion with a B bricks a year, but they’re all made by hand. Wow. Wow. Wow. So in fact, that’s one of the hopes that we have is that, and I think there’s some potential there.
It’s time for modernization of the brick kilns and we’ve had conversations with the government and we’re trying to get Christians a capacity who would see this as a business venture to sell them. Automatic brick making equipment so they don’t need slaves anymore. We’ve already had, in our pilot project, we’ve found that we found a machine that will make these bricks and they do it cheaper and more per day than the slaves that they have.
And [00:23:00] when they make ’em, they don’t need the women and children anymore. Hmm. So we think there’s some opportunity to. Free a bunch of people just using technology.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. I was gonna ask if, if you are facing opposition from either government officials or from the kill owners are you, are, are those some of your obstacles or are, are they listening to you that there’s a better way to do their business?
Michael Brickley: We’ve been broaching that. I will tell you that the Pakistan government would like to see this fixed. Hmm. They, they know it’s time. Of course, you know, they have a lot of issues they’re dealing with as a country. It’s not like a, you know, a highly run operation. But the people that I’ve met, there are people who have good hearts who say, you know, I really would like to see this end too.
And I, they like the idea of right automation of the brickhill industry. So I think the government is just waiting for. Plans to try to do that, and we’re working on [00:24:00] those plans. In fact, there may be some people listening to this who have experience with equipment or selling equipment who would be able to help guide us to actually modernize that, that industry.
That would be one of my, one of my hopes the brick owners. It’s like anybody never want to change if they can help it. But I have asked them after we’ve bought some families out, I sit down with a brickhill owner and I, I talk to ’em and I, I said, look, you know, would you ever consider mechanizing your brickhill and not have these people?
And the response is almost universal. They say to me, are you kidding? We don’t want these people. They, they they don’t listen to us. They get sick, they die. They only can work 14 hours a day. They don’t produce export quality. Yeah. They only produce, they don’t produce export quality bricks.
They’re always asking us for money. I mean, you know, ’cause they’re starving. So yeah, they would just as soon not have 125. [00:25:00] You know, slave people working on the brick kiln, if there was mechanization, right? So actually C as terrible. This situation is, and by the way, we need to get all our brothers and sisters out.
We need to relocate ’em. We need to get ’em in school. We need to, we need to train them, get them education. They have a lot of needs that we can help. Fix, and it’s very inexpensive there. I will share with you, we have 60 full-time employees right now in Pakistan. Wow. On 32 rescues. 32 Rehabil rehabilitation.
But the average salary of a full-time bilingual college educated employee is $250 a month. Wow. That’s everything. Taxes, everything. Wow. Two 50 a month. So it’s the, the money goes a long, long way in Pakistan. Yeah. And we’re really hoping that we can push this thing over the finish line, but we really do need help to do that.
Yeah.
Dr. Mark Turman: Mike, tell us I love the way that your ministry has thought about [00:26:00] not just getting them out, but getting them established. Walk us through that process a little bit. ’cause it’s, it’s so important, right? That these families start learning a whole new way of living, a whole new way of sustaining themselves.
So talk to us a little bit about, it’s not just about getting them out of the slavery of the kills, it’s about getting them set up for success.
Michael Brickley: Yeah. And, and by the way, one of the things that we’re trying to do that we’ve had some wonderful success ourselves with is partnering with other organizations that would like to help.
Lemme give you an example. After a family gets out of a brick county, we relocate them to a safe place. Hmm. And we rent their home for them. And then when we we come back a couple weeks later and set ’em up in a small business, connect them to a church. And then we get them involved in our savings groups and we have now a [00:27:00] little under a a hundred savings groups with 25 people each in them.
And what they do is they meet once a week, they get discipleship training and they learn how to manage their money. They put a little money in the box. And that whole community of 25 men or women. They build up a fund. So if somebody gets sick in the future then there’s money there to help them. Or we’ve seen several new businesses start up, they lend the money out to the other members of the group to help ’em start businesses.
So what it’s doing is it’s helping ’em and teaching them, and I don’t know if you’re familiar with crown financial Ministries?
Dr. Mark Turman: Yes.
Michael Brickley: And one, they sent a whole team out there and we’ve implemented. Their money management system into our savings groups, and so we find that great. That’s what we’d like to do Will, if there’s other ministries that like to help these people, maybe trauma counseling, other things, we’ve got them.
Now. What we’ve built, and this goes back to my technology days, but we have built a slave rescue database [00:28:00] system, but we keep track of every family. We keep track of how they’re doing. They communicate with us regularly, so if they have a problem in their business or somebody else gets sick or they have an issue, they contact us because we wanna walk alongside them to make sure that they will be able to transition back.
And we’re having great results with that.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah, that’s so awesome to just have a sustainable model. That.
Michael Brickley: Yeah.
Dr. Mark Turman: They, they can break, you know, what is for many of them a generational cycle of poverty, and right in poverty and enslavement. Mike, what are, as, as we talk about how to just get to know your ministry more and how to pray, what are some of the biggest challenges or obstacles that you’re concerned about right now in terms of moving the ministry forward?
Michael Brickley: Yeah. You know, our, we are taking out one family at a time from these Rick kilns and we’re, we’re helping them, right? But we want to have a strategy [00:29:00] that sets them all free. And so we have several efforts that we’re trying to do that, that if someone was praying they could help on, one is we wanna make sure we rescue ’em with excellence.
And by the way, it breaks your heart. We don’t rescue everybody from one family be one brick kiln because. That would shut the brick kiln down and create more problems for us. So we take a few out of each, each brick kiln, uh right. But the families that are still there and they see us freeing other people, hearts are broken.
Sure we have little kids come up to us and go, what about me? Can you get me outta here? You know, and, and so that’s really, really hard. So we wanna get as many out as we can. Second is we do work with the Pakistan government to help them enforce the laws that are already in the books. So there is just that political dialogue that we have been thankful that we’re having an openness to it to try to find solutions there.
So working on that. And the third thing that we’re doing. Is we’re doing this [00:30:00] modernization attempt which is a whole business model. All of these require a lot of skills and we’re just praying that God will bring to us the people that we need in order to do all these things successfully.
For instance, we, we really need trauma counseling for these families, the trauma they’ve been through. If you could imagine your worst movie of what this would be like. That’s what goes on here. Most of the women and girls are raped in these camps. It is, they’re beaten. It is not, it’s not a good environment and they just, they need people to love on ’em and listen to ’em,
Dr. Mark Turman: right?
Yeah. Part of part of the reason we wanted to have this conversation today for our audience is to. Just let them know about what God is doing in other places around the world and how he is stepping into all kinds of darkness and delivering people. Mike, give us a couple examples. You talked about setting these families up in their own [00:31:00] businesses.
What, what kind of businesses do y’all help them set up? Yeah,
Michael Brickley: You know, there is one thing that’s really great is that they have been forced to have an amazing work discipline. And they, because they have to make bricks regardless of how they feel, regardless of the weather, whatever’s going on, they have to do it.
And so we are seeing some wonderful success stories. I’ll give you an example. We set this one family up with a retail produce business. And set him up with a stall selling produce, and it just blossomed and grew. And we went and talked to him. We said, what’s going on? He said he says, I’m used to getting up at 2:00 AM to go make bricks.
So I’m the first person at the wholesale produce market and I get the best produce for my customers.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. And
Michael Brickley: so he’s been successful and we’ve had other people that we’ve gotten rickshaws for where they can do delivery or taxi service. And we’ve had families that have been so successful with that.
They’ve been able to buy [00:32:00] additional rickshaws. They actually have a fleet of these rickshaws where they’re going out and, and doing that. We’re really thankful for that. We also get. Vocational training skills ’cause a lot of these kids have just never been to school. And we found some training centers that have said, Hey, we’ll take these kids for six months or a year and teach ’em to be carpenters, welders, plumbers, electricians, they’ll make.
More than double the national average of income and be able to provide for their family. And, you know, every month we show up with about 30, 40 kids that we’re signing up for these one year courses. It’s wonderful to see. Same thing for, for girls. We have partnered with some vocational training centers where they the girls can learn how to have their own beauty parlor to be a seamstress.
Different kinds of things like that. And then we also have sent girls to college to become nurses. We’ve sent several to learn electronics and so [00:33:00] we’ve got different supporters that have hearts for different things and they’ll say, we’ll paid, educate them because we know if they get that kind of training.
They can have a really positive impact. So we do that grocery stores different kinds of retail op operations and we’ve been experimenting with a lot of them. Just even today I was meeting with a group of business people in this one city, salt Kott, and it’s a big industrial city, a group of Christian business owners that were there that are very successful.
And they said, look, we’ll take. All of these people, and we’ll train them and give them jobs in our factories so they have a chance. Wow. And so God is just moving and creating these opportunities, and we’re just gonna follow ’em up. If somebody, by the way, has a need. For product that they import, say from China, which gets really difficult.
Mm-hmm. We we, the labor costs are much less in Pakistan. And [00:34:00] so one of the things we could do if someone said, I need this kind of product or that kind of product we would actually like to set up little businesses for these people because the reality is they got in this problem ’cause there’s no Christian business ecosystem.
And so part of the solution is to help teach them how to buy and sell from each other and to own their own businesses. And I think we can do that. If somebody has something they need, for instance, we talked to one man. He, he says I import about. 10 container loads of towels for my car wash business.
He says I buy ’em from China. I could just buy ’em from Pakistan. And those are the kinds of things that we’re trying to pursue to get done.
Dr. Mark Turman: This is, this is our version of being the Shark Tank. Yeah. Oh, it’s incredible. It’s incredible. Mike, I could, I could imagine somebody listening to us today in this conversation, and they’re, [00:35:00] they’re asking the question, is it really safe to do this kind of mission work in a place like Pakistan?
Obviously in our country, our media resources. Often depict places like Pakistan, Afghanistan, all of this region of the world as a very disturbed and troubled place. What have you experienced Pakistan to be from just a sense of your own personal safety?
Michael Brickley: I will tell you that the Pakistani people that I have met are very warm, welcoming.
Obviously as westerners we stand out, but I get a lot of smiles. I, I, I’ve actually felt very comfortable here. Now, having said that, we have multiple layers of security when we go do these things. Like in the slave rescue I’m doing in a few hours we will have private security, but also the government of Pakistan will provide police [00:36:00] security for us when we do this because they don’t want any international incidents.
And I would tell you that, you know, obviously there are issues, like we have issues in our own country where people do crazy things, right? But I have, I have actually felt very safe here and I, I also believe God’s hand is on it. So if you’re where God wants you to be, you’re always gonna feel pretty good.
Dr. Mark Turman: Always be in the safest place you can be. Absolutely. Mike, as we get, as we get ready to wrap up, I know it’s been a long, long trip and day for you, but tell us a couple of things. One is where can people find more information about family set free on the web? And how can you give us one or two, even three specific ways that people can help?
Obviously funding donating is an obvious one, but are there others? And where can people go to learn more about family set free? Where can they go and watch one of these rescues happening? How can people [00:37:00] connect to you more directly and in an ongoing way?
Michael Brickley: Yeah, our website is family set free.org.
So when you type out families, you know there’s a couple of S’s in there. There’s s on the end of families and S on in the word set, but you type out family set free.org. It’ll take you to our website. There’s a spot on the website where you can say. I’d like to know more and where you can provide your email address.
If you do, you’ll get an invitation to watch a live slave rescue, which will be really helpful to understand and see what’s going on to be able to sit and you can watch anonymously for as long as you’re short, as you’d like. Most of our rescues are about an hour. We don’t advertise them much in advance just for pure safety purposes.
We don’t want to get the word out, but you can actually be sitting there watching in your home better than anything that you would ever watch anywhere else on television and be part of an experience that [00:38:00] candidly. Will touch your heart and touch you right to your core when you actually see it. I mean, I, I can’t recommend that the most, we need prayer.
I’ve actually been trying to find technology to build a prayer network because a lot of what we’re doing is a spiritual battle. I mean, I don’t know what you think, but a, a million Christians and slave camps, I, to me that’s spiritual warfare and Absolutely. So we would like to build a prayer network that might even be somebody out there that would like to help, help us do that.
We need prayer. That’s what’s going to drive it. You might want to go with us on a trip to Pakistan. We take people. They come with us and we take men, we take women, and we’ve had wonderful experiences. So it could be a great adventure someone would like to go to. And yeah. And just so you know, and as we look at our costs I work about 50, 60 hours a week.
I’m a volunteer. So we don’t, we don’t spend a lot of money. We’re trying to rescue as many people as we can, and the [00:39:00] way it works is our average debt per person. Is about a hundred dollars and that will free somebody. But we can’t just free ’em and throw ’em in the street. You know? We need to get ’em a place to live.
We need to get ’em a rickshaw. We need to get the kids in school and get clothing. We need to set up these savings groups, and that’s about another $300 a person. So when we get all done, it’s probably. $400 a person will rescue and rehabilitate someone. And when you think of that from a cost perspective, it’s kind of mind blowing.
It’s so inexpensive. But and I’ll also tell you this too, there, there’s opportunities for a lot of personal connections. I’ll give you an example. My granddaughter. When she was 14 and she heard about this, she said I want to do something to help. What do I do? I have no money. I don’t have a job.
How can I help? And in California where she lives, there was a big orange tree in the backyard. So she went out, picked oranges, she got some brown paper bags and her put computer labels [00:40:00] on these bags, put ’em in a wagon, and went door to door. Said, would you be interested in buying some of these oranges so I can set someone free from slavery?
And she raised enough money to do that. And what we thought would be cool is let’s have, she’s 14, let’s have her rescue a 14-year-old girl Oh wow. In Pakistan. And we did. And we got, took a video of this 14-year-old girl in Pakistan and here’s this 14-year-old girl in Pakistan covered in mud, standing in the slave camp crying, saying, I can’t believe I have a sister on the other side of the world that I have never met.
Who went door to door selling oranges so I could be free and my family could be free. And what you couldn’t see is her family was standing right next to her and they’re all crying and the man taking the video was crying. And what? What grabbed my heart was, [00:41:00] you know, isn’t that what God wants for us? No.
Is to connect our hearts together. A way to love each other. I think this ministry provides that opportunity for people, so I hope they’ll get involved.
Dr. Mark Turman: So powerful. Yeah, thanks. Yeah. For se sharing that I was, many, many people I know on our podcast that follow us also use tools for their devotional life from the YouVersion Bible and today’s YouVersion bible scripture of the day was bear one another’s burdens and so fulfill the Law of Christ.
And that’s exactly what you’re describing is yeah, bearing one another’s burdens and fulfilling his law of love. Mike, thank you for all that you are doing, all that you have done to respond to the call of God in your life. Remind everybody, this is families set free.org and we’ll put that in the show notes for this podcast and we hope that you will check it out.
We hope that you’ll pray about how God would want you to be involved. In what God is [00:42:00] doing in Pakistan to fee to free these families, many of them Christians, also people who are not of the Christian faith yet. But we want to just be a partner and we were excited when we found out about Mike’s ministry being able to bring it to you so that more of the Christian family can be aware, and can be involved, can be prayerful, can be helping, can be giving, possibly even going.
And so we hope that you’ll strongly consider families set free.org and that you will follow whatever God wants you to do in that area. Mike, we pray for you. Pray that you will get some great rest. We pray for this rescue that you’re going to do in just a few hours, and thank you for the way that you’re letting God use you in all of these things.
Mm
Michael Brickley: mm Thank you very much. Appreciate it. I’m thankful to be here.
Dr. Mark Turman: You bet. All right, until we get to talk again, my friend, I hope everything goes well with you. Thank you to our audience for listening to us [00:43:00] today, and we’ll see you again soon on the Denison Forum Podcast. God bless you.
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