The Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) abducted Acayo Concy when she was 15. She was raped, made a sex slave, forced to steal and kill. She had three children in the northern Ugandan bush.

Peter Ochan was abducted from his home one night when he was 14 and forced to become a child soldier. He and other children were compelled to walk all night and all day before being allowed a rest. Their training also included being forced to carry around the decomposing body of a boy who had been killed for trying to escape.

Stories like these are distressingly similar to those told by slaves over 200 years ago, as in Olaudah Equiano's narrative, published in 1789, the year William Wilberforce first spoke against slavery in Parliament. And it is stories like these that drive CMS to continue Jesus Christ's mission "to bind up the broken-hearted and set the captive free".

CMS owes its own beginning in 1799 to the remarkable group of people who fought the slave trade. Among them were Wilberforce, who championed the cause of abolition for 44 years, and John Newton, slave dealer turned abolitionist, who penned the evergreen "Amazing Grace", including the lines: "I once was lost, but now am found, Was blind, but now I see."

Sharing that 'amazing grace' remains the chief goal of CMS and although that historic template of slavery is no more, we see its modern form in situations that destroy people, rob them of choice and entrap them for the benefit of users.

To bring international attention to the 19-year war in northern Uganda, where Acayo Concy and Peter Ochan became modern slaves, CMS initiated its "Break the Silence" campaign.