Christian conference organizer and Atlanta minister Louie Giglio, award-winning Christian musician Chris Tomlin and others started Passion City Church near the Lindbergh MARTA station about four years ago.
Giglio’s conferences and church are aimed at high school and college students, who are encouraged to get involved in social issues such as alleviating poverty and providing clean water to Third World inhabitants. This year the focus has been on fighting modern-day slavery and human trafficking.
Giglio international conferences draw between 20,000 and 40,000 young Christians. This year the largely student crowd at the Atlanta conference raised $3.3 million to combat human trafficking, which went to the cities of Atlanta and Vancouver and to establish a 24-hour hotline in Greece, three hot spots for sexual and other trafficking.
Passion City Church led a drive to gather more than 72,000 names on a petition delivered to President Barack Obama calling for the U.S. government to take a lead in combating sex and labor trafficking.
Giglio told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2010, “I think high school students are catching onto what it means to live for a greater purpose and catching on to the ideas of participating in God’s global purposes and causes for justice.”
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