Posted on 02/27/2014 4:13:41 PM PST by Morgana
Returning home from a recent business trip, I flew over the city purported to have more churches per square mile than any other in America. As I gazed down sleepily at the numberless steeples checkering the landscape and dimly pondered their equivocal significance, I was suddenly startled awake by a strange transformation occurring before my incredulous eyes: The spires of the church buildings had morphed into so many cruciform chimneys belching skyward an almost palpable, smoke-like darkness.
Only the darkness wasn't smoke. What I saw ascending to heaven from each sanctuary was praise—the grotesquely incongruous praise of Christians worshiping a God they fancied demanded no remorse and no repentance for doing precious little to stop the extermination of the most vulnerable of His children. * * *
If you're as old as I am, you will recall: We swore we would never forget the German death camps. We swore we would never let them be rebuilt. We swore we would never let such a monstrously evil thing happen again. Not on our watch. No, not ever.
But, effectively, we did forget the death camps. We let their equivalent be rebuilt in America's 850 abortion clinics. We let the monstrously evil thing happen again, in spades. History has repeated itself by powers of 10. For where the Nazis had their 6 million victims, we have on our hands the blood of 60 million.
Not a day passes that I don't ask myself, how, in the name of all that is holy, have we let this happen? How, from week to week, are we able to assemble in houses of worship and, with ostensibly clear consciences, preach and hear sermons and sing songs about the love of God, when we are so fantastically out of touch with what the love of God is all about? What happened to caring for “the least of these”? Where is our love for them?
I know, you're weary of hearing the now-almost-emptied-of-meaning comparison to Hitler's systematic extermination of those he considered untermenschen: the “less than humans.” Believe me, I'm weary of drawing the comparison. Not because it doesn't fit; it does. But because it no longer produces outrage. Witnessing Christian apathy on abortion makes me wonder if Auschwitz enraged us not so much for the depth as for the novelty of its evil. After all, we weren't accustomed in the 1940s to mass-produced, assembly-line murder. These days we are.
I say “we,” because it is we—Christians—who could bring about a swift end to the abortion holocaust if we really wanted to. But 40-plus years of deafening pulpit silence argues we don't really want to.
Christians are quick to say they believe in the sanctity of life from conception to natural death, but most do little, practically, to incarnate that belief and help change ours from a culture of death to a culture of life. Most are pro-life in belief but not in action. Most do little to actually help abolish abortion.
Remarking on the failure of the church to do little more than deal with the effects of great evil after the fact, Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “We are not simply to bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.”
Click "like" if you are PRO-LIFE!
If we were serious about ending abortion, we could easily drive a spoke into the wheels of the machinery that drives Christian apathy and inaction. I've outlined an embarrassingly simple One- Minute Strategy to End Abortion that I believe would work—if only pastors would implement it.
But many American pastors and churchgoers are more offended that responsibility and blame should be laid at their feet than that 3,500 babies a day are being put to death. This, by itself, ought to be a potent wake-up call that there is something horribly wrong with a Christianity more upset by what it considers unfair defamation and wrongly placed blame than it is by the mass extermination of its little neighbors.
But is the blame wrongly placed?
In common jurisprudence, when you have a duty to prevent the commission of a crime but fail to make the effort, you are complicit in its commission. You are what's known as an accomplice. Christ's brother James put it this way: “The one who knows the right thing to do and does not do it, to him it is sin.” We know the right thing to do.
Yet we persist in being willing accomplices to the evil of our age. We could end our silence on abortion, but we don't want to pay the price for standing up and speaking out on behalf of those who can't defend themselves. We prefer an “abundant life” Christianity that includes all the blessings but none of the suffering Christ promised His followers they would face if they were true to Him.
We have become expert at devising reasons why we can't make the abolition of abortion a church priority. So expert, in fact, that if every baby aborted in America were Jewish, we would be the pride of Hitler's SS for sanctioning their obscene “final solution” with our steadfast refusal to oppose it. What a testimony.
* * *
As my plane touched down on familiar soil, I found myself haunted by the opening words of a contemporary Christian song. I recalled, with no little irony, that it had been the theme song of the recent Missions Conference at my church, my own dear church:
Carry the light Carry the light Go and tell the children they are precious in His sight . . .
Suddenly, I was weeping bitterly for them.
But even more bitterly for the precious children.
” But 40-plus years of deafening pulpit silence argues we don’t really want to. “
501C has castrated the virility of the Churches, just like LBJ INTENDED!!!!
LBJ or Margaret Sanger?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/501(c)
Has done so much damage to the soul of this country because in a way it established the religion of forcing other religions to cater to the state’s wishes concerning their own 1st amendment rights...
Preaching repentance is the #1 failing of churches across America, and perhaps the world.
If you don’t repent, then there is not true conversion. If there is no true conversion, there is no true conviction.
Without conviction, there is no moral authroity.
No moral authority means going along with the world and turning God into a sugar-daddy that’s there to make us feel good and help when we get into trouble.
Christians today do not read their Bibles and attempt to apply it to their daily living.
Oh I know he did that but Sanger got the churches to accept birth control thus now they accept abortion and don’t preach against it. Before Sanger all churches were against contraception. So I have to ask again LBJ or Margaret Sanger? It’s a tough question.
So I have to ask again LBJ or Margaret Sanger? It’s a tough question.
One was the right hand of the devil the other the left....
I would say Sanger definately, but besides Neutering the churches LBJ also established the welfare state that reinforced Sanger’s propaganda By tailoring a problem that well meanign people thought that Sanger’s message would solve, of course only to make it worse....
One way would be another Great Awakening where the hearts of people across the country are changed. Think it might take more than a minute.
What could take a minute? Blowing up the U.S.A if you had a gazillion gigaton Nuke? Maybe. No more abortions at least in this country.
Churches are going to lose their tax exempt status anyway. It’s just a matter of time. We might as well lose it for something important - even if we have to go back to meeting in homes. We’d be putting more or our “tithes” into ministry instead of building maintenance.
But, effectively, we did forget the death camps. We let their equivalent be rebuilt in America’s 850 abortion clinics. We let the monstrously evil thing happen again, in spades. History has repeated itself by powers of 10. For where the Nazis had their 6 million victims, we have on our hands the blood of 60 million.
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We don’t have to go back that far. We Americans forget real easy, real fast. 9/11 is a perfect example.
so what is the one minute strategy...?
Evangelical Christians vote about 77 to 80% pro-life, so it isn’t all denominations.
A lot of Christians, as individuals and as churches, have done what they can to stop abortion. I get so tired of people like you – no-doubt well-meaning but thoughtless of your caustic rant – castigating Christians for bad things that happen in this country. Most churches I know and have attended have done all kinds of things to try to stop abortion and help with problem pregnancies. Many Christians and many churches are being beaten up on every side, and you have to step up and kick, too. Bleh. Shame on you.
I believe that many churches will not talk about abortion because they are afraid that it would cause some of their own members to quit coming. The statistics show that just as many abortions happen to churched women as non-churhed women. Same with divorce, adultery, etc. It is a sad day, but when you consider that churches felt they needed to water down the message to not step on people’s toes, what do you expect? Now the church is demanding that gays be treated as equals in the faith...etc.
Result? Half the congregation is now worshipping elsewhere, or nowhere, and the treasury is low-to-empty. Our reward is the babies that are born to live instead of aborted to die, but if you want to know why abortion continues unabated in the US, simply come to our church this Sunday: there will be at least one empty pew available for each of you.
*** I flew over the city purported to have more churches per square mile than any other in America.***
Siloam Springs, Arkansas?
Siloam Springs, Arkansas?
I once heard that city was Wheaton, Illinois.
Spend and hour in your Adoration Chapel each week and pray for an end to abortion.
Las Vegas, NV, I believe.
Spend an hour
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