Fishers of Men

Hello, I’m Edee Olson, the host of Fishers of Men on Channel 17 in Santa Barbara, California. I created this show simply because I want people – not just “churchgoing” people – to get the chance to hear the fascinating stories of people who have veered away from “the American dream” of working, saving, owning, and retiring, and ventured out to see where God’s plans might take them. (In Matthew chapter 4, verse 19, Jesus is quoted as saying, “Come, follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.”)

Several stories in particular really stuck with me, egging me on to create a larger audience. Take Gary Haugen for example. He quit his job as an attorney when he realized that perhaps there was no one out there taking the risk of rescuing innocent girls enslaved in the sex trade. Now he travels across the globe, gets in good with scary dudes with guns who guard prostitute compounds, and rescues the women in the middle of the night when he thinks he can get them without getting shot to death. His wife’s main request is that he be home every weekend, sitting at the dining table, ready for a normal dinner with his family.

Or take my neighbor’s mother. Upon her husband’s death, she realized her passion would be to help people in the poorest places in the world. She wrote Mother Teresa and asked if she could join her order. Mother Teresa wrote back…yes. Since then, she’s been in cities that are so destitute and dangerous to visit that her son’s family once had to hire a hearse to safely get into one of them.

Then there’s the story of a couple from our church who have been missionaries in a tribe in South America for 32 years. They declined being interviewed on the show because their continuing work of translating the bible into the local tribal language – which, by the way, they had to first learn fluently – could actually get them killed if the “right” people were to get word of it. They used to live and work in the wilderness but have been forced to the safety (and relative lifelessness) of a guarded building in the city.

Missionaries, justice seekers, conservationists, translators, teachers, pastors, leaders, authors, speakers, you name it. I wish I had heard life stories like these when I was younger; they’re often only heard in churches. So this is my way of bringing the stories out of churches and into the global community.

There is no money involved in any of this; we are all volunteers.

Thanks for watching and reading!