Pro-Life Commitment
As executive director of the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod (LCMS) Office of Government Information 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 newborn 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:
- a plan to teach the faith;
- a plan to care for people in need; and
- 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 a 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 Christian 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. The God-given task of civil authority 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. It is not enough for a church body to believe pro-life things if it fails to take pro-life actions.
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.