By Pete Kernoghan

With Christmas coming around the corner faster than Santa's sleigh on light speed, malls are overflowing with shoppers and stress levels are heating up amongst the society in general. But here at CCM, we've been channeling that pursuit of worldly treasures towards a more reflective tone this season, counting down the "12 Days of Christmas" by highlighting one of your favorite faith-based artists talking about their favorite outreach organizations. Today we catch up with Bluetree's Pete Kernoghan chatting about StandOut.

StandOut was birthed on a cold, but surprisingly sunny, day in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Aaron Boyd [lead singer, Bluetree] and I often would meet on Thursday mornings to walk, talk, pray and dream. On this particular day, we had been chatting about our Thailand experience and how crazy it was, as well as the whole "God of This City" story.

We started asking some questions: "How can what we do in western churches as Bluetree impact the need in Thailand or the world? How can we sing about the one, true God in our churches and not do anything about the 10-year-old girl who is getting raped on the other side of the planet? There must be something we can do."

This is our response: StandOut International, which launched in May '09. We exist to end child sex exploitation (CSE). We work from the platform of "worship, music, justice." What we want to see happen is for the church to come together, worship God together and, by simply doing that, be inspired and challenged to go and change the planet.

For us in Bluetree, we want to end CSE. We want to sow finance into projects that are already operating on the ground, already addressing the needs of people. We want to raise awareness of the issues that people face on this planet, specifically CSE. We came to the place that just singing songs over our cities, our towns, our villages, our countries, is not good enough. We need to go and be Jesus to the broken world. We need to be peace to the broken. We need to be the joy in the sadness. We need to sing those songs and then become that song in this world.

We have committed ourselves over the next 18 months to focus on Cambodia. We are raising finances for a project called Doorsteps 2, which consists of 28 smaller projects that all work with children at risk of sex exploitation—ranging from being pulled into, being currently involved in or been previously involved in CSE. All money that we raise will go to those projects in Cambodia. We have set a target for this time period of raising $85,000. If we can raise this, it will make a massive impact in the lives of many children. Since May we have been able to sow $20,000 into Cambodia. We have raised funds through concerts, youth projects, monthly giving and generous one-off gifts. We have been truly amazed by the response we have received. But this is only the beginning because we truly believe that greater things have yet to be done here.

For more info, visit standoutinternational.co.uk.