Training prepares students to articulate and respectfully defend the pro-life position.

CBR Southeast announces a new page on Facebook that will focus on our pro-life apologetics training.

Our Pro Life Training Academy (PLTA) is an ourtreach primarily to Christian/pro-life college and high-school students, but even experienced activists will benefit from the training.

Pro-life youth are a critical group because they are the future leaders of the movement. More immediately, they wield enormous influence on their peers, particularly when they are trained and equipped.

Please go “Like” our new page at www.facebook.com/ProLifeTraining.

A full-day seminar prepares the student to articulate and respectfully defend the pro-life position, even before hostile audiences. Role-playing exercises allow the student to practice for real-life encounters.  For students ready to take the next step, CBR’s Genocide Awareness Project (GAP) provides a unique opportunity for on-the-job training (www.facebook.com/ProLifeOnCampus).

In addition to the training pro-life advocates, the PLTA unites pro-lifers behind common goals of education, training, and outreach. Community pro-life advocates host, promote, and participate in the training. Target audiences include college pro-life groups, Church youth groups, Christian high schools, pro-life agencies, and pro-life volunteers.

CBR and the local community stakeholders work jointly to fund community-wide training.

Here is Dr. Alveda King speaking at the Jefferson Memorial at the Restoring Honor Rally on August 28, 2010.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtNscI-DiQI

You can watch the entire rally here.  Glenn Beck said early media reports indicated that “over a thousand” people were in attendance!

Pastor Cecil Clark of True Vine Baptist Church outside an abortion clinic in Knoxville.

“Would you look at that?” he said, as we stood on the U of Louisville campus. Pastor Dave Daubenmire and I watched as professional pro-aborts desperately denied the truth staring them in the face.  The students weren’t buying it.

“Every time Christians show up with the truth, we win.”  But then Pastor Dave hit me where it hurts, “The only problem is, we Christians usually don’t show up.” 

Jesus said the gates of Hell would not prevail against the Church (Matthew 16:18), but can we really apply that verse when the Church does nothing?

The biggest example of this is abortion. We have abortion in American because the “pro-life” church isn’t showing up. I’m not talking about the churches that are officially pro-abortion.  I’m talking about just the churches you and I attend.

If you are reading this, you probably attend a church that claims to be “pro-life.”  But is it really?  An easy test to perform:

1. Go to the nearest abortion clinic when the killing is going on.  Count the number of your pastors/elders/church leaders that show up.
2. Go to the next meeting of any pro-life endeavor in your community and count the number of your pastors/elders/church leaders that show up.
3. Take a look at the budget of your church and add up the money spent on stopping abortion. Then add up the money spent on church-run sports programs. Then add up the money spent on making the music better on Sunday morning. If you add it up all over Knoxville, where I live, it will be a few thousand dollars to stop abortion, hundreds of thousands to run sports programming, and millions of dollars on the Sunday morning music. I’m not knocking music or sports, but I am wondering why full-time professionals are hired to run sports and music programs in almost every major church, but almost zero staff time is ever devoted to help stop killing babies.  That despite the fact that approximately 1 in 5 women who aborts her baby identifies herself as a “born-again” or “evangelical” Christian.
4. Take a look at the required core education curriculum of your church. It has to be on paper (or online) or it doesn’t count. Look for the mandated requirements for teaching middle and high-school students about abortion. Are there any such requirements? No? Then is it any wonder why so many of our children have abortions?
5. As you evaluate the pro-life education requirements at your church, find out if photos/videos of aborted babies are mandated as part of the published curriculum. We hear from the students who grew up in “pro-life” churches all the time.  Just recently, two student government leaders at Liberty University told me they were not commited pro-lifers until I showed them pictures of abortion.  The “pro-life” church had hidden the truth from them, and they had never known nor cared because they had never seen.

So, is your church “pro-life”?  What are you going to do about it?

What would Jesus do?

P.S.  A pastor recently told me that his church “works through” the local CPC that some of their members helped to start 20 years ago. Not sure what that means, but I do know it ain’t much. They were not interested in doing anything more.  I can tell you that babies are dying in that church, but the pastor believes that their only responsibility to those babies is to send a few dollars to a pregnancy center across town.  If I ever have a heart attack, I hope I’m not sitting in that church!

Appalachian State students plan their pro-life year

Please forward this link to every pro-life student you know.

CBR / Pro Life on Campus and the Students for Life of America (SFLA) announce the 5th Annual Pro-Life Student Leadership Conference, to be held on September 10-11, 2010 in Knoxville, Tennessee.  The theme for this years conference is Sharpening Your Focus to Cultivate a Pro-Life Campus.  For more information, click here.

This Conference is about how to make your student pro-life group more effective on your campus.  We show you how to:

1. select projects that work,
2. recruit members to grow,
3. raise money to pay for projects,
4. assert your First Amendment rights when they are threatened, and
5. maximize media exposure.

Put them all together, and you have a comprehensive pro-life action plan for your campus.

In short, we give you the entire tool-box you need to make a huge and ongoing impact on your campus. If you do the things we teach, you will be the most talked-about student group on campus within a year, and number 2 won’t even be close.  And we back that up with a money-back guarantee.  Who else does that?  And who else offers a conference for only $10, and that includes housing and meals?!

 You can get more information and register here.  Deadline for reserving free housing is August 28, so call now.

Check out this video on media fraud at the annual March for Life in Washington, DC.  Look for the CBR truth truck!

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8knMYK-IX4U

I am stunned.  This is the best and most encouraging pro-life story I’ve seen in a long time.  I’m speechless.  Check it out.

Not only are the Midland Catholics for Life doing a GREAT job, one TV station is willing to cover it.

Its right out of the CBR playbook.  Educate people about the horrifying reality of abortion, and do it in such a way that compels the media to cover it.  Create conflict—not uncontrolled conflict, but modulated conflict—that draws attention to the plight of the preborn child.  Media might not like us, but they can’t resist conflict.  Thank you Midland Catholics for Life!

The abortion photos on the billboard came from CBR.  We provide graphic images to pro-life groups all over the world who (1) comply with our non-violence policy condemning all abortion-related violence and refusing to associate with groups or individuals who fail to condemn such violence, and (2) agree not to alter the images.

We give all glory to God, and we are so thankful he is using us in this way.  Please share in our blessing by $upporting our work!

I think this is pretty funny:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFNnyKDB9hs

One of our wonderful supporters asked me how to respond to people who excused themselves from doing even the smallest thing to stop the killing (e.g, attend a pro-life event or contribute financially) by saying that “everybody has a different calling” or “it’s just one of many causes.”  I suggested she might respond this way:

10-week (1st-trimester) hand on quarter

Regarding my request that you help with a pro-life activity that I am planning, you responded by saying that “not everyone has the same calling and that this is just one good cause out of many that you might help.” In addressing these statements, I need to ask you if you believe that every abortion kills a human baby? If not, then please say so because I don’t want to waste your time or mine. But if you agree every abortion kills a baby, then our nation is killing 1.2 million children every year. Do you really believe that stopping a Holocaust of this magnitude is just “one of many causes”? Can any Christian really do nothing at all?

There is some truth in your statement that God calls different people to different ministries. However, what would we say about a German Christian who did nothing to obey God’s commandment to protect and deliver the helpless being led away to slaughter (Proverbs 24: 11-12)? We might give that person a break, because for him, doing something might have meant execution.  But what would we think of Germans who claimed to be Christian and did nothing to help stop the killing of Jews, if we knew it wouldn’t have been personally dangerous? I think we might have asked the same question that Martin Luther King, Jr. asked when he reflected on White Southerners who did nothing to stop racism.  Dr. King asked ” What kind of people worship here? Who is their God? Where were their voices …?”

What do we say about the Priest and the Levite who passed the robbery victim on the side of the road (Luke 10-30-37)? I have heard many sermons on this parable, but never have I heard any pastor excuse the Priest and Levite by saying that perhaps they “had a different calling.”

What would we say of the person who saw a child drowning in a neighbor’s swimming pool and responded by saying, “I have never felt called by God to save drowning children, and it is, after all, only one of many good deeds I might do today.”

I am not trying to rearrange your life. But I am asking that you do something important for me. [What comes next depends on what you want the person to do.]

• [Help with a project:] If you agree that abortion kills a human baby, I am asking for a few hours of your time. Your small investment in this project will save babies that would otherwise be killed.  Because a real baby’s life is at stake, I am compelled to ask you to reconsider and assist me with this project. Specifically, I want you to … (summarize the request). May I call you tomorrow?
• [Financial assistance:] If you agree that abortion kills a human baby, I am asking you to consider a small monthly financial commitment to help stop the killing. If you have cable TV, I wonder if you would consider a monthly gift equal to your cable TV bill. But any amount will save babies’ lives if it is offered regularly (monthly). May I call you tomorrow?

What do you think?  Would this change anybody?  Did it change you?  If so, please click here!

Christians see abortion for the first time.

We hear it all the time:

I’m a Christian.  I grew up in the church.  Our pastor may have said that he was pro-life, but I thought it should be a woman’s choice.  But now that I’m seeing your pictures, I know now that abortion is killing a baby.

How, you ask, can this happen?  It’s because the church is doing nothing to expose abortion, even among it’s own people.  Ask yourself this question:

When is the last time the pastor of my church showed us what abortion looked like?  When is the last time he showed abortion photos to our youth?

If the answers are “no” and “never”, then you know why 1 in 5 women who abort their babies identify themselves as “born again” or “evangelical” Christians.  The abortion rate among practicing Catholics is just as great.

This is intolerable, so we at CBR are doing something about it.  Over the weekend, we took our Matthew 28:20 pictures to the Harvest Crusade at Angel Stadium.  Tens of thousands of people saw the pictures as they entered and exited the stadium.  See pictures here.

Christians need to see abortion and work to stop it. Who will show them the truth?

There are three adverse conditions that must be corrected:

1. Christians need to know, and most of them don’t.
2. Christians need to work to stop the killing, and most don’t.
3. The Church needs to lead, and it doesn’t.

Unilaterally, we are able to correct only Item 1.  By God’s grace, we can show Christians the truth.  If we are willing to do that, we pray that the Holy Spirit will do the rest.

You have heard of Lila Rose of Live Action.  You may have seen her under-cover videos that show how Planned Parenthood employees cover up the illegal sexual abuse of children.

In this video, Ms. Rose describes how CBR employs the exact same strategy that was used by other successful reformers in history, including the movements to stop the slave trade in England, to abolish slavery here, to end abusive child labor here, and to galvanize the civil rights movement in the 1950s.

Ms. Rose reports from Sproul Plaza at the University of California at Berkeley during our GAP presentation last October.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldxict4AZD4

Besides college campuses, what other venues are appropriate for abortion pictures?  Please comment!

Appalachian State U. students plan their pro-life year.

I got an e-mail from a Georgia Tech student just yesterday.  He wanted to know about our annual Student Leadership Conference (Sept 10-11):

“Georgia Tech has a bunch of new leadership that is really going to benefit.”

This is a generational struggle, and nothing we do is more important than our work to train the next generation of leaders.  When they lead the right way, babies and moms are saved right now.  And we get closer to that future day when the killing stops.  It’s just that simple.

That’s why CBR, along with the Students for Life of America, is hosting our annual Student Leadership Conference in Knoxville again this fall.  Here’s what one student at the University of Georgia had to say about this conference:

“While there is a lot of information about defending the pro-life cause, information about building leadership skills is scarce.  These skills are needed to start, grow, and manage a group.  The CBR conference is giving student groups around the country the tools they need to be effective on campus and I truly believe strong campus pro-life groups will change the country and the world.”

Leadership = Results at Appalachian State U.

Changing the country and the world.  That’s what we are all about at CBR.  Please consider a financial gift to support pro-life college students.  Your gift of $100 will pay the conference cost for one student!  It’s really an investment in the future of the pro-life movement.

What do you think?  How important is it to train the next generation?  Comment below!

An anonymous donor has pledged $1,000 if we can get up to 1,000 pro-life fans on our fan page by August 31.  We already have 300 fans; we need 700 more.  Please do two things for us:

1. Simply go to our fan page (click here) and “Like” the page.
2. E-mail all your pro-life friends.  Ask them to “Like” the page and invite their pro-life friends to do the same.

But there’s more!  This donor has pledged another $1,000 for every additional 1,000 pro-life fans we can get by August 31, up to $5,000 for 5,000 fans!  Please do this.  It won’t cost you a thing, but it will mean so much to our work to save babies and moms on campus!  Let’s get 5,000 fans by August 31!

Here’s the Facebook link: www.facebook.com/ProLifeOnCampus

To add your own contribution to save babies and moms, click here!  (For your online donation to CBR/ProLifeOnCampus before August 31, you will receive a free pro-life gift!)

CBR Board Member Rev. Clenard Childress addresses the crowd.

 A number of CBR volunteers attended the Freedom Ride that started in Birmingham and ended in Atlanta on Saturday, July 24.  The event was organized by CBR board member Fr. Frank Pavone.

The TV coverage by the CBS affiliate in Birmingham was actually very well done.  Several women appeared on camera to express regret for their abortions and describe how they were deceived by the abortion industry.

Pastor Cecil Clark of True Vine Baptist Church in Knoxville was interviewed for that story (video below).  He appears at about the 1-minute mark.

More coverage by Fox News, the Birmingham News, and the National Catholic Register.

Question for you:  What kind of effect will demonstrations such as this have on the larger culture?  Please comment below!

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A749cVjVbJk

Medallion emphasized to Londoners the humanity of the Black slave in 1787.

My talk last night at the Atlanta Right to Life was very well received, I think.  The subject was “Learning From the Past: How We Can Win.”  This is a similar talk to the one I gave to a group of pro-life Georgia Legislators a couple of years ago and the talk I gave to a group of pro-life Congressmen in DC.

This was a fairly easy audience.  We’ve been working with these folks to display abortion images for many years (GAP, RCC, etc.), so they are very familiar with the need to educate the public.  I didn’t need to convince them so much as to help solidify in their minds the connection between our work to educate the public using horrifying images and the work of other social reformers in history who achieved success using the same strategy.  Examples:

• The anti-slave-trade movement in England (William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson) used images to show the humanity of the Black slave and the inhumanity of the slave trade.
• Abolistionists in this country used similar images, and later used photographs, to expose the injustice of slavery.
• Lewis Hine, who was concerned about abusive child labor practices, took pictures of children working in coal mines and textile mills and turned them into a traveling display.
• Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said that “America will not stop racism until America sees racism.”  He arranged for video and photos of Black men and women being attacked with dogs and water cannons to be shown on TV and in magazines.

Horrifying photos of racial violence showed the ugly truth of racism and changed America's heart.

You can download my slides by clicking here.  It is a fairly large file (38 MB); it might take 10 minutes or so to download.  Just save it to a file; a pop-up window will ask you where to file it and will tell you how long it will take to download the file.

Please take a look at the slides and leave your comment on this post!

 

Deeper Still's Karen Ellison and Kay Smith at Market Square.

While doing GAP on Market Square last week, we were pleased to be joined by Deeper Still, a post-abortion healing ministry based in Knoxville.  It was the perfect message for our community, emphasizing both the horrifying reality of what abortion is and does, but also emphasizing the forgiveness and healing available to every abortion-wounded heart through Jesus Messiah.

Deeper Still invites abortion-wounded women to participate in weekend retreats that help bring healing and lasting freedom.  These are offered free of charge, not only to women in the Knoxville area, but nationally and internationally as well.  Please visit their website!

Deeper Still President Karen Ellison talks about Deeper Still:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owN4z8rcoo0