You could say that … but probably not 3 times really fast!

Anyway, great story in World Magazine on the Battle for Babies at Biola.  Link to World Magazine story here.  Link to original video here.

Excerpts:

She always considered herself pro-life, but after watching a video of an actual abortion earlier this year, she realized its horror and decided to do something about it.

***

[CBR Executive Director Gregg] Cunningham, pointing to social reforms such as slavery, child labor, and the civil rights movement, says public opinion changes only after people see images depicting the reality of the injustices. He says Christians have been overly concerned with not offending people, and he says schools like Biola help “Planned Parenthood hide the horror of abortion. … We’re losing ground until Christian colleges are willing to get serious and provide systematic leadership in defense of life.”

***

But when the fall semester begins on August 28, CBR is planning to greet returning students with large abortion posters at every campus entrance, along with aerial images pulled by planes flying over the university. Cunningham’s goal is for Christian schools to be radically pro-life, with programs and majors devoted to training activists: “It’s not going to happen until some china gets broken. We don’t wish it to be that way, but some china will get broken.”

For more, link to full story here.

Christian leaders, including the pro-life ones, have 10 people/day coming at them with some kind of agenda.  We pro-lifers are just another one of the 10.  For just that one day.  By the end of the week, we are forgotten and so are the children and moms we represent.  Unless we can create the kind of tension/conflict that forces many more pro-life Christian leaders to think about abortion — and hopefully act to end it — babies and moms will continue to be ignored.

Please pray that God will open doors for the kind of constructive tension/conflict that brings growth.  And pray that God will raise up Christians with the courage to walk through those doors.  To help create more growth-inducing tension at Christian schools, link here.

Maggie Egger

CBR Project Director Maggie Egger shares a story from her recent GAP excursion to the University of South Florida

What about rape?

She was staring intently at the pictures when I approached her and asked what she thought of abortion.  She said “I’ve never really thought about it.  I don’t really have an opinion.”

I’d heard that so many times already that I already had my next question prepared.  “Well, can you maybe think of a hypothetical situation where you would think it was okay?”

She thought for a moment and then said, “In the case of rape, I think it would be up to the woman what she want’s to do.  I guess that would be the only time I would say it would be okay if that’s what she decided.”

I then gave her this hypothetical rape situation:  A married woman has consensual sex with her husband on Monday and then is violently raped on Tuesday.  She discovers she’s pregnant.  After discussing it all with her husband, they decide to continue with the pregnancy because there’s a possibility that the baby is her husband’s.  She gives birth, and then has a paternity test done.  They find out that the father is actually the rapist’s and not her husband’s.

I asked “Would it then be okay for her to kill the month-old infant?”

She replied, “Of course not!”

Then I countered, “So, what is the difference between the month-old infant and the 6-week embryo that makes it okay to kill one and not the other?”

That lead us to a discussion of fetal development and when life begins, as well as the harmful effects that abortion has on women, especially women who have already suffered the trauma of rape.

The conversation was slowing down a bit and she went back to looking at the pictures in front of her.  So I just came out and asked her again, “So what do you think about abortion?”

She paused for a minute, looked at the pictures again, looked at me and said, “Ya know, I guess there is no good reason to do that.”

Indeed.

“Now is a bad time.”

“How can I convince my pastor to engage on abortion?”

We hear that question all the time.  We have all asked that question, and we are down to only one answer, but we’ll need help doing it.  If you will help, please contact us.

Abortion cannot be outlawed in America without the massive involvement of Christians, both individually and corporately.  Christians, however, are massively uninvolved in this struggle.  After decades of futile attempts to mobilize the church, we see tokenism at best and indifference at worst.  We and many of our pro-life colleagues have tried in vain to establish a dialogue with countless Christian leaders who have ignored or rejected our requests for meetings.  The few who would meet with us have often temporized interminably or explicitly refused to adopt effective pro-life programs.

They might say that their church is “not ready” to deal with abortion in a meaningful way.  By “meaningful,” I mean showing abortion images, like Calvary Chapel Pearl Harbor did recently.  The pastor’s willingness to simply show truth saved at least one baby that Sunday morning.  That’s what I’m talking about.  Anything less delivers babies to be killed, and we can prove it.

But most pastors don’t get to that point.  In fact, they aggressively avoid any discussion of it.  They are afraid.  Early in my pro-life career, I would contact “pro-life” pastors in Knoxville.  No more.  Here is the typical progression:

1. Pastor:  The timing is bad.   We’ve got Thanksgiving and Chistmas coming up, and we are busy with lots of stuff.  Please call back after the first of the year.
2. I’d call back.
3. Pastor:  We’ve got the Sweetheart Banquet coming up, and that’s a big deal at our church.  I’m tied up with that.  Please call back in late February.
4. I’d call back.
5. Pastor:  Our big Easter Cantata is coming up, and everybody is tied up with that.  Please call back after Easter.
6. I’d call back.
7. Pastor:  The timing is bad.  Everybody is gone for Spring Break.  We’ve got a mission trip coming up.  Folks are out of town.  Call back after that.
8. I’d call back.
9. Pastor:  It’s almost the end of the school year.  Our programs until then are set, so it’s too late to talk about abortion this year.  Please call me back at the beginning of the next school year, and we’ll do something.
10. I’d call back.
11. Pastor:  We’ve got a lot of stuff going on at the beginning of the school year.  And then it’s Fall Break soon and then Fall Festival after that.  Everybody is busy with that.  Call back after that.
12. I’d call back.
13. Pastor:  Woah!  The timing is bad.  We’ve got Thanksgiving and Chistmas coming up, and we are busy with lots of stuff.  Please call back after the first of the year.
14. I didn’t bother any more.  I’d rather be surrounded by a dozen screaming pro-aborts than to be burdened with one more apathetic and cowardly Christian “leader.”

The bottom line is this:  Babies are dying in the man’s church.  If he really cared, wouldn’t he do everything possible to save those babies’ lives?  Wouldn’t he beg every pro-life activist in this city to help him save the children in his own church?

But with your help, we can break through this apathy.  If you will help, please contact us.

The historic church response to injustice has been half-hearted and ineffective.

“Pro-life” Christian leaders routinely say abortion kills 1.2 million children every year in America, that it is a modern-day “holocaust” of epic proportions.  But has the response been anything more than ineffective half-measures, at best?  Is that a surprise?  Not if we look at how the Body of Christ responded to genocide against Jewish people and countless other crimes against humanity.  To our eternal shame, the church has often been more concerned with saving face than saving lives.  We can hear the heartbreak in the writings of reformers:

1.  What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?,  Frederick Douglass, 1852 (TeachingAmericanHistory.org):

The American church is guilty, when viewed in connection with what it is doing to uphold slavery; but it is superlatively guilty when viewed in connection with its ability to abolish slavery.  The sin of which it is guilty is one of omission as well of commission.

2.  Abolitionism and American Religion, McKivigan (Taylor and Francis, 1999):

… [E]xamination … [of evangelist Charles Grandison Finney’s] … theology and his antislavery activities reveals not only a firm commitment to abolitionism, but also a conviction that Christian indifference to slavery impeded the great work of spreading the gospel.

3.  Indifference of the Church to Child Labor Reform, Rev. John Haynes Holmes, 1910 (Sage Publications/American Academy of Political and Social Science):

… [I]t is a matter of no little surprise … to find the Church named among the forces described as antagonistic to child labor reform … [despite] what such a rich and powerful institution as the Church might do in the education and inspiration and direction of public opinion …

4.  International Handbook of Violence Research, Heitmeyer and Hagan (Springer, 2003) V. Coexisting with Violence:  The Bystanders, pp. 157 – 158:

Only a small minority of [German] Protestant Christians openly rejected the persecution of the Jews.  The weak resistance to the National Socialist persecution of the Jews was particularly apparent in the relative failure to assist Christians of Jewish descent, who, irrespective of their religious beliefs, were fully subjected to the persecutions …
* * *
… Germany’s Catholic bishops were unable to find the resolution to protest publicly against the persecution and murder of the Jews.

5.  Becoming Evil:  How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing, Jim Waller (Oxford University Press, 2002) author interview, Whitworth Today, Whitworth.edu, “Failing to Meet Christ’s Highest Ideals?”, Spring 2007, speaking of the response of religious institutions to the Holocaust, Rwandan genocide and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina:

… [G]enocidal responses include sins of omission (silence and denial) and sins of commission (accommodation and active participation in killings).  In the Holocaust, church hierarchies followed their own narrowly defined best interests …  Such interests were best advanced by silence and denial, rather than by protest or heroism.

6.  The Anthropocentric Predisposition of Revivalism, inlightoftruth.com, J. Seth Wallace, 2004:

Even recently, years after the Emancipation Proclamation, Reinhold Niebuhr urged Billy Graham to preach more about racism in a country where revivalism prospered in the midst of this great sin that was as prevalent among the “born again” as those who were not.

7.  Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King, Jr., April 16, 1963:

My Dear Fellow Clergymen:

… I have looked at the South’s beautiful churches with their lofty spires pointing heavenward.  I have beheld the impressive outlines of her massive religious education buildings.  Over and over I have found myself asking:  ‘What kind of people worship here?  Who is their God?  Where were their voices … when bruised and weary Negro men and women decided to rise from the dark dungeons …?’

8.  Message of the Month, R. C. Sproul, Ligonier Ministries, April 2007:

Of the books that I’ve written, over fifty, the one that went out of print the fastest was the book I wrote [titled] The Case Against Abortion.  … [Y]ou couldn’t give it away.  And we would ask pastors, “why won’t you use this series?”  And we heard the same answer again and again …  “We can’t do that.  It will divide our church.”  Because our churches are as divided on this question as the nation is.

The church often seems preoccupied with other matters during times of great injustice.  Like the priest and Levite in Christ’s parable of The Good Samaritan, our inclination is to focus on our own agendas.  Of course, Christians say God has called them to these priorities.  But that assumption means one of two things concerning abortion:  Either (1) God doesn’t care enough about this slaughter to call His church to make it a high ministry priority or (2) He does care but His church is ignoring His call.  The priest and Levite might well have felt pity for the beating victim, but the Good Samaritan took pity on the beating victim.  James 2:16 says, “If one of you says to him, ‘Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed,’ but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it?”

If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the truth of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at that moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Christ.  Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved; and to be steady on all the battlefield besides, is mere flight and disgrace if he flinches at that point.  (Martin Luther,1483-1546).

CBR volunteers show what “family planning” looks like to NEA delegates.

On Monday morning, July 1st, delegates of the National Education Association’s (NEA) annual assembly were in for an eyeful as they made their way to the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta.

CBR volunteers from all over Georgia stood at the intersection of Andrew Young International Boulevard and Marietta Street with CBR’s handheld “Choice” signs, which depict images of early-term aborted fetuses. Our group’s positions were adjusted throughout the morning to adapt to changing traffic patterns.

CBR was working alongside other pro life organizations, including Georgia Right to Life (GRTL) and Pro Life Educators of America (PLEA), to bring a message to the NEA: adopt a neutral position on abortion.

“We are not asking the NEA delegates to do a one-eighty and change our union’s abortion position and activism to being pro-life,” said Bob Pawson, Director of PLEA and  NEA member, “We are asking that our union be verifiably neutral and totally non-involved regarding abortion. And stop hiding their advocacy behind euphemistic language such as ‘reproductive freedom’ or ‘all methods of family planning,’” Pawson said.

CBR works to effectively dismantle such euphemisms. While other pro life advocates used text signs to exhort the NEA to neutralize it’s pro-abortion position, the graphic pictures we used showed exactly what certain methods of “reproductive freedom” and “family planning” do to unborn children (and future students).

The Truth Truck made several rounds in front of the CNN News Center in Atlanta.

NEA members were also shown the true meaning of these genteel phrases by billboard-sized abortion images on CBR’s “Truth Truck.” Our truck made rounds in the Georgia World Congress Center vicinity throughout the mornings and afternoons of July 1 and July 2, insuring that as many NEA delegates as possible would be exposed to the brutality that their union’s official resolution currently supports.

“Normally, in America’s news media, when citizens hear or read press reports about teacher unions and picketing, it is the union DOING the picketing; usually demanding more money. This event is one of those unusual instances in which the NEA Teacher Union is the TARGET OF PICKETING; ironically, by NEA members, taxpayer-parents, and students. The very constituencies which the NEA leadership touts itself as supposedly serving,” said Pawson.

While we received some of the usual irate responses, several passersby paused to observe and ask questions about the images. One driver, a young African-American woman, rolled down her window to address one of our volunteers when stopped at the traffic light:

“Excuse me, is that a real picture?”

“Yes, it is”

“Awe.” She was audibly saddened by what she saw.

Much conversation was overheard among pedestrians regarding abortion and the NEA’s stance on abortion. While some doubted that the NEA took a pro abortion stance, others indicated that they were previously unaware of the fact before encountering the message being shown to them. Pro life NEA members in particular expressed appreciation of CBR’s message and our assistance in reforming the teacher’s union.

For more on the NEA’s position, please see http://www.grtl.org/?q=NEA-pro-abortion-tendencies

Submitted by: Lincoln Brandenburg

Did you see The Alamo (2004), starring Dennis Quaid and Billy Bob Thornton?  Check it out; it’s a great movie.  Thornton’s portrayal of US Congressman David Crockett is stellar.

When the Mexican army arrived on 23 February 1836, the Alamo defenders numbered only 150 men.  Crockett said to Lt. Col. William Travis, “We’re gonna need more men.”  Later, when he stood on the wall and saw that the army surrounding the Alamo was 1500 strong and growing, he revised his estimate, “We’re gonna need a lot more men.”

Pro-life students on campus are outnumbered and surrounded, just like the Texians at the Alamo.  Their enemies are principalities, powers, and rulers of darkness (Ephesians 6:12).  Opposing artillery are lies that Satan uses to destroy children, mothers, and families.  His foot-soldiers are key faculty members and administrators, who themselves have been deceived and victimized.

Armed with truth, pro-life students are fighting back, but they are gonna need a lot more men (and women).  We can’t just abandon them to fend for themselves.  That’s why I’m traveling all over the Southeast this summer, recruiting and hiring new staff.  Our team of project directors will reinforce, equip, train, and help pro-life students to expose the deeds of darkness (Ephesians 5:11) on campus, where it’s needed most.  Link to job announcement here.

That’s where you come in.  Please put me on the road, so I can recruit and train an army of reinforcements.  Unless I go out, we can’t find the reinforcements we need, and pro-life students will have to go it alone.  Please put me on the road with your special gift of $1,000, $500, or even $100.

If you will send me, I will go.  Please send me, because pro-life students are gonna need a lot more men.

Diana Jimenez

Even while Biola University was doing its best to suppress the truth of abortion on campus, a baby’s life was saved by the one student with the courage to break the rules.

The following was posted at ArmsOfAudio.com:

There are a lot of people bashing Diana right now but first hand I can tell you she did what she was told to do.  I am 20.  A student of Biola and always claimed to be prolife.  I thought that until I got a positive pregnancy test.  This came after a night of partying just outside the campus and had a one night stand with a youth pastor in training.  I was going to go to Planned Parenthood that day and as I walked through campus her signs made me realize there is a human life in my womb ….  In that moment I went to my dorm room got on my knees and asked that I would have the strength to be my baby’s mom.  STOP saying she didn’t follow her stupid rules.  God came through for me because of her.  And Susan Elliot is a tool of the devil.

Letter from Biola University to employees:

Dear Biola Community,

Some of you may have heard about a recent edited video posted on YouTube that has given a false impression of an interaction that took place between a student and campus safety.  A few members of our community are being targeted and threatened by individuals and advocacy groups for pro-life.  Here  is a collection of information that captures Biola’s pro-life conviction.  We believe it helps to articulate Biola’s steadfast commitment to the sanctity of human life, both in its words and actions.

Please know that this is not an issue of pro-life, it’s an issue of treating students fairly and according to stated policies.  The issue here is the student’s behavior and non-adherence of guidelines clearly communicated to her (and all of our students) as defined in the student handbook related to the posting and dissemination of any information around campus.  Since we cannot disclose all the details related to this matter, the one-sided and edited view disseminated online is inaccurate and misrepresents Biola.  This is unfortunate.

Please be in prayer for the individuals in our community that have been unfairly targeted in this video and on the various blog sites.  Please pause today to pray over this matter as a community.  We invite you to pray at your desk or gather with those around you some time this afternoon for an intercessory prayer moment.

If you receive any calls about the situation, please direct them to UCM at extension 4079.  If any of you have questions, university leadership will be available at 2:00 p.m. at the Talbot East Plaza.

Thank you for being in ongoing prayer for our community — particularly that the Lord would help us to respond to this situation with truth, grace and love.

Questions for Biola University:

1. You say the edited video gives a false impression.  Really?  How so?  What would the unedited version tell us that is different?  If you say CBR has borne false witness, then please back up your claim.  Show us the truth of the matter.
2. Did the Biola University Police Chief John Ojeisekhoba not take the aborted-baby photograph from Diana Jemenez’ hands?
3. Did Chief Ojeisekhoba not threaten Ms. Jeminez with arrest and expulsion?
4. Did Biola President Barry Corey not say that we need people with the courage to speak truth into us?
5. Did Dr. Corey not say that we do not need people in our lives who say “peace, peace” when there is no peace?
6. Who among your staff is being targeted?  What do you mean by “targeted?”
7. Who among your staff is being threatened?  What do you mean by “threatened?”  What threats are you talking about?

Biola argues that “we’re all pro-life here” and gushes about what it does concerning abortion (largely half-measures offered as fig leaves) in an effort to avoid any debate over what it refuses to do, and that is to simply expose the whole truth.  Officially, Biola condemns abortion, but the priest and Levite in the Parable of the Good Samaritan would have condemned street violence.  Yet they refused to do the one thing that would help the poor victim.

Words without meaningful action are as empty as faith without works.  James 2:16 warns that “If one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,’ but does nothing about their physical needs, what good does it do?”  Biola isn’t doing “nothing” for the unborn, but Biola refuses to do what most needs to be done, exposing the horror and inspiring students to do more than mouth platitudes.