Friday, December 15, 2017
Thursday, December 14, 2017
Wednesday, December 13, 2017
Saturday, May 13, 2017
Every Lone Ranger Needs a Posse
NOTE: This is an article originally written for Discipleship Journal, an evangelical magazine. It never ran, so I'm running it here. All photos used to accompany this article are in the public domain and were found on https://commons.wikimedia.org.
==================================
By Sean Taylor
Geoff was perhaps the most irritating person I’d ever met. Not only that, he quickly became the most antagonizing person I’ve ever tried to live my faith in front of and share my faith with on a one-on-one basis.
For starters, Geoff wasn’t just an agnostic. He was a well-read, articulate, and highly intelligent agnostic, the kind who could make first-year theology students run screaming for the clichéd hills. And he remained just as adamant about trying to convince me I was an idiot for believing inGod as I was to convince him he was missing out by not believing. For nearly two years we went back and forth in the copy room we shared with two other workers, listening and debating, often doing our best not to let conversations degenerate into petty arguments—often failing—neither of us swaying the other.
So why didn’t I quit, just give up and write him off?
Because of Cassandra, or San as her friends called her. San was my mission partner in prayer, in encouragement, in active sharing of my faith, and in accountability to keep me from becoming un-Christlike in my zeal to help Geoff come to faith. Simply put, San was part of a group that “had my back” when I needed it. Without San’s help and partnership, my time spent with Geoff could have—and probably would have—been much less effective and Christ-focused.
There were others besides San—Todd, Dan, Tim, my wife, my pastor. Although we never formally dubbed ourselves an evangelism support group or held regular meetings, we learned several lessons about not going it alone in the Great Commission. It was the support of this “posse” that helped me be ready even when I was alone with Geoff or others with whom I shared my faith.
It was a lesson learned from the example of Jesus. While it’s often spiritually romantic to think of Jesus as the lone religious rebel, turning the world on its head, we can’t forget that He spent His entire ministry surrounded by a group of friends. Peter, James, and John formed His closest group, followed by the rest of the disciples, and then there remained the group of 72 others who apparently also dedicated their lives to following Him around. While Jesus was a unique person, His ministry was characterized by a network of group support.
Jesus never wore a black mask
Jesus is often labeled with various job titles for His time on Earth. We talk about Him as a pastor, a roaming healer, a traveling preacher, a religious scholar, a spiritual rebel, a missionary, or even a church planter, but He was never primarily any of those things, according to Alan Huesing, strategist for Youth Mission Education for the Southern Baptist Convention’s North American Mission Board. In that role, Alan bears the responsibility for starting and strengthening mission and evangelism support groups for students in local churches.
“Jesus was never a pastor like His brother James,” he says. “He wasn't a church planter like Paul or a missionary to another culture like Philip. Although Jesus personally led several people to salvation, He was no mass evangelist like his cousin John the Baptizer. Occasionally He fed, healed and restored physical life to needy people, but He clearly did not want to be known as an administrator of social services. Jesus left the Christian book-writing contracts to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. He preferred to delegate baptizing, ordaining and conferring of degrees to others. Jesus never had a ministry through music. He would have laughed out loud at the thought of being a denominational worker like me.”
What Jesus did was invest His life in 12 men to train them, equip them and model for them how to do the mission He was going to eventually turn over to them. Everything else—the preaching, the healing, the run-ins with religious leaders—was icing on the proverbial cake. His focus fixed on those men and getting them ready for His plan for them. He began—to put it in blatantly corporate terminology—by assembling a team and giving them not only the resource of Himself but of each other. For their “field training,” He even sent them out in groups of two, not alone. And when they arrived in a new location to do the work, one of His first commands instructed them to find some folks to support them. If they couldn’t, the next command told them to split and hit the road for another town.
So, why do we so often treat evangelism as something that must be done as a Lone Ranger?
“I believe time commitment is the main reason,” says Scott Overby of Morningview Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Scott leads a group that strives not only to do ministry projects but also to hold each other accountable for verbally sharing the reason for the ministry.
“Most people already feel overwhelmed with everyday life and just find it hard to commit to another person,” he says. “Unfortunately this is a weakness, for I believe just as Christ traveled with His disciples and even had a few a little closer to Him, we too should have that. Having a support group is more important than most realize. I think of the model Jesus gave us where He sent the disciples out two by two. He did this for a reason. He knew we needed encouragement and support.”
Retiring the Lone Rangers
While evangelical soloists must often face discouragement and rocky soil alone, those involved in a group can look to one another for prayer support, encouragement, accountability and help each other discover and use spiritual gifts.
Lone Ranger Christians, however, can be in for “a difficult road when it comes to sharing their faith,” says Tony Whittaker, editor of Web Evangelism Guide (www.gospelcom.net/guide/). “Christians are not islands, and we should always be accountable to someone for what we are doing and how we are doing it,” he says. “Maybe we don't realize the dangers. Certainly, there are forms of evangelism that can be done very much as individuals rather than as part of a team. Yet the Bible indicates that any evangelism is spiritual warfare, and so we should expect opposition and need prayer.”
Accountability is at the heart of Scott Overby’s group. “Ongoing commitment to one another is crucial,” he says. “I believe Satan will use discouragement in any form to steal the joy from a person. Through a commitment to one another, the right to accountability is established. You now can ask your partner how things are going and get very ‘in your face’ if need be. Through accountability, you can encourage or rebuke whatever is necessary. The common goal of serving the Lord can be the reminder for any man to draw back closer where one’s relationship with the Lord may be lacking.”
With the advent of Internet chat rooms and e-mail, accountability no longer necessarily means a group of people must meet together in a room in the church basement on whatever night the church isn’t hosting children’s activities.
“The Web makes it seriously easy to keep in touch with prayer partners or mentors and support each person,” says Tony Whittaker. He’s even learning lessons from his non-church projects on how to better incorporate Internet communication into his evangelistic endeavors. “A secular heritage preservation project I know is incredible. They take the trouble to do a daily email roundup of progress. It really makes me feel I belong to it.”
While prayer, accountability, and encouragement may often become the highlights of a group, helping each member find and use his or her spiritual gifts is perhaps one of the most crucial responsibilities if a group wants to remain focused on spreading the good news.
“One of the most important things to deal with in a group,” Scott Overby says, “is plugging in all the people involved, helping them discover their uniqueness and how God has designed them, helping them make the connection between who they are and how God wants to use that for the kingdom.”
Often God will use members in ways they don’t expect, as Scott discovered during a recent mission project. “One of the guys serving that day had a brother who was unchurched and unsaved who wanted to help. It turned out that the whole day was not about helping this poor widow get her house ‘warm, safe and dry.’ It was about sitting on the roof of the house and helping another brother share our faith with this lost soul. He did not receive Christ that day, but we know our job was to be faithful and share out of the overflow of our own lives. His comments got back to us a few days later. He said we were the most real people he had ever worked with, that what we were doing was really making a difference, and he wanted to be a part of it.”
The Dangers in Them There Hills
“The enemy does not like people doing evangelism,” says Tony Whittaker. “Especially effective evangelism. So Christians doing it will be attacked—of course at their weakest spot.”
That’s where having group support can be a strong help, but be warned—being in a group also comes with its own dangers. For example, a group can take up a lot of time. “The speed bumps may come in inconsistent attendance or participation. Another may be overcommitting time to the project or ministry instead of to the number one ministry—your family,” says Overby, whose work involves him primarily with other men.
It’s also not uncommon to have a strong, energetic start that leads to a more leisurely pace or perhaps even a complete stop because of spiritual burnout. Overby cautions, “This is a marathon walk with the Lord, not a 100-yard sprint.”
Burnout and time consumption are not the only potential pitfalls, according to Overby. “Another caution is confidentiality,” he says. “You must find or have the Lord direct you to the right relationships so that trust can be established.”
Moses Catan and Lorenzo Cosio, leaders with the Gen Rev ministry (www.genrev.net), echo the importance of maintaining trust. Without trust, a group designed to deal with intimate accountability regarding evangelism can quickly become superficial and ineffective.
“One thing that must be guarded very well within a support group,” they say, “is that trust is not violated. This must be guarded well—by seeing to it that everyone involved lives a life of integrity, and to correct and discipline those who are not—or else the teamwork simply corrodes. Distrust and suspicion will only breed rivalry and unhealthy environments.”
An unforeseen danger for a group, ironically, can be success, warn Catan and Cosio. “When GenRev goes on campus concert tours,” they say, “they are usually received by high school and college students very well. Sometimes, they are even treated like celebrities, with teens screaming and asking for autographs. Belonging to a support group drills the ‘sense of mission’ in them, that this is all about proclaiming Christ and helping transform youth culture through the gospel messages, along with the message that this is a ‘team effort,’ with no single member having a right to claim singular responsibility for success. In the light of successful missions like this, the support group instills focus on the team—a focus based on Luke 17:10—that we are merely unprofitable servants doing what we are obliged to do.”
So, what happened to Geoff?
While San and I invested a lot of time in modeling for and sharing with Geoff what it meant to become and be a Christian, Geoff never acknowledged his need for a Savior. Still, long after he left the job, San and I continued to pray for him and each other and hold each other accountable for telling people about Christ. Perhaps Geoff was our “trial by fire,” as the saying goes. Or perhaps something we said took root—or will take root—later.
Regardless, I still pray for Geoff, a skill and discipline I learned from the time San and I prayed together, and in almost every accountability group I’ve been a part of since, I’ve asked the members to add Geoff to their prayer list and stay on me about praying for him. I hope to one day have the opportunity again to ask him if he’s been mulling over any of the conversations we used to have years ago in that cramped copy room.
And I know that I have San and my other support partners to thank for the change in me that led to becoming that type of person.
==================================
Tips for maintaining an evangelism support group
Alan Huesing’s job requires him to organize and equip evangelism support groups all over the United States and Canada. As such, he has quickly learned quite a few things about how that’s done. Here are some tips from Alan for maintaining and strengthening your group:
He also provides these cautions and warnings to help your group stay on track:
==================================
Geoff was perhaps the most irritating person I’d ever met. Not only that, he quickly became the most antagonizing person I’ve ever tried to live my faith in front of and share my faith with on a one-on-one basis.
For starters, Geoff wasn’t just an agnostic. He was a well-read, articulate, and highly intelligent agnostic, the kind who could make first-year theology students run screaming for the clichéd hills. And he remained just as adamant about trying to convince me I was an idiot for believing inGod as I was to convince him he was missing out by not believing. For nearly two years we went back and forth in the copy room we shared with two other workers, listening and debating, often doing our best not to let conversations degenerate into petty arguments—often failing—neither of us swaying the other.
So why didn’t I quit, just give up and write him off?
Because of Cassandra, or San as her friends called her. San was my mission partner in prayer, in encouragement, in active sharing of my faith, and in accountability to keep me from becoming un-Christlike in my zeal to help Geoff come to faith. Simply put, San was part of a group that “had my back” when I needed it. Without San’s help and partnership, my time spent with Geoff could have—and probably would have—been much less effective and Christ-focused.
There were others besides San—Todd, Dan, Tim, my wife, my pastor. Although we never formally dubbed ourselves an evangelism support group or held regular meetings, we learned several lessons about not going it alone in the Great Commission. It was the support of this “posse” that helped me be ready even when I was alone with Geoff or others with whom I shared my faith.
It was a lesson learned from the example of Jesus. While it’s often spiritually romantic to think of Jesus as the lone religious rebel, turning the world on its head, we can’t forget that He spent His entire ministry surrounded by a group of friends. Peter, James, and John formed His closest group, followed by the rest of the disciples, and then there remained the group of 72 others who apparently also dedicated their lives to following Him around. While Jesus was a unique person, His ministry was characterized by a network of group support.
Jesus never wore a black mask
Jesus is often labeled with various job titles for His time on Earth. We talk about Him as a pastor, a roaming healer, a traveling preacher, a religious scholar, a spiritual rebel, a missionary, or even a church planter, but He was never primarily any of those things, according to Alan Huesing, strategist for Youth Mission Education for the Southern Baptist Convention’s North American Mission Board. In that role, Alan bears the responsibility for starting and strengthening mission and evangelism support groups for students in local churches.“Jesus was never a pastor like His brother James,” he says. “He wasn't a church planter like Paul or a missionary to another culture like Philip. Although Jesus personally led several people to salvation, He was no mass evangelist like his cousin John the Baptizer. Occasionally He fed, healed and restored physical life to needy people, but He clearly did not want to be known as an administrator of social services. Jesus left the Christian book-writing contracts to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. He preferred to delegate baptizing, ordaining and conferring of degrees to others. Jesus never had a ministry through music. He would have laughed out loud at the thought of being a denominational worker like me.”
What Jesus did was invest His life in 12 men to train them, equip them and model for them how to do the mission He was going to eventually turn over to them. Everything else—the preaching, the healing, the run-ins with religious leaders—was icing on the proverbial cake. His focus fixed on those men and getting them ready for His plan for them. He began—to put it in blatantly corporate terminology—by assembling a team and giving them not only the resource of Himself but of each other. For their “field training,” He even sent them out in groups of two, not alone. And when they arrived in a new location to do the work, one of His first commands instructed them to find some folks to support them. If they couldn’t, the next command told them to split and hit the road for another town.
So, why do we so often treat evangelism as something that must be done as a Lone Ranger?
“I believe time commitment is the main reason,” says Scott Overby of Morningview Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Scott leads a group that strives not only to do ministry projects but also to hold each other accountable for verbally sharing the reason for the ministry.
“Most people already feel overwhelmed with everyday life and just find it hard to commit to another person,” he says. “Unfortunately this is a weakness, for I believe just as Christ traveled with His disciples and even had a few a little closer to Him, we too should have that. Having a support group is more important than most realize. I think of the model Jesus gave us where He sent the disciples out two by two. He did this for a reason. He knew we needed encouragement and support.”
Retiring the Lone Rangers
While evangelical soloists must often face discouragement and rocky soil alone, those involved in a group can look to one another for prayer support, encouragement, accountability and help each other discover and use spiritual gifts.Lone Ranger Christians, however, can be in for “a difficult road when it comes to sharing their faith,” says Tony Whittaker, editor of Web Evangelism Guide (www.gospelcom.net/guide/). “Christians are not islands, and we should always be accountable to someone for what we are doing and how we are doing it,” he says. “Maybe we don't realize the dangers. Certainly, there are forms of evangelism that can be done very much as individuals rather than as part of a team. Yet the Bible indicates that any evangelism is spiritual warfare, and so we should expect opposition and need prayer.”
Accountability is at the heart of Scott Overby’s group. “Ongoing commitment to one another is crucial,” he says. “I believe Satan will use discouragement in any form to steal the joy from a person. Through a commitment to one another, the right to accountability is established. You now can ask your partner how things are going and get very ‘in your face’ if need be. Through accountability, you can encourage or rebuke whatever is necessary. The common goal of serving the Lord can be the reminder for any man to draw back closer where one’s relationship with the Lord may be lacking.”
With the advent of Internet chat rooms and e-mail, accountability no longer necessarily means a group of people must meet together in a room in the church basement on whatever night the church isn’t hosting children’s activities.
“The Web makes it seriously easy to keep in touch with prayer partners or mentors and support each person,” says Tony Whittaker. He’s even learning lessons from his non-church projects on how to better incorporate Internet communication into his evangelistic endeavors. “A secular heritage preservation project I know is incredible. They take the trouble to do a daily email roundup of progress. It really makes me feel I belong to it.”
While prayer, accountability, and encouragement may often become the highlights of a group, helping each member find and use his or her spiritual gifts is perhaps one of the most crucial responsibilities if a group wants to remain focused on spreading the good news.
“One of the most important things to deal with in a group,” Scott Overby says, “is plugging in all the people involved, helping them discover their uniqueness and how God has designed them, helping them make the connection between who they are and how God wants to use that for the kingdom.”
Often God will use members in ways they don’t expect, as Scott discovered during a recent mission project. “One of the guys serving that day had a brother who was unchurched and unsaved who wanted to help. It turned out that the whole day was not about helping this poor widow get her house ‘warm, safe and dry.’ It was about sitting on the roof of the house and helping another brother share our faith with this lost soul. He did not receive Christ that day, but we know our job was to be faithful and share out of the overflow of our own lives. His comments got back to us a few days later. He said we were the most real people he had ever worked with, that what we were doing was really making a difference, and he wanted to be a part of it.”
The Dangers in Them There Hills
“The enemy does not like people doing evangelism,” says Tony Whittaker. “Especially effective evangelism. So Christians doing it will be attacked—of course at their weakest spot.”That’s where having group support can be a strong help, but be warned—being in a group also comes with its own dangers. For example, a group can take up a lot of time. “The speed bumps may come in inconsistent attendance or participation. Another may be overcommitting time to the project or ministry instead of to the number one ministry—your family,” says Overby, whose work involves him primarily with other men.
It’s also not uncommon to have a strong, energetic start that leads to a more leisurely pace or perhaps even a complete stop because of spiritual burnout. Overby cautions, “This is a marathon walk with the Lord, not a 100-yard sprint.”
Burnout and time consumption are not the only potential pitfalls, according to Overby. “Another caution is confidentiality,” he says. “You must find or have the Lord direct you to the right relationships so that trust can be established.”
Moses Catan and Lorenzo Cosio, leaders with the Gen Rev ministry (www.genrev.net), echo the importance of maintaining trust. Without trust, a group designed to deal with intimate accountability regarding evangelism can quickly become superficial and ineffective.
“One thing that must be guarded very well within a support group,” they say, “is that trust is not violated. This must be guarded well—by seeing to it that everyone involved lives a life of integrity, and to correct and discipline those who are not—or else the teamwork simply corrodes. Distrust and suspicion will only breed rivalry and unhealthy environments.”
An unforeseen danger for a group, ironically, can be success, warn Catan and Cosio. “When GenRev goes on campus concert tours,” they say, “they are usually received by high school and college students very well. Sometimes, they are even treated like celebrities, with teens screaming and asking for autographs. Belonging to a support group drills the ‘sense of mission’ in them, that this is all about proclaiming Christ and helping transform youth culture through the gospel messages, along with the message that this is a ‘team effort,’ with no single member having a right to claim singular responsibility for success. In the light of successful missions like this, the support group instills focus on the team—a focus based on Luke 17:10—that we are merely unprofitable servants doing what we are obliged to do.”
So, what happened to Geoff?
While San and I invested a lot of time in modeling for and sharing with Geoff what it meant to become and be a Christian, Geoff never acknowledged his need for a Savior. Still, long after he left the job, San and I continued to pray for him and each other and hold each other accountable for telling people about Christ. Perhaps Geoff was our “trial by fire,” as the saying goes. Or perhaps something we said took root—or will take root—later.
Regardless, I still pray for Geoff, a skill and discipline I learned from the time San and I prayed together, and in almost every accountability group I’ve been a part of since, I’ve asked the members to add Geoff to their prayer list and stay on me about praying for him. I hope to one day have the opportunity again to ask him if he’s been mulling over any of the conversations we used to have years ago in that cramped copy room.
And I know that I have San and my other support partners to thank for the change in me that led to becoming that type of person.
==================================
Tips for maintaining an evangelism support group
Alan Huesing’s job requires him to organize and equip evangelism support groups all over the United States and Canada. As such, he has quickly learned quite a few things about how that’s done. Here are some tips from Alan for maintaining and strengthening your group:
- Write (and sign) a group commitment and/or mission statement.
- Agree on a daily time to pray for each other.
- Maintain a group prayer journal with prayer concerns about others—especially lost people.
- Select a specific mission field to focus on as a group... like family, neighbors, colleagues at work, etc.
- Help each other to discover ways to reach members of your mission field for Christ.
- Work together to build relationships and trust with people you are seeking to reach.
- Help each other discover gifts and talents for ministry.
- Share with others what you see God doing in and through you.
- Work together to disciple new believers.
- Stay closely involved and connected with your local church.
- Evaluate your work together according to your mission statement.
He also provides these cautions and warnings to help your group stay on track:
- Don’t let your group be simply one more study or discussion group.
- Don’t spend more time with people in your support group than with people on your mission field.
- Don’t forget your mission.
- Don’t let your support group replace the role of the church in your life.
- Don’t compare yourself to others in your group.
- Don’t use prayer as a religious "ritual."
- Don’t let your meetings together get stuck in a rut.
- Don’t be a "closed" group.
- Don’t be inconsistent in meeting or praying together.
- Don’t forget that prayer powers and guides your mission.
- Don’t neglect opportunities to serve others and build relationships.
- Don’t underestimate how God wants to use you.
- Don’t stop or give up.
- Don’t be hypocritical.
- Don’t let others in the group drift away.
Friday, March 25, 2016
[Link] Good Friday Conversation with Jesus
I'm conflicted every year on this day. On one hand, I like contemplating what You accomplished on this day. On the other, I'd like to skip over it to Easter morning. I know, though, that there'd be no Easter without this day, so I need to consider--try to feel--what my part was in Your crucifixion.
I like to think of myself as not all that sinful. As soon as I entertain that notion, I'm deceiving myself and in need of another rehearsing of my Lenten prayer. The truth, even if I can't get in touch with all the feels, is that I am sinful. I was sinful in my mother's womb, sinful from the day I first drew breath, doomed like all mankind from the moment Eve and Adam bit into that apple.
Yet it's not just inherited. I have willfully done what I knew was wrong. I still do. I have gone my own way. In spite of what I knew, I chose. Mine was just one of billions of decisions like that which made your death necessary.
Forgive me for being so flippant. It's hard for me because for as long as I've been aware of my sin, I've been aware of Your offer of salvation. I accepted it on its face as soon as my mind would allow me to comprehend the gift. Having accepted it so young, though, is like getting a gift from someone that I didn't fully understand how desperately I needed it. It's hard to be appropriately grateful because I don't know exactly what I've been saved from.
Read the full article: http://www.bluetablemusings.com/2016/03/a-good-friday-conversation-with-jesus.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BlueTableMusings+%28Blue+Table+Musings%29
Wednesday, March 16, 2016
What Books Influenced You?
What books have had the greatest impact in making you the person you are today?
I
get asked this from time to time, and I always love to talk about the
books that have influenced me enough to make me, well... me.
The Books that Make the Believer:
Making Real What I Already Believe by John Fischer helped me sort through what I thought I believed about life and faith because I'd grown up being taught it and what I actually believed about life and faith because I had lived it and experienced it.
The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis was the first book to help me see that most often the biggest obstacle to personal faith is all the "good" things we treasure more than the "best" thing, and how perhaps the greatest obstruction in the path of belief is religion itself.
A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis showed me how a man could endure great pain and come out the other side somehow both weaker and stronger and more real than before.
The Jesus I Never Knew and What's So Amazing About Grace by Philip Yancey took me back past all the cultural and church and historical baggage about Jesus and church (and Church) and helped me find out just how radical a human being he was, and an example for me to be in regards to emptying my life out in the sake and service of others.
Tangled Up in the Bible: Bob Dylan and Scripture by Michael Gilmour helped me realized that "St. Bob" and I are more alike that I thought in our ongoing love/hate relationship with the church and the very beliefs we espouse.
Messy Spirituality by Mike Yaconelli taught me that God made some of us to be bricks for the stain-glassed windows and speedbumps for the journey of faith to make the Church question itself and learn to laugh at itself far more than it questions others and judges them -- and it taught me that I'm okay with being made that way.
And most recently, God Is Disappointed in You by Mark Russell (with awesome cartoons by Shannon Wheeler) has continued to inspire me to live my seemingly heathenic life of religious faith that causes more problems than it solves and keep enjoying God's sense of humor both at me and at the world He/She/It (being beyond our mere pronouns) created.
The Books that Make the Writer:
The Adventures of Monkey by Arthur Waley taught me the thrill of reading when I was young and longed for adventures guided by words.
The Childcraft Encyclopedia: Stories and Fables introduced me to the stories of the world beyond just the legends of the Greeks and Romans.
Fox in Socks by Dr. Seuss showed me how much fun words could be, both alone and in a group.
Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and in particular "Harrison Bergeron," inspired me to never let myself get shackled creatively, damn the consequences, and to try to inspire others to lose their shackles too.
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway taught me how to write and taught me that bittersweet, not completely happy endings are the best endings for stories because we human beings learn best through them instead of happy endings that don't challenge us.
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver taught me how to be inspired by Hemingway without trying to be a clone of him when I write.
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler taught me how to bring the literary inspiration I got from Hemingway and marry it up to pulp-based, adventure storytelling.
Wednesday, March 9, 2016
What Does It Really Mean To Be Pro-Life?
My criteria for what I'm going to argue:
1. I believe life begins at conception. I believe that everything we need to become the person we will be is inside us at that point. Religiously speaking, that means I have a soul at that point. Scientifically speaking, it means genetically I can't grow up to become a chicken or a tree. It means that I'll develop a certain eye color, hair color, height, skin color, genetic predispositions, etc.
2. I believe each individual is created in the image of God and is to be treated with value and dignity -- even when and especially when they don't act like they deserve it. Putting dirt on the color blue doesn't make it less blue. It merely covers up the dignity that is intrinsically there beneath the dirt.
3. I believe physical life ends only when our brain is dead and we cease to be more than a body carrying on activities based on machinery.
4. I believe life continues beyond the point of physical death and that the soul endures.
What I'm about to say that will probably make some readers angry:
1. If you support a national or individual embracing of a campaign of violence against our political enemies (through war, murder, terrorism, etc.) then you are not pro-life. You are pro-baby and anti-enemy. In other word, if you're pro-violence in any way, you're not pro-life. You're pro-whomever you're fighting for. 2. If you EASILY choose the life of an unborn child over the life of a mother, you are not pro-life. You are pro-baby. If you are truly pro-life, the well-being and health of the mother will have the same weight and importance to you. That's not to say that you can't seek alternative options to ensure the health of the mother, but her life will not be something you value less than that of her unborn child.
3. If you support a system of capital punishment that kills a convicted felon without offering the opportunity to rehabilitate, then you are not pro-life, you are pro-baby and anti-bad guy. If you suport a system that legally destroys the lives of convicted felons in a prison system that merely institutionally reinforces the cycle of violence and locks them away without seeking to bring out their basic human dignity and look for the image of God within them and rehabilitate, then you are not pro-life. You are pro-baby and not pro-duration of the life cycle.
4. If you embrace (at worst) hatred or (at best) disdain for those who by their own actions or your own perceptions you see as your enemies, and seek to either harm them through either action (political, personal, etc.) or inaction (leave 'em be and let 'em get what's coming), you are not pro-life. You are pro-baby. You are very much anti-dignity of life except for those you choose to like.
5. If you protest the funeral or anyone to draw attention to your "pro-life" cause, at the expense of the dignity of another individual's last opportunity to give his or her family and friends the value of a dignified goodbye, you are not pro-life. You are an asshole who is more concerned with politics and pet issues than you are human beings. When anything comes before love for all other human beings, you are NOT pro-life.6. If you are truly pro-life, you are concerned with the welfare, safety, health, and mortality rates of people all over the globe due to political climates that enslave, destroy, debilitate, etc.; poverty, economic woes; etc. If you can turn a deaf ear because it isn't happening in your country, then you're not pro-life. You're not pro-baby. You're just pro-American-baby.
7. If you are truly pro-life, you value life, period. In my case, that's from conception to long after death. You value the human being's dignity throughout that span, and you look for the image of God created within him or her, regardless of how his or her actions may have placed him at odds with your view of moral rights and wrongs.
8. If you are truly pro-life, you love humanity and the human experience.
9. If you are truly pro-life, you love fetuses, you love newborns, you love children, you love teenagers, you love young adults, you love regular adults, you love old adults.
10. If you are truly pro-life, you love those who agree with you and those who don't, you love your friends and your family AND your enemies.
11. If you are truly pro-life, you seek to affirm that all individuals are capable of being redeemed and/or rehabilitated (even while acknowledging that those two aren't always necessarily the same thing.
12. If you are truly pro-life, you love good people and bad people, law-abiding and law-breaking, saviors and destroyers.13. If you are truly pro-life, you understand conceptually that society may require death in certain situations because of politics or warfare or even public safety, but you can never willingly embrace the enjoyment of another person's death, love for killing or wanting to have people be no longer living, or feel vindicated that some enemy is dead and no longer a problem to you.
14. If you are truly pro-life, then, in the words of John Donne, every man's death diminishes you, and you regret and feel them deeply.
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A caveat: I'm not saying it's not okay to be pro-baby. Be pro-baby. I'm sure as a political issue, those looking to turn over Rowe v. Wade welcome all the pro-baby folks they can find. But don't call yourself pro-life as if life only equates to conception. If you want to be pro-life, embrace a love of life and lives for the full human lifespan. Being pro-life is not a mere political tag. It's not a sign posted outside a voting booth. It's an all-encompassing way of seeing humanity through the eyes of the God who created it, or at least it's a way of trying to see humanity that way, as best we can in our own failing whoring, imperfect, more often than not unloving way.
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