See how they love one another

Well, our church made headlines in the local paper. We are praying the story doesn't get picked up by other news agencies - we would like for this to all go away soon.

What happened? Well, first some background: there is a group of people in our community who seem to want the church to take a more active - read that "adversarial" - role in fighting abortion in our nation. Not our local church, but 'the church' in a larger sense. They want us to do exactly what they do. We don't want to do exactly what they do, so they have done their level best to hold us hostage to their beliefs. Now let me be clear - we are a pro-life church, not only our local church, but our national denomination.

Exactly what transpired is this, boiled down: They began to picket in front of our church a few months ago. Not just our church, but many of the local churches. One church at a time, as they seem to only have a few people who will take the time to "demonstrate" on Sunday mornings. Their signs said, "Church Repent" and "4,000 abortions a day," and it has to be very confusing to people who drive by. I don't know if they have ever picketed in front of the Jewish Temple or other houses of worship - why do I mention that? Because there are houses of worship in our community which are public in their support of Planned Parenthood and in other ways make it clear - publicly - that they are pro-choice. We are not. We are pro-life. We support the local "Crisis Pregnancy Center" and we have given large gifts to the neo-natal wing at our local hospital, in hopes of keeping babies alive. We do not want to make the lives of women harder - on the contrary: we want to help any woman who finds herself facing an unplanned pregnancy. We will love you, take care of you, give you a safe and secure place to calmly sit and make tough choices and we will even give you a place to live while you await this new life coming into the world. We want to save lives.

So this group showed up with posters - eight feet tall - of aborted babies. In full, gory color. And several of our young children were exposed to this gore as their moms and dads drove them in to Sunday School. There was no way to warn our parents: they simply drove up to church as usual, and their kids got an eye-full. And many of them reacted as you would expect: asking "what is that!!??" with tears, many with night terror or at least trouble sleeping that night and the next.

One parent went too far and engaged the protesters in a water fight. And THAT is what made the paper. The reporter did not quote any statistics about how many babies die each year, or how often babies are aborted after the point at which they are viable, living individuals. Nothing was mentioned of the ability of a teenager to have the school nurse take her to a clinic, get an abortion and go back to school as if nothing had happened, without contacting parents - nope. The father, angered at a rude exposure of his kids to violent bloody images in front of his place of worship was the focal point.

Well, what he did was not very level-headed. He may pay a huge price for his actions, but I would truly love to know the answer to this question:

If the protesters are truly interested in saving the lives of unborn babies, how many do they think they will save by turning a pro-life church into the butt of jokes, the object of scorn, the focus of hate and revile among our neighbors? Of COURSE there have been calls and letters from our neighbors asking "what were you thinking?"

We had to explain that those ugly posters were most definitely NOT being held up by members of our church, nor were any of the events that transpired part of some plan by the leadership of our church - it was an outside agency which fully wants to pressure us into their agenda. But it is too little too late: so many local people will get up and read the headlines this morning and ask:

Is this how Christians behave?