Implementing A Pro-Life Theology In A Lutheran Congregation
by Dr. David
L. Adams
As executive director of the Lutheran Church
Missouri Synod Office of Government Information for most of the last five
years, I had many opportunities to travel around the church. One of the
pleasant things that I found in those travels is that our church body is
strongly pro-life. Most of the pastors I met, even those who were rather
liberal on other issues, tended to be solidly committed to upholding the
sanctity of human life from conception until natural death. Having said
that, I also saw some things that troubled me greatly, things that have
convinced me that our church is very much in danger of losing its pro-life
commitment.
The greatest danger to the pro-life position of
the LCMS does not come from the external pressure of our culture, promoted
by the media and popular press, to accept the view that unwanted, or
unfulfilling, human life is expendable. It does not come from the ethical
theorists who debate whether it is morally defensible to kill an unwanted
new-born because birth is merely an arbitrary point in the process of
becoming fully human. The biggest threat to the pro-life commitment of the
LCMS does not even come from those few voices within our church that
parrot the mantra of the pro-abortion movement to the effect that the
church should not have an opinion on what is, after all, a private
decision between a woman and her doctor. No. The biggest threat to the
pro-life position of the LCMS is us. We, who are committed to
upholding the value of the divine gift of life, are the greatest danger to
the pro-life position of the Synod.
What makes us a threat to our teaching is that we
are generally failing to follow up our theological convictions with real
day-to-day ministry work. We seem to be satisfied with knowing the truth.
We have generally not taken the next step toward turning our convictions
into action. This is a deadly error for any church. Theology is never just
an abstract intellectual exercise: the only theology that you really have
is the theology that you practice. So I have become convinced that unless
we reverse our current trend, unless our churches begin not only to
believe in the value of human life, but take action to make that
conviction a part of the way that we do our ministry work in the
congregation, we shall cease to be a pro-life church body within a
generation.
Turning our pro-life theology into a pro-life
ministry in the local Lutheran congregation must include, at the very
least, three basic things: 1) a plan to teach the faith; 2) a plan to care
for people in need; and 3) a plan to witness publicly to the teachings of
God's Word.
A Plan to Teach
We must begin by consciously and intentionally integrating the teaching of
the value of human life into the teaching programs of our congregation.
Churches teach in a variety of ways, sometimes from the pulpit, sometimes
in structured learning experience such as Bible study or confirmation
class, and sometimes through activities and the interactions of
individuals. A congregational pro-life ministry will look for ways to
instruct Christians about the value of human life at every opportunity.
We have depended too much upon our underlying
culture to inculcate our members with a sense of the value of life. A
generation ago that might have been sufficient; today it is a recipe for
disaster. Our culture has changed. It now teaches our members to put their
own interests above those of others in need, especially whose birth would
inconvenience our career, educational, or social goals; and those whose
medical needs in old age threaten our economic prosperity by consuming our
limited financial resources. If we want our members to understand that God
values every human life for its own sake, then we must consciously and
intentionally teach our members these things, and confront them with the
need to reject the perspective of the prevailing culture.
Such a teaching program will have to begin with
the youngest children, teaching them that God loves and cherishes them,
and that He desires them to love and cherish one another. As our children
grow and become more exposed to the steady diet of violence and
selfishness that the media promotes, we must teach them to be
other-oriented, to serve and care for those in need. We must get them
involved in activities where they can actively serve and care for others.
We must teach our youth to understand the temptations of their sexuality
in order to care for their own bodies. We must teach our young adults how
to respond to one another so they will learn not to view the members of
the opposite sex as a means to the fulfillment of their own pleasure. We
must teach them about God's gift of marriage and how we may live in this
holy estate in a God-pleasing way. We need to equip parents of young
children to be the primary teachers of godly values and the Chrstian
faith. We need to help middle-aged adults understand the issues before
they are forced to make hard decisions about the medical treatment of
their elderly parents. Finally, we need to help our older members prepare
to die joyfully in Christ. In short, the church must consciously and
intentionally teach all of our members, young and old, how to face the
hardships of temptation, selfishness, age, disease, and death so they
might treasure the gift of life in Christ.
God's people will not learn these things unless
the church teaches them and the church will not teach them by accident.
Our congregations must plan to do so intentionally and continually.
A Plan to Care
As important as it is, the teaching ministry is insufficient to
make our churches true pro-life ministries. Pro-life ministries not only
help people understand pro-life ideas, they help them do pro-life things.
At the heart of a real pro-life congregational ministry must be a plan to
translate commitment into action.
When Scripture talks about Christians loving
their neighbor, it is not just talking about having a certain attitude
toward them; it is talking about doing things for them. Christ did not
demonstrate His love for us by sitting in heaven and talking about it; He
did something: He became man to die on a cross for us. When the Good
Samaritan encountered the man injured beside the road he did not just wish
him well, he cared for him. God reminds us of this principle through the
Apostle James (2:15-16): "If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily
food, and one of you says to them, 'Go in peace; keep warm and eat your
fill,' and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of
that?" If James were here today, addressing the life-ministries of our
congregations, he might say that if we see a woman under pressure to kill
her preborn child or an elderly person with infirmities contemplating
suicide, and we say to them, "You should cherish God's gift of life," but
do nothing to help them with the concrete problems responsible for their
despair, what good is that?
To be pro-life means to care for those women and
families in life-crises. At a minimum the life ministries of our
congregations should have a plan to help the women of our congregations
and the women of our communities who find themselves in financial or
social situations in which they are tempted to kill their preborn children
in order to escape from what they perceive to be their problem. In the
past many of our congregations did this by supporting orphanage
ministries. More recently others have promoted caring pregnancy centers,
either alone or in conjunction with other congregations.
Similarly, our congregations need to be havens of
compassion and real, meaningful aid to those who are facing crises in
times of illness and death, particularly for the elderly. In the years to
come our members will be under increasing financial and social pressure to
succumb to the swelling tide of the cultural forces in favor of
physician-assisted suicide. The proponents of euthanasia and
physician-assisted suicide argue that in an era of increasing demand for
always-limited health care resources, it is not only morally acceptable,
but a practical necessity to eliminate those whose consumption of
society's resources exceeds their contribution to society's welfare. How
will we care for our elderly with failing health when the insurance runs
out and the government programs are insufficient to meet the need? If we
are really pro-life, we will. In the meantime, many of our congregations
already contain families with members who need assistance caring for an
elderly relative who is infirm. Whether through organizing volunteer
efforts or programs such as the parish nurse, we have to find ways to
translate our pro-life theology into real life-promoting action in our
churches.
Providing help to those in a life crisis is only
the beginning of a pro-life caring ministry. Among the members of most of
our congregations are women who have had abortions and men who have
encouraged or pressured women to do so. Often these women and these men
live with the burden of the guilt of this unconfessed sin. Either they
defend their actions and refuse to face their sin or, convicted by the
Holy Spirit of their fault, they struggle to deal with the guilt and the
shame of what they have done. In either case, God has healing for them.
Unfortunately too often the church withholds God's healing by failing to
bring these issues into the open. We pretend that these things do not
happen among us, and our pretense keeps us from helping and counseling
women and men who are suffering from the trauma and guilt arising from
past abortions in which they have been involved.
A Plan to Witness
Lutherans understand that the mission of the Church is the
proclamation of the Gospel and the making of disciples (Matthew 28). It is
not the mission of the Church to try to force society to conform to God's
Word apart from faith in Christ. We recognize that God created civil
authority as a means of providing the welfare of a fallen mankind. Its
God-given task is the preservation of life and order for the good of all
(Romans 13:1; 1 Peter 2:13). Christians are bound to obey the government
(Matthew 22:21 and parallels; Romans 13:4; 1 Peter 2:13-14), even an
unjust and unrighteous government, as long as it does not attempt to force
them to disobey God.
However, Christians also have other obligations:
the obligation to work for the welfare of the land in which God has placed
us (Jeremiah 29), the obligation to care for our neighbor (Matthew
25:34-40 and elsewhere), and the obligation to speak God's truth in love
(Ephesians 4:15). In a democracy, in which every individual citizen has
the opportunity and the responsibility to participate in the process of
governing, the making of law, and the establishment of national policy,
Christians, with their understanding of what is good shaped by the
teachings of Christ, will hold their governments accountable for promoting
policies that do evil rather than good. They must work within the
democratic process to ensure that government fulfills God's intention in
creating civil authority. And, speaking the truth in love, they must
promote policies that care for those in need and condemn government
actions that lead to the harm of the innocent and the weak.
Christians do this as they fulfill their
individual responsibility as citizens. The Church's responsibility is to
teach Christians these things, not to attempt to fulfill the vocation of
citizen on behalf of the individual Christian. Pro-life congregations need
to plan to help Christians understand their role as citizens and their
responsibility to work for laws that protect the weakest and most
endangered of their neighbors: the preborn, elderly people with
infirmities, and people with mental disabilities. The Church as a whole
must speak up in defense of these when the civil authority fails to
protect them, and individual Christians must consider this issue above
every other concern when evaluating the fitness of a candidate for public
office. In this way both the Church as a whole and each individual
Christian will be a witness for life in our society.
It is not enough for a church body to believe
pro-life things if it fails to take pro-life actions. Given the pressures
of our culture to compromise for the sake of political harmony, the
promised gains of medical science, our own financial welfare, and the
environment, no church can continue to be pro-life for more than one more
generation if it is unwilling to translate its theology into action. Time
and our culture are against us. Let us be on God's side and teach His
Word, care for those in need, and bear public witness to the value of
life, and we shall have the comfort of knowing that He is on our side.
This article is available in booklet form from LFL.
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