Refugee Relief: An Interview With Preemptive Love | Holly Furtick

Hi, everyone.

It is one of my favorite weeks of the summer. It is Love Week at Elevation Church. An entire week that we set aside to go out into our communities and share the love of Christ. So this week on my YouTube channel, I wanted to highlight a few of our outreach partners that are killing it. Today I have an interview to show you that I got to talk with Jeremy Courtney, who is the founder of Preemptive Love. Jeremy and his wife Jessica Love live in Iraq. Yes, I said that.

Right.

They live in Iraq. They've been there for 15 years. They've lived through ISIS and bombings and the Syrian crisis and Covid. And they are reaching people and sharing the love of Christ. And I can't wait for you to watch this interview.

What if we could love our enemies before they did anything to get us? What if we could love our neighbor before they harmed us or before even they did anything good for us? What if we were the ones to do good first? And so we called ourselves the Preemptive Love Coalition because we wanted to almost like blackmail ourselves into forever constantly being those people who had to reckon with what does it mean to not strike first?

Yeah.

But to love first and ask questions later.

And honestly, I think one of the hardest things to do is to name an organization. And I just want to go on record as saying I love the name of your organization. I think it says so much about what you do, and I just think it's amazing. So you And Jess, in 2007, you move to Iraq, you get there, you're like, you just feel called, you want to do relief. You get there, you end up starting this organization, Preemptive Love. And over the last 14, 15 years, preemptive love has had all these different iterations. Can you give me a brief history of the things that you guys have done and what you're doing now?

Yeah. So, I mean, the whole organization really kicked off when I met this little girl who needed a life saving heart surgery. I was in a cafe minding my business, and a guy, long story short, approaches me and says, can you help my family? She's this big and she needs a life savings. Heart surgery. And we kind of threw in with that family to see what we could do to help this one little girl.

So you just start helping kids get the surgeries that they need.

Yeah, kids started coming out of the woodwork, Parents kind of thrusting their kids in our face lovingly and saying, please save my child's life next. So we started facilitating life saving surgeries for kids. And then ISIS comes on the scene in a really big way, takes over about a third of Syria, takes over a third of Iraq, and suddenly heart surgeries for even tens of thousands of kids, though, that's a big number. It almost paled. I mean, I dare say it paled in comparison to the millions and millions and millions of people who are now without homes, living on the run, piling up in camps with a terror group like ISIS continuing to ravage the country.

Right. So we're here in the United States and we're watching these horrific videos and pictures of people piled on boats and just fleeing the country. And you're there on the ground and what are you doing? How do you even know how to help people?

At that point, we had done so much legwork and traveled the miles and built our credibility, but in other ways. We were a small heart surgery organization, a very niche kind of organization that didn't necessarily know how to source and do all kinds of other things that were very needed at that time. So we had what amounted to a staff meeting. Just a few of us gathered around the staff table and we said, so what are we going to do? Are we going to sit this one out and basically say, this isn't our deal because we're a medical organization, or are we going to throw all in with our neighbors and say, more than being a heart surgery organization, we're a people organization or we're Iraq organization. Like, this is our home, this is our neighborhood. So are we going to go in with our people or are we going to go in with our expertise? And we said, we're going in with our people. So we kind of threw the whole blueprint out the window and retooled the entire organization to figure out how to help where was needed most.

Tell me really quick about some of the job training programs that you guys have created to help these refugees be able to be self sustaining.

Yeah. So it probably behoves me at this point to say clearly, like, what preemptive love is. We consider ourselves a community of peacemakers. And everything we're trying to do is about inviting other people to join this community of peacemakers. So whoever you are out there on the other side of the screen. Hi. When I say community of peacemakers, I don't mean we, this team and this staff and this organization, I mean, no, us, all of us together, lets us together be a community waging peace in our neighborhood together and across the world together. Because wherever you're sitting right now, today you can wage peace. And I need you as my partner. That's how we think of ourselves, and that's what we're trying to do. And when I say peacemaking, in many ways, we talk about that in terms of stopping the spread of violence. That's the stuff that we measure. How can we stop the spread of violence? And there's different ways that we do that. But when you're trying to stop the spread of violence, then it gets you asking, okay, so what does stop the spread of violence? What are the factors that lead to violence? And then how do we go to the root of those and uproot them? And one of the factors has to do with economics. And so a lot of what we work on is job creation. We will probably start nearly 600 businesses this year.

Wow.

And among those businesses include a set of work that we call our Sisterhood Collective. And inside the Sisterhood Collective is high, high quality soaps and candles made by women in our community of peacemakers across the world.

Keep going. I got one more.

So when, you know, when you get pushed out of your home, you get sent on the run, running for your life. You have to solve the shelter problem first, you have to solve the food problem first. And pretty soon, somewhere after that, you start to realize, I may be in this situation for a while. You know, normally one of the first things that sets in is denial. I'm not going to be in this situation for a while. This is just for the night, just for the week. But somewhere over that journey, you start realizing, I may not be able to get home. And then you have to start reckoning with, so, what am I going to do? And rather than focus on continual handouts, we started focusing on what we could do to help people find their own agency again, earn their own income again, and start putting bread on the table for their families.

Jimmy, I want to ask you, you have lived in this area of the world for almost 15 years. You've raised two kids, and you've been through multiple bombings and wars and so much that you could be afraid of. Was there ever a point where you were like, we should go home. We should. We. We. We're afraid for our lives. We shouldn't be raising our kids here. What. What makes you stay?

We have. We have never, at any point, been the people in the story who have had it the worst. I think that's probably, in a nutshell, what helps us stay. It is. It has always been not only possible to look around and find someone who has it worse than us, but it's been almost impossible to not throw a rock and find someone who has it worse than us. I mean, to be surrounded by. Need to be surrounded by people who. Who have no passport for escape, who have no paycheck for escape, who have no family to escape to. I don't know, perhaps somehow the fact that we do have all those things has made it even more possible for us to stay. It's like, you can always delay that decision. You can always say, well, we've got all that we need. We can always leave tomorrow. Let's stay today.

Stay one more day.

Yeah.

I think the sacrifice that your family has made and the impact that your family has made on the world is absolutely incredible. And I just. I personally want to thank you for that. I think it's inspiring to me all the way over here. So thank you for that.

Appreciate that.

And you guys are not just in Iraq.

Iraq, then spread to Syria, Lebanon. I can tell more about the story of why later, but Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, these are our major areas of operation right now.

Jeremy, I just. I love your organization. I think. I think it's amazing. And I am such a fan of you and your wife. How can people find out more? Where do they go if they want to find out more about preemptive love?

Preemptivelove.org is kind of your one stop for everything. And you can. There's different trails you can pursue there. Preemptivelove.org you can find your way ultimately to some of our handmade soaps and handmade candles and other things that. That come out of our sisterhood collective. You can join us as a member of our community ofpeacemakers@ preemptivelove.org as well.

I love it. And most of all, the people of Elevation Church love preemptive love. And I. One of the things that I love about our church is that when people give to our church, we automatically allocate 12% of every dollar that comes to Elevation to go back out into our communities and into organizations like yours who are on the ground getting work done. And I know you know this, but I don't know if the people of Elevation know that. Since 2017, Elevation Church has given $325,000 to support the work of Preemptive Love. And I am so proud of that. But also, I have a surprise for you. I am so excited because we are going to add to that number today, and we have a check for you guys for $50,000.

Wow. Thank you so much. That's incredible.

You're so welcome. Thank you for the work that you guys are doing. Thank you for staying and for fighting your fear and loving people. And loving people who don't necessarily look or think or act like you, but people who need the love of Christ. And it really inspires me and ministers to me. And so I'm just so grateful for you and for Jessica and for your kids and for your whole organization of preemptive love. It is just. It's amazing. And we're so, so honored that we can partner with you guys.