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Answering the Call

Saving Innocent Lives One Woman at a Time, Updated Edition

Hendrickson Publishers Marketing, LLC

The Aroma of Life

A few people in King David's time provided such wise assessment of and bold leadership for their generation that it became their lasting testimony. They were the "men of Issachar," and they were described as men "who had understanding of the times, to know what Israel ought to do" (1 Chron. 12:32). Recognizing the vital need for such people in every age, this book aims to help us think through and lead well on a matter of great importance: cherishing and defending innocent human life.

For the past twenty-three years, I have sought to understand and, in turn, help the Christian community understand the times in which we live, specifically at the intersection of biblical ethics and cultural conflict. I have been invited into countless pulpits to address the painful and sensitive issue of abortion. It has been my unwavering hope each time to fashion a powerful, even historic, life-affirming Christian response. I press on because I see no evidence that any other group of people is capable of taking up this burden. Throughout history, right to the present hour, it has been in large part only the Christian community that has cared enough about their neighbors, including the littlest and weakest ones among us, to oppose with courage and compassion the pagan "rights" of abortion, infanticide, exposure, and abandonment.

In the main, pastors and laypeople alike understand that cherishing and defending innocent human life is a moral mandate. It is the law of love. They understand that abortion is an act of violence that kills a baby and damages every mother and father.

As a moral, ethical, and biblical matter, the sanctity of human life is something we uphold as a matter of creed and intellect. But as pastors and Christian leaders, we are reticent about addressing abortion beyond a fleeting condemnation.

My hope in writing Answering the Call is to move us past this reticence. The apostle Paul expects our lives as the Church, the people of God, to be so boldly arresting, so surprisingly gracious, so wooingly fragrant, that we are the very aroma of life itself (2 Cor. 2:16). To be that kind of people, we need leaders like the men of Issachar.

When it comes to abortion, for most people the situation is more like dealing with an unseemly smell coming from the basement while attending a family reunion. Something is wrong, but what should one say? First attempts may be glances toward the basement door, followed by a whisper or two privately ("Am I imagining things, or is there a problem here?"). After a while we may get used to it and forget about the matter. Still, if we love our host family and care about their health, we look for a sensitive but honest way to address it. That is the position many Christians are in today. They want to cherish and defend innocent human life, but they want to do it sensitively and rationally.Answering the Call is for them.

The need, of course, is not only to inform people of the divine call to hold each life precious but also to inspire God's people to lifesaving and life-changing intervention on behalf of the weak and the innocent. In general, the Christian community is a life-affirming people. If they are provided a practical venue for demonstrating their concern for needy mothers and babies, they will respond enthusiastically.

Therefore I recommend that the call to cherish and defend innocent human life always be coupled with direct intervention with those in pregnancy distress. Every church in every land can and should be starting or partnering with a local pregnancy help ministry. While many other arenas for life-affirming action cry out for attention, this should be first on the list.

There are two reasons I suggest this. First, all abortion is local; it befalls one woman at a time. Frightened mothers who are planning to abort their babies tomorrow are agonizing tonight in homes in our neighborhoods. Second, the Great Commandment calls us to love our neighbors. A woman in an unplanned pregnancy is truly frightened and feels that her very life is ending—not physically, but emotionally and spiritually. Her life as she has projected it appears threatened by the baby. Abortion in her mind is a desperate act to save her own life. This may not be true. But it feels true.

Strange and perverse as their end is, abortionists parrot the same message that Christ offers to those in trouble: "Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you ... and you will find rest for your souls" (Matt. 11:28–29). Abortionists promise salvation and rest too. But they require a very different kind of yoke—death and the spiritual death that flows from the bloodguilt of shedding innocent blood.

We have a special duty as the Christian community to refute the false mercy of the abortion industry, especially, and primarily, in our neighborhoods. We know the true Rescuer, the One who gives life and nourishes it. We can say with the Psalmist, "Hope in God" (43:5). We can teach couples who do not see how they can provide for a child to pray for their daily bread, as we ourselves are learning to do. We can break the lie that says that the baby is a death sentence by testifying to how God used our own sin, shame, and fear to turn our lives around and put us on the path of life. We can help them discover God's provision, if we simply act as neighbors loving neighbors, and do the practical things needed to help them through the crisis.

The same Spirit that raised Christ from the dead lives in us who believe. When we get involved, that power emanates from us as the very aroma of life to a young couple grappling with the greatest crisis of their young lives.

Therefore, we, in His name, should be broadcasting in every neighborhood across the land, "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened (by an unplanned pregnancy). Take my yoke (the way, the truth, and the life I have found in Christ) and learn from me, for Our God is gentle and humble in heart (neither harsh nor condemning) and you will find rest for your souls (I will show you the better way and you will delight in it). For His yoke is easy and His burden is light."

In practice, the best way to bring this winsome invitation to abortion-vulnerable women and couples in our neighborhoods is to partner with local pregnancy help ministries. Day after day, without fanfare or major funding, they provide mothers in pregnancy distress the support they need to prepare for parenting or adoption.

Heartbeat International, which serves as a training and support organization for pregnancy help ministries, currently lists over 5,700 such ministries in their worldwide directory. Most of them are pregnancy help centers and maternity homes, and almost all of them have started in the last forty years—since abortion was discovered as a right somewhere in the US Constitution. They are funded by donations from folks like you and me. They are staffed by lay-counselors, mostly mature Christian women, many of whom know personally the anguish and guilt that attends abortion.

In five minutes, these Christian women are "in." A young woman enters a pregnancy help center, sits down with a complete stranger, and in just a few minutes, she is pouring out the most intimate details of her life. She is explaining, often through tears, why her pregnancy is the biggest crisis of her life. What a place for the gospel to show up in word and deed.

Dr. James Dobson, who currently leads Family Talk radio, has long urged the Christian community to establish and support a neighborhood pregnancy help ministry. He says,

I consider abortion to be the greatest moral evil of our time, because of the worth of those little babies. At the end of the year a crisis pregnancy center can point to a baby boy, born January 12th, a baby girl, born February 22nd—real, live human beings who were allowed to live, to be brought into the world, to give love and receive love simply because those organizations exist. Crisis pregnancy centers serve the community, by serving mothers-to-be caught in the most traumatic time of their life.

I have helped establish eleven such centers in four major cities over the last twenty years. I can assure you what Dobson says is true. Churches that have answered the call and put neighborly love into lifesaving action by helping mothers in pregnancy crisis are proving to be the aroma of life.

The Great Test and the Great Work

In some ways time is very much like a volcano. There are long periods of relative serenity. Then there are rumblings and stirrings that foreshadow, and then give way to truly frightening and cataclysmic times of fiery destruction. The people witnessing these early outbreaks of fire often resist seeing them as warning signs to flee. Instead, they say, "Well, that is the worst of it." They do not act decisively because they have never lived through and cannot imagine the scope of horror that is about to be unleashed.

The powers of evil rely on this psychological craving for normalcy in the face of mass murder and carnage. They use the periods of relative calm to create a moral and spiritual drowsiness that resists seeing events as warning signs of greater evil coming. Of course some courageous voices do sound the alarm. But the Evil One seems to raise up unbalanced and off-putting voices to say the same things with shrill and discrediting hyperbole that neutralize the sobering voices so that the "whole lot" is dismissed. Then evil explodes and sweeps away souls in a torrent of fire and ash.

Sheep and cattle are steadily calmed and spoken to with familiar and reassuring voices till, BLAM!, the slaughter house does what slaughter houses do. So too, the powers of evil use our fondness of the normal, to keep us moseying along down the path to the slaughter.

The Great Test

So it falls to certain generations that they will live in a time when evil rumbles and then convulses into the shedding of innocent blood all around them. Such was the case, for example, in Germany in the 1940s.

Count Helmut Von Moltke, a devout Christian leader of his generation, learned of the growing human rights abuses of the Nazis. In 1941, he wrote, "Certainly more than a thousand people are murdered ... every day, and another thousand German men are habituated to murder ... What shall I say when I am asked: And what did you do during this time?" That is the great test.

What is so diabolically evil about abortion is that it quietly, routinely, and, for the most part invisibly, is sweeping away 45 million souls a year worldwide, without raising much of an alarm or disturbing the routine of life around us. And so we face a great test too. Will we, as followers of Christ, and in increasing strength, courageously and resolutely resist the desire to accommodate and normalize mass child-killing and fight for the lives of the innocent? Or will we grow weary of the struggle—gravitate to a more trendy cause, and let slide uncontested postmodernism's blood-lust for unborn human life?

There have always been sober-minded voices calling us to see the unspeakable and pre-eminent evil of abortion. But there have also been a steady number of shrill voices speaking on behalf of the "pro-life movement." They grab attention as if they are saying, "I am pro-life and crazy. Don't you want to be crazy and pro-life like me?"

As a result, in the public mind, the images that are associated with "pro-life" and "pro-life movement" are not as positive as I think they rightly deserve. This saddens me. It is an obstacle to winning the culture. But enduring distorted voices within the movement and slanderously false characterizations from outside it are part of the warfare against evil—part of the test itself.

The year I graduated from high school, 1973, is the year abortion was declared a constitutional right by the US Supreme Court. Within twenty years, approximately 2,300 abortion businesses were profiting richly doing about 1.5 million abortions a year.

Pope John Paul II helped define this contest, calling it a conflict between the "gospel of life" and the "culture of death." Jerry Falwell, Dr. James D. Kennedy, and Chuck Colson are just a few leading evangelicals who came to agree with John Paul II and called upon the evangelical community to get into the fight for life as well.

They are all gone now. If a generation is forty years, then 2013 marks the official torch passing to the next generation. It is the survivor generation. But it is also a generation that has never known anything but legal and accessible abortion.

In addition, this new generation must cope with the general diminution of human life that legal abortion has wrought. Physician-assisted suicide, cloning, embryonic stem-cell research—each has its accompanying lobby of scientists and movie stars trumpeting utopian benefits. Steadily, utilitarian ethics—the notion that some lives can be destroyed (or left to die) to improve the lives of others—is developing into law and policy. An ever-spiraling increase in the cost of health care and an ever-spiraling national debt means that a volcanic pressure is building to see the sick and the elderly pass in a timely, cost-effective way.

The culture of death is gathering strength. Peter Singer, the Ira DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, advocates extending so-called abortion rights to include newborns, so that parents might be allowed to kill their babies until the child is deemed "sentient," or self-aware. Singer writes, "killing a newborn baby is never equivalent to killing a person, that is, a being who wants to go on living." While not yet a mainstream idea, Singer is not a lone voice. Even as I update this book, Australian academics, Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva, writing in The Journal of Medical Ethics, propose changing the term infanticide to "after-birth abortion." They write:

We argue that, when circumstances occur after birth such that they would have justified abortion, what we call after-birth abortion should be permissible ... We propose to call this practice 'after-birth abortion', rather than 'infanticide', to emphasise that the moral status of the individual killed is comparable with that of a fetus (on which "abortions" in the traditional sense are performed) rather than to that of a child. Therefore, we claim that killing a newborn could be ethically permissible in all the circumstances where abortion would be. Such circumstances include cases where the newborn has the potential to have an (at least) acceptable life, but the well-being of the family is at risk.

Their matter-of-fact proposal indicates how reasonable (read: normal or mainstream) they consider their proposal to be. It is a solidly logical extension of abortion-rights rationale. Even though the "after-birth abortion" proposal was met with a firestorm of protest, nonetheless, infanticide is rising as a practice.

"Girl, 16, said to suffocate infant"
"Teen is charged with killing baby at prom"
"Body of baby found in ditch"

These are real newspaper headlines. Baby "drop boxes" have been set up at hospitals and fire stations, and at some pregnancy help centers, as a way of providing an anonymous and safe way for overwrought mothers to find a life-affirming alternative to infanticide, abandonment, or exposure.

The Great Work

But I have hope that this new generation of Christian leaders are also gathering strength. There are young pastors who are speaking with unusual moral clarity and grace. They are young student leaders, bloggers, investigative reporters, researchers, and activists assuming leadership roles and calling this next generation of Christians to answer the call to cherish and defend innocent human life. Their primary challenge is not with those who call themselves pro-choice. It is with those who identify themselves as pro-life.

Yes, abortion advocates are quite happy that so many Christians today identify themselves as pro-life—just as long as they continue to act pro-choice. Passive acceptance of legal abortion, not agreement with legal abortion, is all they need to win.

Jesus used two spiritual leaders in his parable of the Good Samaritan to show this (Luke 10:25–37). The priest and the Levite represent the same kind of leaders who meet me and take great pains to say, "I am pro-life," and "Abortion is terrible" as if that alone fulfills the obligations of love.

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Excerpted from Answering the Call by John Ensor. Copyright © 2012 Hendrickson Publishers Marketing, LLC. Excerpted by permission of Hendrickson Publishers Marketing, LLC.
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