The "Emerging Church" Has Some Real Problems

 I’ve been reading an excellent book by Thomas Horn (Blood on the Altar: The Coming War Between Christian vs. Christian). I sought further help on one of his subjects, the Emerging Church, online. So I found an interview between two opposing giants about the faith:  John MacArthur (Author of 150 books, pastor, radio preacher, president of Master’s Seminary in Los Angeles) and Phil Johnson (Retired U.C.-Berkley law professor, father of the “intelligent design movement.”) They’re both in their 70's now, but their hands are on the pulse of the church—and they’re very, very concerned about the church’s faithfulness to Scripture. I thought I would focus on their concern and highlight part of their interview here.

From the interview, I could see that one of the biggest threats to God's church is, would you believe, a church movement called the “Emerging Church.” So let’s start by defining it. Wikipedia said, 2 years ago, that they are post-Protestant, post-evangelical, post-liberal, post-conservative, and post-charismatic. Their definition today is only a little less radical.  Further, the movement hates preaching; they believe instead on “conversation” with people. This is to emphasize its developing and decentralized nature, its vast range of standpoints, and its commitment to dialogue. VERY important note: There is no central creed in these churches. What those involved DO mostly agree on, is their disillusionment with today's church--and they support the deconstruction of modern Christian worship. They believe, instead, that there are radically diverse "perspectives" within Christianity that should be listened to (this does not mean interpreting Scripture--their litmus test is on social justice, and environmental stewardship of the earth, which are not emphasized in the Bible). They say they are creating a “safe” environment for those with opinions ordinarily rejected by modern conservative evangelism. They believe that non-critical interfaith dialogue is preferred over "dogmatically-driven" evangelism (i.e., they reject orthodoxy). Finally, their beliefs most likely include "liberation theology,"  which means liberation of the poor from the oppressed.  They believe that capitalism degrades society.  Marxists love that phrase.  In the past, particularly with the Catholic missionaries, such beliefs among priests might have had them hiding the leaders of militia gunmen to overthrow the government.

In any event, the emerging church movement “went public” in November 2004, when they were spotlighted in an article in Christianity Today. (I'm not saying Christianity Today likes their stance). But they’ve been around since at least 1996.

The second way to get to know the Emerging Church, is by a few relevant quotes from their founding father, Brian McLaren. In a separate interview, after he "mistakenly" spoke of God in the male gender, he had this to confess: “This is as good a place as any to apologize for my use of masculine pronouns for God…I avoid (their) use because they can give the false impression…that the Christian God is a male deity.” On the subject of the atonement, Jesus’ sacrifice for us, he calls it a “violent view,” because it presents God (who allowed the death of Christ) as the “greatest existential threat to humanity.” On the return of Christ, a reader from Sweden asked: “If Jesus isn’t coming back…what about judgment or the resurrection?” His answer was psychobabble, but you can tell he's not disagreeing with the Swede's idea that Jesus might not come back .  His answer: “Jesus does say ‘I will come again.’…but I think it’s a mistake to assume that when he says those things, he means what we mean…with all our dispensationalist, premillennialist…or whatever categories. The hyperbolic imagery of the New Testament, moon turning to blood..etc. is political language, signaling the fall of powerful political luminaries. Also…Jesus didn’t come just to evacuate us from earth to a future heaven but to show us how to live and make this world more and more beautiful by following Jesus’ example which would eventually lead to God’s “kingdom come on earth.”"

You can see the attack on foundational Scripture by their founder in those quotes. The single Scriptural belief which is above all others, is the resurrection and His promise to return.

On homosexuality, he believes there is "uncertainty" enough to call for a new belief.  (But see Romans 1:26-28, which seems rather certain of God's stance).  He twists fundamentalism (a scatological term already), calling conservative beliefs "fundasexuality," and says we have  "heterophobia," a fear of people who are different.

Another event emphasized in Wikipedia makes us further skeptical about their belief in the validity of Scripture:

The TCPC website (the Center for Progressive Christianity, one of their "tents") gives an analogy that symbolizes the methodology of the Progressive Christianity movement. It involves a Sunday school teacher and a class of 9 or 10-year-olds. Even at that age, some were skeptical of the inerrancy of the Bible. The teacher suggested that they read Charlotte's Web . The class enjoyed the book. The teacher interjected the thought that pigs and spiders cannot talk. The kids protested: "Well, it's a story." The teacher asked whether the story was true. They decided that it was sort of true. "In a way, it was true." So the teacher suggested: "let's look at the Bible in the same way."

Another leader of the "Emerging" movement, Rob Bell, no longer a pastor of his Mars Hill church since he no longer believes in hell (from his book "Love Wins," 2011).  (Note:  His followers still include Joyce Meyer and Rick Warren).  He also attacks fundamental doctrine; he doesn’t believe Scripture was inerrant when he mentions his greatest discovery—“the Bible as a human product.”  In summarizing the movement’s view, he says “This is not just the same old message with new methods. We’re rediscovering Christianity as an Eastern religion…” Mr. McLaren agrees; he believes in inclusivism—that other religions (those that deny Christ as God) lead to salvation, too. For instance, he does not think we should convert Buddhists to Christianity; we should leave them as Buddhists who are followers of Jesus. (Buddhism is usually atheistic, so to them, Jesus is not God, since there is no God), so really, a “Buddhist Christian” is an oxymoron. They need to read Acts 4:12.

Now that we’ve read a bit of this unorthodox group, let’s let John MacArthur tell what he thinks. He’s smarter than me anyway.  He first distinguishes the emerging church movement from Modernism. Modernism was a product of the Enlightenment during the Renaissance in which they made human reason, not Scripture, the determinant of ethics.  He says “out of that came the worship of the human mind, and (in effect, they were saying), the mind trumps God.” The Emerging Church, on the other hand, is post-modernism…In both cases, they assault Scripture. (This movement) "is a denial of the clarity of Scripture....they think we can’t really know what the Bible says. Whether it’s about sin or virtue...they don’t like rules, so their ‘out’ is…(they say) “Well, it (Scripture) is not clear. This is just another way to set the Bible aside.”

Scripture claims to be clear, however, and God holds us responsible: ”A wayfaring man though he be a fool need not err.” (Isaiah 35:8). Dr. MacArthur also charges their leaders that “the reason they deny Scripture (by saying it is vague) is that men loved darkness rather than light (John 3:19). The light is there, they hate the light, they run from the light. The issue is not that Scripture is not clear, it is crystal clear.” Dr. MacArthur charged them with pushing heresy—which he says later on in the interview.

I would like to take the topic of homosexuality as an example of their approach. It's part of their pride in inclusivism, not finding anything morally wrong with homosexuals. Scripture, however, won’t let us do that. It’s condemned in Leviticus 18:22, where God says to men:

You shall not lie with a male as with a woman. It is an abomination.

God does not change His mind in the New Testament.  As Romans 1 points out, it is among the worst deviations that men come down to, after God “gave them up” in their insistence to defy Him.

Scripture is crystal clear on this subject, but not according to Emerging Church leader Mr. MacLaren, who says: “Many of us don’t know what we should think about homosexuality. We’ve heard all sides but no position has yet won our confidence…that alienates us from both the liberals and conservatives who seem to know exactly what we should think…the biblical arguments are nuanced and multilayered, and the pastoral ramifications are staggeringly complex.” The phrase that sticks in my craw--"no position has yet won our confidence." Thus, they are saying, "Our judgment is the final word."  Their judgment trumps God's, evidently.

But Dr. MacArthur insists that it’s bad news for the practicing homosexual, but it’s still the truth. He says, “the truth is what I will defend. It’s not personal. I’m not mad at people. I’m not trying to protect my own little space. That doesn’t make me popular in all circles, it creates just the opposite.” He maintains that it’s impossible for Christians to agree with the latest world's view: “there is no possible accommodation …Christianity would have to be reinvented to accommodate itself to any pattern of (worldly) culture thinking.”

But Brian McLaren, a founding father of the Emerging movement doesn’t believe MacArthur has good motives.  "We fear that the whole issue has been manipulated…by political parties…whatever we say gets sucked into a vortex of politicized culture-wars rhetoric...  I know what you guys' motives are, and I condemn them." (If their motives are to defend Scripture, that's reprehensible, I guess).

Really, a big question he touched on is, how do you evangelize the homosexual? The Emerging Church has decided to, as Dr. MacArthur says, "capture these people by “sanctifying the (gay) culture." But the Bible doesn’t adapt to culture. It confronts culture. The Emerging Church, on the other hand, wants to let the culture define what Christianity should be.

Dr. MacArthur then talks again about big non-Biblical movements in history. He summarizes Pre-modernism: “there is truth and it comes from God; it has a supernatural source…men believed in God or they believed in the gods.” What follows is Modernism (which I’m figuring covers 1750-2000).  He summarizes it as: “there is truth and we can find it by human reason…not revelation from God, not the Bible, but human reason.” But Modernism wasn’t a good idea in practice: “the world got worse than it has ever been…the totalitarian world…fascism, Nazism, Communism, and the massacre of millions and millions of people in the name of human reason.” (For instance, most Lutherans didn’t have any trouble grabbing a gun to obey Hitler). Getting up-to-date, he says: “Now the idea of post-modernism, which says, in effect, “We give up. There may be truth, but we can’t know it. It may be from God, but we can’t know…so we embrace mystery…you have your truth, I have my truth…truth is whatever you think it is, whatever you want it to be, it’s intuitive, it’s experiential..but it’s not universal and it’s not knowable, universally knowable.” Mr. Johnson, the interviewer, responds, “That’s why these days the highest values, the sole remaining virtues, are things like tolerance, ambiguity, mystery..” To me, calling this a “mystery” in post-modernism opens the door to searching in the occult; people still want plain answers to reach their loved ones who have died--but they're not getting answers in this psychobabble of Mr. McLaren. Dr. MacArthur says, “Oh, Brian McLaren says ambiguity is really a good thing (based on McLaren's quote, ”Certainty is overrated”)...it gives people a license to invent their own religion, really…no one is permitted to challenge it…it is wonderful if you want to sin without any guilt. And I think that’s at the bottom of this…they hate the light because their deeds are evil.”

He also charges, “It’s not a theology; (they say they) don’t "teach"…and the word “sermon” scares them… no, we want to have a conversation. But the only part of the conversation they don’t like is when you say, ”That’s wrong. That’s sinful.” So their conversation...never has an objective…that’s another way to negate the Word of God. I say, you can deny that (the plain Word)  is from God. But don’t tell me God has spoken...but He mumbled. The worst thing we could do would be to soften the edges of what really is clear in Scripture.” (They claim) “the Bible is irrelevant, you can’t stand up for an hour and exposit the Word of God, you’ve got to tell them stories… To quote one of their leaders, “The bible (small “b,” to them ) is no longer a principal source of morality as a rulebook. The meaning of the Good Samaritan is more important than the Ten Commandments —even assuming the latter could be remembered in any detail by anyone…” By the way, some of the most revealing McLaren quotes are on this website: http://carm.org/brian-mclaren-quotes-ignorance-bliss-theology.

Dr. MacArthur feels that (they should say) “since we don’t know what it means, why would we teach?  Nobody has a right to impose on anybody else their ideas.” They take a sort of reverse humility in confessing their ignorance. To turn truth on its head, they believe that if someone claims to know what Scripture means, they have committed an act of pride. To quote MacArthur:  “It is an attack on the clarity of Scripture and they elevate themselves as if this is some noble reality…which they call humility…(it’s) a celebration of ignorance.”

They also have this feature: “They’re really, really aggressive at tearing down the church, tearing down historic theology...that have been a part of the church’s life for centuries…but that’s the lowest level of assault there is. Anybody can shred and destroy without having to build something back in its place…(they) just shred what people believe and walk away, leaving chaos everywhere…the egotism of it is pretty frightening. And the church is filled with people who have no foundation.”

He gives a few words of warning to people out there looking for a church home: "I don’t think a person should go to a church that isn’t answerable to a doctrinal statement…(if you do), you need to get out of there because you’re at the whim of a guy who can invent anything he wants any time. This entrepreneurial approach to the church is a very serious breach…" (There) “may be Christians who are seduced by this; in their ignorance they are the children tossed to and fro, carried about by every blowing wind of doctrine.” (Ephesians 4:14). Mr. Johnson, the interviewer, says: “And every man does what’s right in his own eyes.” (Judges 17:6). Dr. MacArthur maintains that young people from a denominational church that often lacks life and fails to exposit Scripture, these are the likely victims of this movement: “I don’t think (the Emerging Church) is nearly as appealing to the non-churched people as to the marginally churched young people."   The young are attracted to Emerging movement; they "are reacting to the superficiality and…the legalism of (their church).”

Dr. MacArthur speaks again to the clarity of Scripture. (Jesus) “says things to them in His day like this, ‘Have you not read? Have you not heard what Scripture says?’ He didn’t say to them, “Oh, look, I know why you’re having a tough time with Me, because the Old Testament is so hard to understand.” Then he brings up the example of the Gentiles, who were totally ignorant of the Old Testament…"Paul (who assumes the regular people are smart as he) builds these massive cases of understanding the Christian gospel based on the sacrificial system from the Old Testament…Thus, to come along and say that the Bible is not clear is then to accuse God, and (accusing) the Scripture of claiming something for itself that it can’t deliver. (Charging God like that is) pretty serious.”

**Note: Mars Hill Churches was the focus of the Emerging movement.  But Rob Bell was removed as senior pastor of his Mars Hill church in Michigan in 2011 after his beliefs were revealed in the book Love Wins. But he has come back, preaching at sold-out conferences in the U.K. and Ireland lately.

Another important name in the movement is Mark Driscoll.  He was removed from a separate Mars Hill pastorate in October 2014, most particularly because he called women "penis homes" and other misogynist remarks--plus, he's being charged with plagiarism.  It was also revealed that church money was used to pump up his book sales so he could make the NY Times Bestseller List. But he has come back, after taking in $1.1 million in donations in 2 years, he built a $1 million church in Phoenix, and has even been called upon to evangelical conferences.

Brian McLaren is still going strong, too:  His latest book, The Great Spiritual Migration, includes the following crazy quote:

“Christianity, we might say, is driving around with a loaded gun in its glove compartment, and that loaded gun is its violent image of God. It’s driving around with a license to kill, and that license is its Bible, read uncritically. Along with its loaded gun and license to kill, it’s driving around with a sense of entitlement derived from a set of beliefs with a long, ugly, and largely unacknowledged history.”

So, let's ignore these guys.  The feeling of freedom from sin an its penalties beats whatever negative nonsense they come up with.

Acknowledgement: Thomas Horn, Blood on the Altar and Christianity Today

God's Love is Misunderstood

 

 I wrote a blog that appeared in February titled: “Is the God of the Old Testament the same as the God of the New Testament?” But that blog did not exhaust the subject of God’s character.  For more enlightenment, I would like to summarize a sermon by Rev. David Pawson.  Here we go.

A Gallup Poll in Britain recently asked people “Do you believe in God?”  Sixty seven percent said yes.  But… that’s an irrelevant and pointless statistic.  Britain is so cosmopoliton, they should have followed that question up with “Which God do you believe in?”  It could be Allah, or one of the Hindu gods, after all.  But even more important is the question “What kind of God do you or do you not believe in?” I’ve talked to a number of atheists and asked, “what kind of God that you’ve envisioned that you don’t  believe in?” When they got through explaining, I was able to respond, “I could be an atheist too, because I don’t believe in that kind of God either.”

So let’s broaden this and discuss, What kind of God do Christians believe in, nowadays?  I’m afraid that 9 out of 10 today would immediately say, “A God of love.”  Because the majority of pastors and evangelists have been preaching a God of love for over a hundred years, in their delivery of the Gospel.  More recently, an adjective has been added to that: a majority seems to now believe in “a God of unconditional love.”  That phrase has only been popular for 25 years, yet it has been preached around the world. 

But that is not our Gospel for evangelizing.  I believe we are mistaken, Biblically, to teach the unbeliever that God is love, as a feature of the Gospel.  Such is not the Gospel we have been given by God; and it is not the Gospel they preached in the New Testament days.  Such a Gospel tends to mislead.  The Bible never adds “unconditional” to God’s love, either. We all happen to love adjectives--unlike the Bible.  We sing “Amazing Grace,” yet the Bible never attaches Amazing to grace.  It simply talks about grace. There is now a chorus called “Outrageous Grace.”  Amazing must have lost its novelty, so we need a more sparkling adjective.  But these are sentimental rather than Scriptural, I’m afraid. 

I’d like to give you four main reasons why the Gospel to be preached is not “the God of love.”

Reason #1:  The Bible actually says very little about the love of God. But people have cherry-picked those verses that do, and preach on them endlessly, so people think that that’s a key phrase appearing frequently in Scripture. But here are most of the Books, and their count of verses about the love of God: 

Genesis:  0.  Exodus:  1. Leviticus and Numbers:  0. Deuteronomy:  2. Joshua, Judges, Ruth:  0 each.  I, II Samuel, I II Kings:  0 each. Psalms talks about the “loving-kindness” of God. That phrase is an English translation of a Hebrew word which really means “covenant love.”  It is never applied to people outside the Abrahamic, or Hebrew covenant. It has a strong note of loyalty in it, loyalty to the covenant.  God loves those who are within His covenant.  But there is no mention of His love for the World in the entire Old Testament. Continuing, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes:  0 each.  You’d be shocked to know that Isaiah has only one verse about God’s love.  Jeremiah and Ezekiel, one each.  Of the 12 minor prophets, only Hosea has one verse.

So, the Old Testament does not back “God is love” anywhere, except to the Jews in Psalms—and that’s not the love we were thinking about.  Song of Solomon is on love, but it’s human love.  Of course, it’s an allegory of God’s love, but it’s not directly satisfying, being that it’s an allegory. Hard to take to heart about loving God by trying to identify with Solomon’s rapture over different parts of his wives’ (or concubines’) body.   

Oh, you might be saying, God’s love, then, is in the New Testament everywhere.  I’m afraid you’re wrong. You would think Jesus talks about it in the four Gospel accounts, right?  Matthew strikes out, 0. Likewise, Luke and Mark.  But John does.  Everybody knows John 3:16. But Rev. Pawson refers to a previous session where he mentions the mistranslation and misunderstanding of the verse.  Here are my words on that.  The “correctest” meaning of the Greek words in that verse, per the Pure Word translation (that translation slaughters the nice flow of words that other translations have; but it is great for analyzing details of Greek meaning—so they are for scholars, not for readers).  Here is what the Greek words mean:

God has loved in such a manner the satan’s world, so that He Gave His Son, the Only Begotten Risen Christ, in order that whoever is Continuously by his choice Committing for the Result and Purpose of Him, should not perish, but definitely should, by his choice, be Continuously Having Eternal Life.     

Yes, that’s a mouthful, but carefully observe the words “continuously,” and ”by his choice,” and their contexts.    These verses express an ongoing need for us to choose to abide with Christ’s commands and purposes, in order to continue to have eternal life (see John 15:6’s warning).  So this verse definitely doesn’t fit the word “unconditional” for God’s love; He has conditioned His love upon continued obedience and commitment.  We need to intentionally, day by day,  strive to abide with Christ, and make our choice to be more like Him. We choose that we want to be sanctified, and there are works to perform, and evil not to perform, to attain that likeness of His holiness. We need to be reliably doing that to obtain heaven.

It becomes not an easy evangelism, to give the usual translation of 3:16, and then try to tell everyone that “they are wrong in their assumptions about the famous verse; they need to cover Greek for awhile with you.” So pastors skip the difficulty and ignore this crucial detail, and preach “unconditional” when it is not.  Too many people relax on sanctification.  So, many people, in the future, will therefore be surprised when they are denied heaven.

Even the loving apostle John only has one more verse (besides 3:16) on the love of God in the Book of John.  But the biggest surprise of all is the Book of Acts, where the Gospel that moved the world was preached.  I assume that the Gospel was nearest to perfection when preached then, because God enormously blessed their work with signs and miracles, and thousands were converted.  They knew Greek backward and forward, they lived in the culture that understood the meaning of each word. They had the apostles right there, who had heard straight from the lips of Jesus Himself, and they got answers to the meaning of doctrines.  But here’s the shocker:  Not one verse in the whole of the Book of Acts mentions the love of God. Now a serious question arises:  Shouldn’t we follow their successful model? Do you really want to introduce a huge variant from their Gospel, when you consider that God blessed theirs? I mean, what have we got from today’s Gospel—higher crime and violence, many of us are totally confused on men and women’s roles, and even about what gender we are; we vote extremely leftward politicians into office, our children at school get dumber by the year as Christianity and the Bible are banned from campuses. Compare  our results with theirs.  Which is really best?

Continuing, Romans:  1 verse.  I and II Corinthians:  0.  Saving space, only I John mentions God’s love more than once or twice.  Nearly at the end (4:7), you find the three words, “God is love.”  Yet those words are not in a section describing God.  They are in a section exhorting believers to love one another.  It’s a section on behavior, not belief. Finally, we come to Revelation.  The only mention of love in that book has a negative attached:

Those whom I love I rebuke and chasten (Revelation 3:19)

That’s it for God’s love in our New Testament. All that should tell us something and make us think. Flat out, the Bible cannot be described as a Book about preaching God’s love.

Well, Rev. Pawson said he would bring you four points; we have only covered one.  The second point is, Every mention about God’s love is addressed to people who are already redeemed.  Well, we are not here to make you a one-point Calvinist, so let us stick to his point.  As far as we know, nobody who has not been redeemed ever, Scripturally,  heard about God’s love, as a theme through preaching, in those days. By the way, I have never denied that God loves us; I am merely pushing the idea that it is not great to evangelize on it. Rev. Pawson considers that God’s love is precious, a pearl NOT to be thrown to the swine (Matthew 7:6). Pigs don’t appreciate pearls.  Unredeemed people do not understand God’s love (more on this later). I add that the phrase about the love of God is too easily misunderstood when presented to those unfamiliar to the Scripture.  It works for the worse, and it gets twisted, much to the delight of hell’s masters.  It leads to “easy believism,” I think. God’s holiness and wrath are underemployed, and He becomes a soft mark for us to attempt to manipulate. 

Point #3:  When Scripture uses the words “love of God,” the love that we are thinking of doesn’t come from well-known Greek words for “love.”  The Greeks were far more careful than the English about the use of the word “love.”  They had different words for different kinds of love.  There were four: 1) “epithumia,” which is a love from addiction.  You feel you need it to survive.  Nothing can get in your way to getting it, even hurting other things or people, including yourself.   2) “Eros” is the love of attraction.  Obviously that would be love between two genders, as God intended (unless you are “woke”).  So this attraction, say between men and women, means you want to learn everything about them—the opposite sex are different, right?—which is meant to take a lifetime to explore the joys of.  A marriage needs eros to survive—even beyond when sex becomes absent in old age.  3) “Philia” is affection, or deep friendship, such as what David and Jonathan had (they were not gay). 

The world knows and expresses those three kinds of love, but uses the same English word for all three, unfortunately.  But there was one other word for “love” in the Greek language, which was rarely used—because it expressed a love that was Not common. Namely  4) “agape.” It stressed action.  You can’t have agape without acting in love.  It has an emotional connection, because it is usually born out of compassion, for someone in a desperate need. But it doesn’t become agape until you act to meet that need. That is the only word for “love” that is used of God in your New Testament. Our need is a Savior because of our sins offending a holy God.  So when you find the word love related to God, you find immediately a mention of the Cross (First John 3:16, for example). This is what God did, acting out of compassion for the human race. This is how we know God loves us, because Jesus the Christ died for the sinner and the ungodly. In I John where it says “God is love,” it goes immediately on to say, “and He sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.”

What Christians did (which makes preaching on “God’s love” not a good idea to those unfamiliar to the Bible), was to twist this rare word agape–rare because it moves to help those who have been unworthy and often don’t even say “thank you” for when it is offered. God’s love even includes for His enemies. But when you evangelize “God loves you,” they will think, not of agape, but one of the other, more common, uses of the word, which expresses easy affection.  But truth is, God is not fond of us, not attracted to us, when we are unsaved and in rebellion to Him—He is actually angry with us.  Our rebellion against His best rule in our lives makes us His enemy.  His agape love caused Him to give His Son to die anyway.

Thus, you need to learn about the wrath of a holy God before you will appreciate His love. That’s why Romans begins (first two chapters) with the wrath of God rather than the love of God.

The wrath of God before the love of God–and you should linger on the first point.  Do not give His offense at our sin short shrift–most people, by studies, give themselves a pass, and a fair certainty of heaven, because they’re “better than the bad guys.”  Nor ignore the subject of hell.  Fact is, most people do not even believe in hell.  Emphasize His need of hearing our repentance from our sin, and our expressed desire to stop offending Him and quit the sin—with help by appealing to the Holy Spirit. The point is, these ideas are seldom taught from our pastors and teachers.

Rev. Pawson’s  final Point #4:  Neither Jesus, nor any of the apostles ever preached publicly about the love of God. “Check me out in your Bible,” he says. If I’m right, tell people the Bible says it, not me. Remember, for reasons we’ve brought up here, it was clearly a pearl.  Keep the concept among the Redeemed, lest it will most always be misunderstood.  You should evangelize like Paul or John did.  When Paul spoke to the Jews, he quoted their prophets or poets, the Old Testament. Then, since they already knew about God, he taught them about Jesus.  When he spoke to the non-Jews, he began with teaching them about God. They needed to understand God, or they won’t be interested in reconciling to Him in fear and worship.  (Read Acts 17 for an example of that approach).  Note also in Romans 1:16-17a:

For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first and also for the Greek. 17 For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith

If you start your evangelism with praising what Jesus did, they might be a Jesus fan, rather than the deeper truth of thanking Him for reconciling us to His Father.  If a Jesus fan, their attachment might blow away in times of stress.  They, too, must ‘take up our cross’ and follow Him.  We don’t want to end up, like the Sower parable, on shallow foundation—it makes it easier to lose our salvation.

May God help us to revolutionize our evangelism and help to create a revolutionized country, eager to know Him.

     

Planned Parenthood and Margaret Sanger

 Planned Parenthood is the oldest, largest, and best-organized provider of abortion, sex education, and birth control services in the world.  It now operates in 150 nations. But the story of Planned Parenthood could never have begun without the story of Margaret Sanger.  It was her impetus, her drive, her single-minded obsession that eventually gave birth to the giant baby-killer.  She died in 1966, but Planned Parenthood has grown and achieved far beyond her greatest dreams.  Yes, from 1978 til’ now, Planned Parenthood has murdered over 7 million babies. What an accomplishment. (Results prior to 1978 were not kept—typical of the organization’s sloppy accountability even until today).

Well, which side of Margaret Sanger’s  story would you like to hear?  My local library has a book in the Juvenile section, no less, that is unrelenting in its praise.  She was a wonderful, progressive woman—according to them.

But my library does not have the book that I chose to review:  Killer Angel, by Dr. George Grant. He is the author of over five dozen books on American history, politics, theology, and social issues.   This book  is a “Cliff’s Notes” of his great work, Grand Illusions, an even more  thoroughly documented biography of her effect on mankind.  She is up there with Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler—and living in the same time period, no less—if you want to find out who was the greatest murderer of innocents the world has ever seen.   How could she be lavishly praised in most of our secular literature, while the other homicidal tyrants are vilified? I maintain that it’s because our culture has silent agreement with her.  That would be another paper.

Her story begins predictably enough.  Born in 1879 in Corning, New York, daughter of Irish Catholic parents, the sixth of eleven children, her home life was never happy.  Her father drank, beat his sons, and worked sporadically, so they suffered much from hunger and privation.  He was a radical atheist, and mocked the religious devotion of his neighbors and his wife.  Margaret was baptized and confirmed in secret in by her mother in 1893, and had a spark of religion; but her mother’s death and father’s cynicism turned her into hatred of religion by the time she was 17.

Grown up, at first she was a material girl.  She was bright and manipulative, pushing her way up the ladder. She married into money at age 29 to William Sanger, an architect.   She had three children soon after.  They lived in Manhattan, but she was restless of housekeeping and kids—so she convinced William to move from their suburban neighborhood to a chic neighborhood where there was lots of shopping and a real night life.  Once they moved, her husband, a free-thinker, immediately began attending Anarchist and Communist meetings in Greenwich Village.  Margaret tagged along, unimpressed—she mocked the rag-tag revolutionaries.  But she listened to the well-honed speeches by John Reed, who learned his trade from Russian Bolsheviks, and she was suddenly tuned in.  She shed her bourgeois habits and plunged headlong into the maelstrom of rebellion and revolution.  She began farming out her kids to friends and neighbors, and went into hospitality, regularly inviting Communists and liberals into their home for meals and talk. Outside of those get-togethers, she had almost no connection with her husband.  She joined the Socialist party—a conglomeration of Mugwumps, Anarchists, Progressivists, and Communists--and volunteered to be a women’s union organizer.   She then formed a special attachment to the words of Eugene Debs, who raved about the evils of Capitalism, and who ran several times for president (though one of his campaigns was run from his penitentiary cell).  But on women’s issues, he was in favor of sexual liberation, feminism, and birth control--subjects that were right in her wheelhouse. But were brand-new for her time period.

She tried labor activism for a while, and even midwifery.  But she met Mabel Dodge, a trust socialite, and began rubbing shoulders and talking with the high-income intellectuals like Eugene O’Neil, who introduced her to free love.  As typical, she jumped in feet first.  She had already suggested to her husband that she would like to sexually experiment with different partners, but despite his puzzled hurt, she often resorted to free love to quench her hunger for meaning in life.  Her husband tried to change things by taking her to Paris, but there she spent much time in learning advanced contraceptive methods.  She abandoned her husband—and her marriage—and returned to New York now looking for income.  She decided to become a writer.  Her first issue of The Woman Rebel (its subheading:  “No Gods and No Masters”--obviously againsst patriarchy) showed the darkness of her mind.  She denounced marriage as a “degenerate institution” and sexual modesty as “obscene prudery"-you don't usually see those two words together).   Two of her issues even defended political assassinations.  But she mostly wrote about contraception and sexual liberation.  One issue irresponsibly recommended “Lysol douches” and “heavy doses of laxatives” to stop pregnancy.  She was promptly served with a subpoena indicting her for lewd and lascivious--and unproven-- articles.  Five years in the federal pen awaited her.  She fled the country under an assumed name—her Socialist friends forged her a passport.  She had to get a permanent babysitter for the three inconvenient children.

While she was a fugitive in England, she was fascinated by lectures on Thomas Malthus (the man is still considered an economic guru, by many).  He maintained that population would always grow faster than production of food, and land available.  This would cyclically lead to a crisis shortage of food, resulting in massive deaths—either by war or by famine, so as to reduce the population, so there would be enough food for fewer people.    Unfortunately, Malthus decided that the only responsible social policy was to managerially limit the growth in population. (But he was totally wrong on his growth in food assumption--productivity innovation has been vastly successful in providing enough food). Listen to his mind-blowing suggestions to "solve" the food problem:  “All children born beyond what would be required must necessarily perish…we should facilitate…this mortality…by encouraging their destruction.  Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits…we should crowd more people together, and court the return of the plague…and build their villages near stagnant pools.  But above all, we should reprobate (disapprove of) remedies for diseases, and restrain those…much mistaken men who use charity, relief, and missionary outreaches.”  Note that most of these monstrous suggestions would kill the poor--and, by the way, he figured the well-to-do would thrive.

This unbelievable idea (the opposite of Christ, who protected the poor and sick) was destined for unpopularity in a moral culture, but…Neo-Malthusianism that arose later, developed palatable arguments that saved the day for Malthusians. (I.e., they developed "better" excuses to cover up their death-theology).  The thesis was, again:  the physically unfit, the poor, and the incompetent were the ones “chosen” for suppression and isolation.  The “Neos” felt the best way to gradually eliminate them was through teaching them three things:  contraception, sterilization and abortion.  Well, Margaret agreed with this doctrine (prejudiced against the poorer blacks), and began preparations to lecture and educate the world.   In order to take the moral “high ground,” she reasoned that she should preach on how these three unholy solutions would lessen the threat of poverty, sickness, racial tension--all "due to" over-population.  “As has been scientifically proven,” she added.  A lie. Plunging wicked literature for scientific "proof," she read up on all the quack science of the day:  Phrenology (the idea that the shape and size of the skull proves mental ability and character), craniometricism (we can determine race and gender by the shape of the skull), Oneidianism (free love), lambrosianism (the idea that criminals have low foreheads, close-set eyes, and small pointed ears), hereditarianism (the idea that heredity plays a significant role in determining character and human nature).   They also believed in the power of genetics to solve many human social problems, and in Freudianism (which they translated as free sex).

But her favorite offshoot of Malthusianism was Eugenics, the idea that while we want to control breeding, we also want to increase desirable heritable characteristics.  Let others talk about restricting immigration or cutting off welfare; let others experiment with sterilization that produced nothing but sad stories that blew apart families; let others suggest an “extra-child tax,” or elimination of medical subsidies to “oversize” families, or eliminating paid maternity leave; but her thing was to help eliminate “bad racial stocks” and to “engineer the evolutionary ascent of man.”  Very noble.  In fact, many universities loved the Eugenics idea (this was in the 1920s) so much that her groups were endowed with departments that taught eugenics—we’re talking Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, and Stanford in particular.  (Where had the Ivy League schools gone?!) Funding was provided by the Rockefeller, Ford, and Carnegie Foundations.  Regardless of the big names, this was immoral; it was malevolent voodoo science; it was genocide, it was White Supremacy, because they zeroed in on the poor and the minority races to eliminate, as we shall see.

Hitler picked this eugenics idea up himself and interpreted it as "kill the Jews, and you have improved the Aryan race."  What is less known is that he forced sterilization, encouraged free sex among the virgin girls that looked Aryan, and also killed the mentally ill and disabled.  Genocide became the wave of the future at the time (in the early 1920s)—I’m sure Stalin wanted to achieve the same noble goals when he killed fifteen million Russian and Ukrainian kulaks (rebellious peasants who resisted forced collectivization). Mussolini killed four million Ethiopians, two million Eritreans (Russia massacred them too), and a million Serbs, Croats, and Albanians.   And I should say that Hitler didn’t stop with Jews; he killed two million Slavs and a million Poles—both pollutants to the Aryan race.

At this time Mrs. Sanger founded the American Birth Control League, which would in 1942 become Planned Parenthood (they went international in the late 1940s).

She also wrote a book, The Pivot of Civilization, a disgusting 284 pages of turgid, hateful words.  The book, like Malthus, hates charitable organizations—“they help spread misery and destitution…dangers which have today produced their full harvest of human waste.”   She unashamedly called for the elimination of “human weeds,” calls for the “cessation of charity,” for the segregation of “morons, misfits, and the maladjusted,” and for the sterilization of “genetically inferior races.”  (This was before abortion was legal).  Lest you question who she had in mind, she later writes that the “dysgenic races” included “Blacks, Hispanics, Amerinds” (Native Americans), and, would you believe, “Fundamentalists and Catholics.” (Such a book, if written today, it would be labeled racist and hate speech  I hope.)   But the book drew rave reviews.  If you were non-Aryan, if you were Red, Yellow, Black, or certain Whites, all were noxious in her sight. (She had some of Hitler’s cronies over for dinner from time to time—it was obvious she agreed with their genocidal plans.)  Later, she planned to have Planned Parenthood deliberately place the abortion clinics in particular neighborhoods with these minorities.  Or, as she called them, “these feeble-minded, syphilitic, irresponsible, and defective” people.

These statements, only slightly subdued, made her a star among the influential intelligentsia in England.  With the help of Havelock Ellis, whom she adored for his radical ideas and his unusual bedroom behavior (though he was impotent, he staged orgies, established a network for homosexual liaisons, and helped provide mescaline and other psychotropic and psychedelic drugs). The two of them plotted what would be politically expedient to broaden her popularity base.  It was decided she would have to tone down her rabid pro-abortion and socialistic stance (remember, this is still only in the 1920s), and she needed to take charge of her children once again, to show that she had family values.  But she could keep pounding on Eugenics in her lectures, since it was popular.  Thus prepared, she came back to America to launch a brilliant public relations campaign.  The authorities were intimidated to drop all previous charges; then she went on a 3-month speaking tour here.  She garnered controversial press coverage everywhere she went—but the upper income crust in America loved her, as did England.  This was right after the Great War, and people were doing everything they could to remove the scars of war—they were drinking, dancing, and forgetting.  Predictions for the future of America were bright.  Racial hatred was still active (this was only 40 years after Reconstruction.)  Many theologians chimed in that we were entering in the Biblical Millennium.  But her enthusiasm and popularity led her to be too bold—and she made a mistake.  She set up an illegal birth control clinic in the Brownsville section of New York—populated, of course, by immigrant Slavs, Latins, Italians, and Jews.  But within two weeks, the clinic was shut down as illegal—but she was only sentenced to 30 days in the workhouse. No problem.  As soon as she was released, she founded a new organization, the Birth Control League, and began to publish a new magazine, the Birth Control Review.

Despite criticism from evangelist Billy Sunday, she still garnered praise from people like Theodore Roosevelt, and got her intellectual friends—H.G. Wells, Pearl Buck, Julian Huxley, Havelock Ellis--to write articles for her.  It became a popular magazine.   By 1922, her fame was secure, and she went on a round-the-world lecture tour.  She took a less-radical stance.  She could no longer publicly talk about the “choking human undergrowth of morons and imbeciles should be segregated and sterilized,” —but that statement WAS recorded in the Review and in private discussions.  But, think how all you needed to know about the mindset of Hitler was to read Mein Kampf  (it was quickly translated into English), so all you needed know about the real mind of Margaret was to read the Birth Control Review.  It had articles of Fascist diatribe, of limiting immigration—by race; and Margaret herself wrote favoring concentration camps for all “dysgenic stocks.”  By her estimation, as much as 70% of the population fell into her undesirables.  Margaret and her cohorts really had their work cut out for them in their goal to limit these people.

But they were more than up to the task. Later, in 1939, she designed a “Negro Project,” as she called it, in response to requests from Southern states’ public health officials—as she called them, “men not generally known for their racial equanimity”—yet she was willing to work with them.  As she put it, “the mass of Negroes, particularly in the South, still breed carelessly and disastrously…the increase among Negroes, even more than among Whites, is from that portion of the population least intelligent and fit.”  Her group wanted to hire three or four “Colored Ministers…with engaging personalities…to propagandize for birth control.”  She wrote, “The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the Minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”  (This is the testimony of a friend and feminist, Linda Gordon, in her book, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right, 1974, page 229ff.)  Further, she said, “Let’s appear to let the colored run it.”  Another compatriot said, “I wonder if Southern Darkies can ever be trusted with…a clinic …except under white supervision.”  (This reminds me of a quote by G.K. Chesterton, a theologian and philosopher, the only intellectual voice at the time opposed to her ravings: “Eugenics asserts that all men must be so stupid that they cannot manage their own affairs; and also so clever that they can manage each other’s”).  Thus, this was a ruse concocted to get blacks to cooperate in their own elimination.  Sadly that project was quite successful.  Margaret’s dream of discouraging “the defective…from their reckless and irresponsible swarming and spawning” was beginning to be fulfilled.

In 1925 she hosted an international birth control conference, in which the attendees for the first time were together in claiming a high goal of unrestricted abortion in every country as soon as possible.  One of their themes was captured succinctly n the following group statement:  “The dullard, the gawk, the numbskull, he simpleton, the scatterbrain are amongst us in overshadowing numbers—intermarrying, breeding, inordinately prolific, threatening to overwhelm the world with their useless and terrifying gel.”

Despite her stunning success, Margaret was miserable.  During one of her many long absences, her daughter caught cold—and died of pneumonia.  Her reaction was to forget by having more sex—and she began indulging in the occult.  She attended séances, and applied into a Rosicrucian gathering (they claimed occult powers and knowledge).  She also dabbled with Theosophy (they believed in karma and reincarnation).  And she married again—in 1922—into big money; this time, to a Mr. J. Noah Slee.  But first she made him sign a prenuptial agreement that she would have her own apartment, feel free to come and go as she pleased, have friends in behind closed doors—and he would have to phone her from the other end of the apartment or seek her secretary to ask her for a dinner date.  I don’t know how he could have missed her intent here, but the milquetoast signed.  Slee never saw too much of her after that.

She may have been terribly unhappy, but she was terribly rich now too.  As befits her obsession and work ethic, she spent most of his money on her cause—traveling and getting in front of every microphone she could—day or night. She was a tenacious organizer.  She applied for every grant, appealed to every foundation, and pleaded for funds from many corporations and—from charity organizations, no less.  Planned Parenthood got its name and began reaching out for affiliates in 1942.  Her greatest coup was when her organization got a tax-exempt status from the IRS.  So she got treated as a charity.  How ironic, considering how she felt about them.

In 1938, Sweden became the first free nation to revert to abortions (Stalin and Hitler did it coercively).  The forebear of Planned Parenthood jumped into their countries with clinics.  They also persuaded Sweden to accept their sex-education programs for schools.  Knowing Mrs. Sanger’s sexual perversions, we can imagine what that might include.  More European nations allowed abortions over the next 18 years.

When Adolf Hitler’s holocaust was laid open in 1945, she backpedaled and covered up her many ties to Hitler’s cronies.  She spent strongly on a massive propaganda blitz aimed at the U.S. middle class; she emphasized patriotism, personal choice, and family values (imagine that from her). She won additional endorsements from Eleanor Roosevelt and Katherine Hepburn.  And from Albert Einstein, Nehru, John Rockefeller, Emperor Hirohito, and Henry Ford (a notorious anti-Semite).   But none of these encomiums gave her any joy.  By 1949 she became addicted to both drugs and alcohol.  She was quietly removed from the Board several times, but they found that they couldn’t survive without her.  She forced their hand by dying in 1966, at age 86.

But Planned Parenthood lived on, and carried her legacy with the same driving spirit as hers.  In the 1960’s, even the middle class loosened up its morals in the U.S.  In 1967, the American Medical Association began calling for the decriminalization of abortion.   So much for the Hippocratic Oath.  About the only powerful opposition voice in this time came from Pope Paul VI, in 1968, whose encyclical Humanae Vitae reaffirmed the sanctity of life.  But pretty much everyone ignored traditions--it was the late '60s, right?  Several states loosened restrictions on fetus-killing procedures (such as, “abortion is OK to preserve her mental health" etc)—Colorado, California, and North Carolina for starters did this huge loophole.  By the end of 1971, half a million legal abortions were being performed in the U.S. each year.  The rate today is higher, but we lack data. Estimates have been calculated.  Worldwide, the numbers are astronomical.  Worldometer (useful in tracking the effects of Covid) has this to say:

The data on abortions displayed on the Worldometer's counter is based on the latest estimates on worldwide abortions published by various sources, including the World Health Organization (WHO). According to WHO, every year in the world there are around 73 million induced abortions. This corresponds to approximately 200,000 abortions per day.

In the USA, where nearly 30% of pregnancies are unintended and 40% of these are terminated by abortion, there are between 1,500 to 2,500 abortions per day.

That's over 700,000 per year.  The US peaked at just over 1.5 million in  1980, right after Planned Parenthood began keeping records (they were forced to do so).  We cannot celebrate this being cut in half.  States are continuing to defy the supposed breakage of Roe v. Wade; Maine just passed a law allowing abortion right up to the date of birth. The main problem we have to contend with, as real Christians, is the fact that the majority of the US public favors abortions.  61% accept it, some with "some exceptions."  The exceptions do not consider that even a zygote has the sacred image of God in them, and are KNOWN by medicine as having a Separate DNA from the mother, and is thus a separate human being.

Planned Parenthood also exercised Sanger's moral legacy (an oxymoron)--in 1970. Here’s how they did things in the Philippines, where abortion was illegal. Planned Parenthood  offered “menstrual extractions”—vacuuming the uterus—and the procedure was done by those who were not medically qualified.  It was still an abortion, but a tricky play on words enabled them to still kill the baby and avoid the legalities. The authorities let them get away with this simple deception.  They were more brazen in Brazil, where they knew there was a lack of legal enforcement.  Despite sterilization being illegal, they performed it anyway—on 20 million every year at that time.  An internal directive from their office in London (this fact was uncovered in 1981), gave them the OK on deceptions like this.  It said “…action outside the law, and even in violation of it, is part of the process of stimulating change.”

But still they have this great image to the public. The organization is coated with Teflon, I guess.  In a 2015 video entrapment, they violated three laws, where they were caught (1)  selling dead baby’s body parts, (2) through partial birth abortion, many beyond state limits; (3) without the mother’s consent to the act of manipulating the abortion procedure.  They got off scot-free—despite admitting to these things on tape; then they had the audacity to sue the video investigator.  The U.S.House found Planned Parenthood did nothing wrong, and a federal judge laid down a $2 million verdict against the videographer!  This horror happened  because  their  federal judge had, in the past, helped open and run a Planned Parenthood clinic.  My question is: Why the silence?  Where were the Christian churches?  If we cared, giant protests should have happened.  And:  Who determined that this federal judge would decide the case?  Of course, the public knows nothing and cares nothing about this case.

Our tax money actually pays Planned Parenthood over $554 million a year to run their grisly service. They like to keep hidden how much of our tax money goes for abortions.  Despite their arguments about a range of services they provide, abortion consumes 94% of their expenses.  Let no one kid you—they are about profit.   Smaller clinics are staying in business by adding chemical abortions with RU486 to their offerings, often via non-nurse presence.  I'm speaking of web-cam hookup with an abortionist at one of the larger mega-clinics. This is a cost-saver, since they don’t need local expertise.  But none of this makes abortion safer–in fact, it increases the danger to the mother–but it does make more centers profitable.

Why are we paying half a billion of our tax money a year to allow Planned Parenthood to kill babies?  Well, ask the 61% above. So we conclude that Americans don’t have much to say against abortion.  Do we have a moral anchor any more?! This is America now.  Why is Planned Parenthood the only organization with a tax-exempt status that is allowed to spend $12 million every two years to elect Democrats—when political bribery by charities is a violation of the law?  Nobody cares.  The unborn need a bigger voice on their behalf—like God. Since we have not defended the innocent, since we had no mercy on them, God will have no mercy on us--or the babies' murderers--mothers and doctors.  We have judged the babies that they are not worth living.  So God will judge us.

 

Refugees are Not the Bad Guys

 Let me begin with a bold statement:  If we are pro-life, we are pro-refugee.  Let's be Christian and do something about it.

Per an international count, at least 89.3 million people around the world have been forced to flee their homes. Among them are nearly 27.1 million refugees, around 41 per cent of whom are under the age of 18. Half of them come from Afghanistan, Ukraine, or Syria.  With Ukraine, Russia has been bombing them as they walk and drive in trying to escape. Also, in a recent blog, I wrote on how the Western powers (like the USA and France), in a conference called to order on that subject, refused Jewish refugees from Germany in 1938, even though it was certain that they would be further persecuted, even murdered by Hitler. That did happen, planned by Nazis  beginning two years later.

Finally, migrants trying to escape gang-related kidnappings, and political and economic crises in Haiti are foundering, even dying, in rough waters off the Florida coast. This was human smuggling that frequently goes bad. I can understand why they seek illegal immigration--who would want to stay in our 200 detention centers? There are over 30,000 people on any given average day in those facilities. 93% that are assigned there spend over 6 months, some as long as 4 years there. It is usually decided that many do not have a great "reason" to flee their country, so are deported back to their home country--many who no longer have homes there. Evidently skyrocketing kidnapping and gang killings are not an "acceptable" excuse to give a pass on immigration into the U.S. The following article that I first blogged was made under President Trump, whose campaign promise was that he would tighten up on allowing refugees and immigrants. I still like his making the Supreme Court conservative, but when it comes to this, my question is, Why? Is our Christianity so shallow that we cannot have new people? Our abortion levels are a big reason why our total population is on a path to decline. Plus, our young people do not want to get married, or have babies til' later.  A declining population is bad news for the economy; just read up on Japan for proof on that. Plus, we are crying for workers, when the huge number of Baby Boomers are retiring. In the lodging and restaurant sector (where many refugees and immigrants work), the current job openings are over 1.4 million; new hires are about equal to the number separated, so domestic has not done the job. These new people's spending habits would help us (statistics prove that almost all get off of welfare quickly, and are an add, not a welfare, from the economy).

After all that rational talk about reasons, let's look at the compassionate heart God wants us to have, as well.

Original article by Ed Stetzer

The U.S. allowed 25,000 refugees into the country in fiscal year 2022, but they used only 20% of 125,000 refugee spots allocated by the Biden administration.  The heads of the Homeland Security and the ICE have slowed things down.

“Most refugees from the Middle East are women and children who have suffered the assaults of ISIS terrorists and civil war,” said National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) president Leith Anderson; “We have the opportunity to rescue, help, and bless some of the world’s most oppressed and vulnerable families.”  Many of these are from Syria and Afghanistan, but there are increasing numbers displaced from Central America.  Perhaps the saddest situation is Venezuela.  Death from starvation or nutrient deficiencies, and frequent unavailability of water, goes on all the time.  Add to this the entire economic collapse under Hugo Chavez, a totally inept leader who doesn't seem to care.  There's plenty of violence, and the country is nearly torn by civil war.  Yet of their 5.4 million refugees, we are blocking their arrival--because they don't fit our definition of "refugees." Almost all their displaced have ended up in other Latin American countries or the Caribbean.

It is not wrong to be wise and cautious. But...too much of the policy is driven by unfounded fear of refugees.  Yes, it is to be expected that terrorist attacks around the world and in our country, including the Orlando and San Bernardino shootings, would cause all of us to pause long enough to consider what kind of world we live in and how best to ensure safety for ourselves and our families. But those were not refugees.

There is a 1 in 3.64 billion per year chance that you will be killed by a refugee-turned-terrorist in a given year. If those odds concern you, please do not get in a bathtub, car, or even go outside, which have equal odds of harm. For contrast, there were about 700 tragic murders in Chicago alone last year compared to 0 people in the U.S. who were killed last year by a jihadist-style terrorist attack.

Fear is a real emotion, and it can cause us to make decisions we wouldn’t have otherwise made.   But at the core of who we are as followers of Christ is a commitment to care for the vulnerable, the marginalized, the abused, the wanderer. And fear cannot replace that core—as a matter of fact, we Christians are the ones who proclaim that we have hope rather than fear.

Today, millions of people have had to flee home, safety, family, and livelihood due to threats of violence. And each of these have names and faces and lives and stories. This is propitious moment for action in which God is calling us to be the people He has called us to be in hard, but life-changing ways.

If America bans refugees, it makes a statement to the world that we don’t want to make. It is the picture of someone wealthy who sits, arms crossed and turned away from the plight on the helpless, the homeless, the broken.

We must do better.  Jesus addresses this in Luke 16:19-31; please read it prayerfully:

 “There was a certain rich man who was clothed in purple and fine linen and [a]fared sumptuously every day. ²⁰ But there was a certain beggar named Lazarus, full of sores, who was laid at his gate, ²¹ desiring to be fed with [b]the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table. Moreover the dogs came and licked his sores. ²² So it was that the beggar died, and was carried by the angels to Abraham’s bosom. The rich man also died and was buried. ²³ And being in torments in Hades, he lifted up his eyes and saw Abraham afar off, and Lazarus in his bosom. ²⁴ “Then he cried and said, ‘Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus that he may dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame.’ ²⁵ But Abraham said, ‘Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things; but now he is comforted and you are tormented. ²⁶ And besides all this, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed, so that those who want to pass from here to you cannot, nor can those from there pass to us.’ ²⁷ “Then he said, ‘I beg you therefore, father, that you would send him to my father’s house, ²⁸ for I have five brothers, that he may testify to them, lest they also come to this place of torment.’ ²⁹ Abraham said to him, ‘They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them.’ ³⁰ And he said, ‘No, father Abraham; but if one goes to them from the dead, they will repent.’ ³¹ But he said to him, ‘If they do not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded though one rise from the dead.’ ”

As you can see, our God does not look kindly on ignoring those in desperate straits.

Last year, more than 100 evangelical leaders, including Rich Stearns, Stephan Bauman, Jo Anne Lyon, Frank Page, Alton Garrison, Jamie Aten, and Sue Elworth, signed a statement which says, in part, “We will not be motivated by fear but by love for God and others.”

There is no more critical time than now for God’s people to instead turn towards the helpless, the homeless, the broken, with open arms and hearts, ready to pour out every ounce of love we can muster.

Sure, conversations with our neighbors are sometimes hard as we express our solidarity with the refugee and those who are broken and in need of safety and dignity, but we must pursue what is right anyway. We are pro-life, but we must remember all that entails, from conception to death and each moment in between.

I am pro-life—and that includes for refugees. Recently, many of us focused on the unborn, and rightly so, but I’m also here to stand up for the born, made-in-God’s-image, refugee as well.

God help us be the people He’s called us to be in this generation, in this moment.  In the meantime, #WeWelcomeRefugees.

Acknowledgement:  Ed Stetzer and Christianity Today