A test: Is your church really pro-life?
Pastor Cecil Clark of True Vine Baptist Church outside an abortion clinic in Knoxville.
“Would you look at that?” he said, as we stood on the U of Louisville campus. Pastor Dave Daubenmire and I watched as professional pro-aborts desperately denied the truth staring them in the face. The students weren’t buying it.
“Every time Christians show up with the truth, we win.” But then Pastor Dave hit me where it hurts, “The only problem is, we Christians usually don’t show up.”
Jesus said the gates of Hell would not prevail against the Church (Matthew 16:18), but can we really apply that verse when the Church does nothing?
The biggest example of this is abortion. We have abortion in American because the “pro-life” church isn’t showing up. I’m not talking about the churches that are officially pro-abortion. I’m talking about just the churches you and I attend.
If you are reading this, you probably attend a church that claims to be “pro-life.” But is it really? An easy test to perform:
- Go to the nearest abortion clinic when the killing is going on. Count the number of your pastors/elders/church leaders that show up.
- Go to the next meeting of any pro-life endeavor in your community and count the number of your pastors/elders/church leaders that show up.
- Take a look at the budget of your church and add up the money spent on stopping abortion. Then add up the money spent on church-run sports programs. Then add up the money spent on making the music better on Sunday morning. If you add it up all over Knoxville, where I live, it will be a few thousand dollars to stop abortion, hundreds of thousands to run sports programming, and millions of dollars on the Sunday morning music. I’m not knocking music or sports, but I am wondering why full-time professionals are hired to run sports and music programs in almost every major church, but almost zero staff time is ever devoted to help stop killing babies. That despite the fact that approximately 1 in 5 women who aborts her baby identifies herself as a “born-again” or “evangelical” Christian.
- Take a look at the required core education curriculum of your church. It has to be on paper (or online) or it doesn’t count. Look for the mandated requirements for teaching middle and high-school students about abortion. Are there any such requirements? No? Then is it any wonder why so many of our children have abortions?
- As you evaluate the pro-life education requirements at your church, find out if photos/videos of aborted babies are mandated as part of the published curriculum. We hear from the students who grew up in “pro-life” churches all the time. Just recently, two student government leaders at Liberty University told me they were not commited pro-lifers until I showed them pictures of abortion. The “pro-life” church had hidden the truth from them, and they had never known nor cared because they had never seen.
So, is your church “pro-life”? What are you going to do about it?
What would Jesus do?
P.S. A pastor recently told me that his church “works through” the local CPC that some of their members helped to start 20 years ago. Not sure what that means, but I do know it ain’t much. They were not interested in doing anything more. I can tell you that babies are dying in that church, but the pastor believes that their only responsibility to those babies is to send a few dollars to a pregnancy center across town. If I ever have a heart attack, I hope I’m not sitting in that church!
Tags: abortion pictures, anti-abortion, church, prolife, right to life
This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 25th, 2010 at 2:10 pm and is filed under Abortion and the Church. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
7 Responses to “A test: Is your church really pro-life?”
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August 25th, 2010 at 5:06 pm
If only we had more pastors like him, who “show up” to stand for life, what a different world this would be!
“You slaughtered my children and sacrificed them to idols.”
(Ez. 16:20)
It’s important to remember that in Ezekiel’s prophesy against this child sacrifice, God instructed the chastisement to begin “at my sanctuary.” (Ez. 9:6) Do you think that our chastisement will begin there too?
August 25th, 2010 at 5:13 pm
Excelent point Chris. I’ve been warning people for years that when God cleans house, He starts with His own.
August 26th, 2010 at 7:40 am
So what is the Church’s excuse for not showing up? We find it very hard here in Maine for any pastors/priests/deacons to show even when the mill is located a quarter mile from their sanctuary doors! No surprise there, you say…
August 26th, 2010 at 9:04 am
You’re right, no surprise. And really, the excuse isn’t important. The priest and the Levite passed the victim by because, bottom line, they simply didn’t care about the victim as much as they cared about [fill in the blank]. They did nothing, not even the bare minimum, to help. Sound familiar? Church pastors/leaders are not going to care about abortion until we pro-lifers care enough about it to show up outside these “pro-life” churches, on the public sidewalks, with our abortion pictures, on Sunday mornings. Only then will the typical “pro-life” pastor give abortion more than a passing thought.
November 30th, 2010 at 1:41 pm
To avoid thinking about abortion at all is the most comfortable thing in this culture of selfishness. Unfortunately, “passive pro-lifers” avoidance of this “unpleasant subject” leaves their children with no foundational understanding or learned grounding, and thus susceptible to anyone who might want their money. I do not wonder why so many college kids think they are pro-abortion; it is those kids that fund the corporate abortion mills and their “rights”-focused, truth-burying, underhanded “freedom” advertising to these children, abortionists’ main clientele. I love hearing sermons that hit the current culture: they are sadly rare, as keeping the numbers up at church becomes the bigger priority.
April 24th, 2013 at 1:47 pm
Thank you for this! I am outraged at the church! I have written letters to pastors at my church, encouraged women(friends) to pray, to sign petitions, and publicly share the horrors going on … To pray for Gosnell trial. To step out, speak out and reach out in Jesus name to save lives… But no response. No care and compassion? What is going on? Doesn’t God command us to love our neighbors? Doesn’t God commands us to defend those being led to slaughter? Prov 24:11
For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who suppress the truth in unrighteousness. Romans 1:18
I am ashamed and deeply heartbroken that the “church” Gods ppl the light in the darkness can not even be the light! So sad!
What can we do? How can we stir up the church to open there eyes?!
July 16th, 2013 at 2:45 pm
Thank you for posting this blog. I am currently working to try and get local churches involved in the pro-life movement so this was very informative for me.