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Last week I sat down with a pastor who wanted to know what to do in response to abortion. As we moved onto our second coffee, amongst all the excellent questions he posed about how to speak and act inside and outside the church came this one, framed negatively: How should we not do it? At this point I mentioned what seems to be many UK pastors’ number one reason for saying or doing not very much about abortion: We don’t want to do this “the American way”. Though suffering from a lack of definition, I think we all understand (talk about “unconscious bias”!) what is suggested by “the American way”. The fear is that to make a big deal of abortion would be to make God out to be a Republican, and Donald Trump his final prophet. The tone will be “shouty” and “unnuanced”, and the application points will include things such as shooting your local abortionist or wagging a finger at women who’ve had abortions. Perhaps a hatred of women in general will be encouraged too, because, as we all know, Trump is certified misogynist. It’s not a look most UK pastors are going for. To his great credit, my pastor friend immediately volunteered that it was precisely this (minus perhaps my elaboration) that had held him back thus far. It was a confession, not a defense. He genuinely wants to move forward now and make it right. There are many out there, like my pastor friend, who have somehow fallen under this impression (I wonder who’s been whispering in their ear) that there really are only these two options: “American” or “nothing”. But they know that they cannot do nothing: love for the babies, the women, our nation, God’s word, compel them. At the same time, the Lord’s renown is precious to them too, and the last thing they’d ever want to do is misrepresent Christ or sully his gospel, which they fear “the American way” would. And so they feel stuck. But they are not content. They want to find a way through. This is for them. I must restrain myself – purely because of space – from defending my brothers and sisters across the Atlantic from a stereotype which is itself unnuanced and judgmental, evidentially unwarranted, little more than a racist slur. There are many pastors on that side of the pond who don’t do it “the American way” (John Piper, for example) – but don’t expect that to get through our double mainstream (even Christian) media lens unfiltered. I will also have to leave for another day the very important question of Christian engagement in politics. I am certainly not trying to argue here or anywhere that Christians should stay out of these things. All I am seeking to do here is to encourage you that when it comes to preaching on abortion, “the American way” and “nothing” are not your only two options. There’s a third way. You can preach on abortion without the MAGA hat. 1) Start with the gospel The gospel of Jesus Christ is a great leveller. Not only does it humble the proud and lift up the lowly, declaring that all of us are sinners in need of a Saviour: it cuts across the ethnic, social, “us and them” divides that we human beings like to construct. I am not saying that political stances are immaterial. Some of them are deeply moral and there are certainly moments in history and around the world where it seems that the Christian must take a particular side (consider Bonhoeffer, the German Church, and the Nazi Party). But these are conclusions rather than starting-points, and they are subordinate to the most pressing question facing every man and woman on the planet. The crucial distinction between all people everywhere is not Republican or Democrat, nor even “pro-life” or “pro-choice”: it’s that there are sinners who’ve bowed the knee to Jesus and received his forgiveness as a gift, and there are sinners who haven’t yet. If someone of a different political leaning or position on abortion comes into my church, I want to be sure that they hear the gospel first and foremost, loud and clear, and that any ethical applications are built on and from that, nothing else. Look at it another way: I could have a church that agrees with me morally and politically – but for the wrong reasons. It could just be fear of the tribe that got them there. Moreover, some of them might not even be saved. So for the salvation of my hearers, but also to make sure that any ethic taught is a truly Christian ethic, I must start with the gospel. The gospel must continually form, inform, reform all our thinking and acting. There is also this colossal reality that cannot be ignored: 1 in 3 women has at least one abortion by the age of 45, and it’s not that different in our churches. If I don’t make sure these post-abortive mothers (and fathers) in my congregation know that, contrary to their fears, abortion is not the unforgivable sin, that Christ’s mercy is vast enough for them, I am not doing my job. I am also not doing my job if I say nothing about abortion, because it is precisely the silence around abortion that makes so many feel that what they’ve done is unforgivable, because their pastors can’t even mention the word. 2) Lead with the facts You don’t need me to tell you that abortion is an emotive issue. It can be tempting to dive in with (often justified) feelings, opinions, judgments. Can I encourage you instead to allow the facts to do most of the talking for you. The humanity of the unborn child is the absolute crux of this issue. Don’t just claim it: show it! This footage from the Endowment for Human Development is hugely impactful and paints at least a thousand words. Bring out the biblical case for the value of human beings right from conception and you won’t need to say much more: you’ve already laid the foundation that changes the entire debate. And all without a flag, gun, or pick-up truck in sight! It’s not enough merely to show the humanity of the baby, however: you also need to show the inhumanity of what’s being done to them. Every reformer from Wilberforce and Clarkson to MLK has known and practised this simple principle: injustice has to be exposed. The most objective and respectful way you can do this is to offer people the opportunity (I always give them a warning and permission to close their eyes) to see abortion for themselves. Again, you are letting the facts speak. You’re not protesting abortion: abortion is protesting itself. 3) Frame it as a discipleship issue Jesus insists (e.g. Matthew 28) that we are to obey everything he taught. Much of this is captured by the summary: “Love your neighbour as yourself.” Loving our neighbours – in this case the babies and their parents – is not an optional extra, nor can it be dismissed as something political or social as opposed to Christian. It’s a core part of basic discipleship. Followers of Jesus love their neighbours. Majoring on biblical language and concepts like this (“true worship”, “compassion”, “taking up your cross”, “suffering”, “boldness”, “truth”) will help your listeners to think and act biblically, and will make sure that what you are saying is rightly different in tone and angle from some political rally. This is how I seek to teach on abortion. Let me know if it sounds American to you in any way! If you're a pastor can I urge you to make a commitment to teach on abortion regularly yourself? I agree with Vaughan Roberts that merely referencing it as an aside isn't enough: it needs special focus and devoted teaching. And I hope you can see now that "the American way" is not your only option. May I close with a word of caution? Or perhaps an encouragement to count the cost. Jesus, as you know, was called a glutton and a drunkard (Luke 7:34). Do you think he was a glutton and a drunkard? Of course not. But people maligned him as such. Jesus promises his followers that if the world hated him, it will hate them also (John 15:18). Specifically he blesses those who will have all kinds of evil spoken falsely against them (Matthew 5:11). You can preach on abortion the “right” way, in a way that pleases the Lord, and you can still get hated for it, unjustly, even from within your church – but more often by people who weren’t actually there and didn’t even hear it. Someone might even call you a Trump-supporter. Is that a price that you're willing to pay, for the sake of preserving a baby’s life, ministering the gospel to a post-abortive mother, preaching the whole counsel of God?

"Black lives matter." “Blue lives matter.” “White lives matter.” Voices cry out, vying to be heard, trying to climb above the clamour. Like rainforest trees they race upward, desperate to burst out from under canopy shadows and reach that got-to-have-it sunlight. Whether there’s space for everyone up there or some have to be deposed for others to ascend I leave for others to discuss. I want to ask a more fundamental question here. What if, when you get up there, you discover that you have no roots? Without roots, the very sunlight that you seek only accelerates your withering demise. What if the very basis for your entire cause is missing? What if no lives matter? Do Any Lives Matter? If humans are considered valuable only insofar as they contribute to or benefit from certain things (economic prosperity, health, ethnic or genetic “improvement”, the advancement of certain politics or ideology, happiness, education, national security, quality of life), their value is not inherent, it is only incidental, and it is taken away the moment that the function in question ceases. It is fair to say, therefore, that this kind of “value” is not really value at all: humans are no more “valuable” than a carton is to someone eating a Big Mac, they can and should be thrown away as soon as they are no longer of use. So what we really need to discover is this: Can the case be made for the intrinsic value of all human beings, regardless of their functions or capacities (size, age, sex, disability, happiness, intelligence, memory).? If it can, we have a solid basis for “lives matter”. If it can’t, we have no basis at all. There really are only these two options. Black Lives ARE Matter?! The prevailing worldview in the West right now seems to be, broadly speaking, secularism: the belief that there is no Creator God but instead all there really is, is matter. Everything around us is here by chance. Collisions happened, over billions of years, and here we are today. No design. And therefore, though this conclusion is rarely said out loud, there is no meaning. If all is matter, nothing really matters. It merely happens. Human beings, far from being intrinsically valuable, are simply the latest model in a long line of (accidentally produced) carriers of “selfish” genes. Their “value” in the evolutionary narrative is totally contingent on function (speed, intelligence, size, fertility): they “matter” only insofar as they help to advance the species. The logical conclusion of all this is that caring for the vulnerable, the elderly, the disabled is nothing more than slowing down the onward march of evolutionary progress. What a waste of precious fuel and oxygen – propping up faulty gene-carriers! It is horrifying to see instances past and present where this logic is followed, but mercifully most atheists are inconsistent and we are spared the full weight of these terrible conclusions. Being consistent doesn’t prove that you’re right. But being inconsistent does prove that you’re wrong. Atheists who want to uphold any sense of the intrinsic worth of human beings are inconsistent and therefore wrong. Their worldview provides no basis whatsoever for the intrinsic worth of human beings; indeed, it expressly works against the notion. Imago Dei The intrinsic worth of human beings and the reality of good and evil that we all intuit so deeply can only be defended if there is a God. Atheist philosophy professor Mark Joel in his Amoral Manifesto gets this: “without God, there is no morality”. If you want to believe in human rights, you have to believe in God. And not just any “god”: you have to believe in a loving God who has actually dignified his creatures with value. Indeed, human rights were founded on this precise worldview. The United States’ Declaration of Independence states: “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights”. This is based on the Judaeo-Christian belief that humans are made in the image of God (Genesis 1:26-7; 9:6) – they bear the likeness, and something of the dignity, of their Maker. They are not just stuff. According to a biblical worldview, we are all in some sense God's children (Acts 17:28). One family, one race, under God: sacred. Root And Fruit It is of course no secret that in the United States as elsewhere, adherence to these expressed convictions has been, to put it mildly, patchy. Many have claimed the name of Christ yet done horrific things against his character and commands. Nevertheless, a strong correlation can be mapped between a nation’s relationship with the Christian worldview and their esteem of human worth. The point I am about to make is not that racism in the post-Christian UK is unworthy of attention or action. But as we respond to it, let it not escape our attention that there is racism at an objectively higher level in many other nations such as China, where it is believed that over 1 million people are actually being detained (and worse) by order of the Government simply because they are Uighur Muslims; or India, where some school children are formally required to sit apart from everyone else at meals because they were born in a “lower caste” with darker skin. If we think the UK criminal justice system is harsh, consider North Korea. If we think our politicians and police are corrupt, consider day-to-day life and business experience in many sub-Saharan African countries. Gender equality: Saudi Arabia. We have plenty of planks in our own eye, but it is very difficult to maintain that the Christian-based West is more oppressive than, for example, cultures based on atheistic communism or Islam. (Although held to be a creator, Allah is not believed to have dignified his creatures with his own image, as the Jewish/Christian God has; the imago Dei is unique to Judaism/Christianity.) The freedom even to write and read things like this is not something that could be taken for granted in many parts of the world today. Liberty, equality, rule of law; countless hospitals, schools, orphanages worldwide; the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade: all of these are gifts from a Christian worldview. The point I’m trying to make is that theological worldview makes all the difference when it comes to human rights. Running Out Of Gas Someone might retort, “But we’ve long since departed from Christianity in the West and we’re doing fine! Human rights continue to advance!” Are we doing fine? Like a car that’s run out of petrol, our momentum is keeping us going for a while, but we are beginning to find out the hard way: we’ve got nothing left in the tank. Indeed, the wheels are already coming off. Some who think they are the world’s leading campaigners for human rights are actively agitating for the killing of more humans. Some who claim to care for black lives seem not to care very much when the black lives in question are not on the same political side as them. That these casualties are tolerated is proof that it is not humans that are the intrinsic good here, it’s certain ideological outcomes; people matter only insofar as they are pawns in these political manoeuvres. But the statistic that really exposes our human progress delusion is this: Last year in England and Wales one quarter of babies in the womb were deliberately killed by our doctors, with our permission and our money. Worldwide, some 50 million babies are killed every year. This killing is far more prolific – and state-sanctioned – than any other killing in the history of the world. Start At The Beginning In a sense, the rights of the child in the womb are the defining human rights battle of the day. Not all of us are black, Jewish, disabled, or female. But every single one of us was once a baby. There can be no true justice for black lives, blue lives, or any lives, unless we first establish that baby lives matter (black, blue, or otherwise). Anyone who declares “black lives matter” whilst upholding “access” to “abortion” contradicts themselves instantly: black lives don’t matter if baby lives don’t matter. How can it be argued that baby lives matter? Pathetic, speechless, weak, productivity-negative babies? For that, you need a loving Creator, who has endowed even the least of us with this immeasurable dignity: that we are made in the image of God. That, and only that, is why lives matter.

Black lives matter.” “Blue lives matter.” “White lives matter.” “Downs Syndrome lives matter.” “Baby lives matter.” Voices cry out, vying to be heard, trying to climb above the clamour. Like rainforest trees they race upward, desperate to burst out from under canopy shadows and reach that got-to-have-it sunlight. Whether there’s space for everyone up there or some have to be deposed for others to ascend I leave for others to discuss. I want to ask a more fundamental question here. What if, when you get up there, you discover that you have no roots? Without roots, the very sunlight that you seek only accelerates your withering demise. What if the very basis for your entire cause is missing? What if human rights don’t exist? Come with me if you will, dive deeper beneath the waves of tribalism and signals, analysis of people’s motives, the correctness of people’s wordings. (Anyone else weary of all that?) Come below the currents of competing political theories and ideologies. There’s something more fundamental, more important to explore. Do humans matter? Do Any Humans Matter? It would be silly to dismiss this as a silly question. A brief survey of the history of the human race could be summed up in Robert Burns’s four booming words: “man’s inhumanity to man”. Even today, a human being’s most likely cause of death is being killed by another human being. Much as we would all like to believe that we uphold the value of other human beings, at best our conviction is shaky and easily overridden, at worst we have no regard for one another whatsoever. It should go without saying that if we struggle to make the case for human beings in general, any attempt to alleviate the plight of a particular segment of that race – for example, black lives – is doomed to failure. It cannot provide a rationale for itself. You have to put the strings on a guitar before you can fine-tune the guitar. The viability of every human rights cause depends on this, so it is not a merely “academic” question. If we find ourselves unable to justify our belief in the absolute value of all human beings, it is reasonable to question whether the idea is true at all in the first place. So: do human beings matter? Can we find a basis for human rights? And might that basis also provide some helpful definition and even guidance as to how to advance human rights, in general and in particular? Intrinsic Or Instrumental? At this point it is worth clarifying what we actually mean by human rights and worth. Human beings can be considered valuable either intrinsically or instrumentally. If human beings have value intrinsically, it means that they have value in and of themselves, simply by merit of being what they are: human beings. Nothing to do with what they may or may not be able to “bring to the table”, and regardless of their functions or capacities (size, age, sex, disability, happiness, intelligence, memory). If humans are valuable instrumentally, by contrast, they are considered valuable only insofar as they contribute to or benefit from other things that are themselves considered intrinsically good (economic prosperity, health, ethnic or genetic “improvement”, the advancement of certain politics or ideology, happiness, education, national security, quality of life). Their value is not inherent, it is only incidental, and it is taken away the moment that the function in question ceases. It is fair to say, therefore, that this “value” is not really value at all. Under this view humans are no more valuable than a carton is to someone eating a Big Mac: it can and should be thrown away as soon as it’s no longer of use. So what we really need to discover is this: Can the case be made for the intrinsic value of all human beings? Regardless of their functions or capacities. If it can, we have a solid basis for human rights. If it can’t, we have no basis for human rights at all. There really are only these two options. Black Lives ARE Matter?! It can be argued that the prevailing worldview in the West right now is, broadly speaking, secularism: the belief that there is no Creator God but instead all there really is, is matter. Everything around us is here by chance. Collisions happened, over billions of years, and here we are today. No design. And therefore, though this conclusion is rarely said out loud, there is no meaning. If all is matter, nothing really matters. It merely happens. Human beings, far from being intrinsically valuable, are simply the latest model in a long line of (accidentally produced) carriers of “selfish” genes. Their “value” in the evolutionary narrative is totally contingent on function (speed, intelligence, size, fertility): they “matter” only insofar as they help to advance the species. But, of course, “selfish” and “value” and “matter” are only used as kinds of metaphor in this world: ideas of personality and moral worth are actually just constructs projected by chemicals in the brain; they don’t really exist. As Dawkins put it so eloquently, and honestly: “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.” The logical conclusion of all this is that caring for the vulnerable, the elderly, the disabled is nothing more than slowing down the onward march of evolutionary progress. What a waste of precious fuel and oxygen – propping up faulty gene-carriers! It is horrifying to see instances past and present where this logic is followed, but mercifully most atheists are inconsistent and we are spared the full weight of these terrible conclusions. Even card-carrying atheists like Dawkins live as though love, purpose, evil, good are real, though logically they ought to practise what they preach and dispense with them altogether. Being consistent doesn’t prove that you’re right. But being inconsistent does prove that you’re wrong. Atheists who want to uphold any sense of the intrinsic worth of human beings are inconsistent and therefore wrong. Their worldview provides no basis whatsoever for the intrinsic worth of human beings; indeed, it expressly works against the notion. Can a rational basis for human worth and dignity be found elsewhere, then? Imago Dei The only way to make sense of the idea of intrinsic human rights, the inherent worth of every human being, is if human beings have been endowed with dignity by their Creator. Morality needs a higher authority – a source – to be anything more than arbitrary scrapping, in which the strong impose their preferences on the weak. One child says to another in the classroom, “You need to give me all your pencils.” Hopefully, the second will reply, “Says who?” In that environment, it is not the preferences of individual children, vouchsafed by their relative strength, that dictates right and wrong. It is the teacher, and the rules of the school. At a human rights level, if there’s no ultimate authority, there’s no objective morality. Just preferences. If I’m strong enough, I get to decide who has rights and who doesn’t. The intrinsic worth of human beings and the reality of good and evil that we all intuit so deeply can only be true if there is a God. If there is no God, we need to do away with all the rest: human beings don’t matter, they are matter. Atheist philosophy professor Mark Joel in his “Amoral Manifesto” gets this: “without God, there is no morality”. Human rights didn’t appear out of a vacuum; they were founded, sometimes expressly, on a worldview whereby people are created and dignified by God. The United States’ Declaration of Independence includes the statement “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights”. This is based on the Judaeo-Christian belief that humans are made in the image of God (Genesis 1:26-7; 9:6) – they bear the likeness, and something of the dignity, of their Maker. They are not just stuff. They can’t be treated as stuff. There’s more: according to a biblical worldview, not only is our value derived from God: we ourselves are somehow derived from God, we are in some sense “his offspring” (Acts 17:28). Adam is described as “son of God” (Luke 3:38), and all human beings are descended from Adam. As Adam bore “the image” of God, so Adam’s son Seth bore “the image” of Adam (Genesis 5:3). We are all part of one family, one race. I think twice before going too close to a nest full of cygnets – not because of what they might do to me, but because of what mummy or daddy swan might do to me. So with human beings: they are under the watchful eye of their heavenly Maker. An attack on them, is an attack on him (see Genesis 9:5-6). If you want to believe in human rights, you have to believe in God. This is true philosophically; it can also be observed as a trend historically. Root And Fruit It is of course no secret that in the United States as elsewhere, adherence to these expressed convictions has been reluctant and shoddy. There have been many pretenders who have claimed the name of Christ yet done horrific things clearly contradicting the character and commands of Christ. Nevertheless, a strong correlation can be mapped between how closely nations have stuck to a Christian worldview (notice that I said “stuck to a Christian worldview” as opposed to “called themselves Christian”), and their esteem of human worth. In recent days a lot of energy has been put into critiquing the nations of the (post-Christian) West. Essentially this is no bad thing: we have plenty we still need to repent of (though sadly the biggest issues are not always the ones picked up on by popular culture). But we need to exercise some perspective here. If we think racism is bad in the UK (and I am not dismissing the problem of racism that is here), maybe we should go and spend some time in China, where it is believed that over 1 million people are actually being detained (and worse) simply because they are Uighur Muslims? Or India, where some school children are formally required to sit apart from everyone else at meals because they were born in a “lower caste” with darker skin. If we think the UK criminal justice system is harsh, perhaps consider North Korea. If we think our politicians and police are corrupt, observe the elections and roadside checks in some sub-Saharan countries. Gender equality: Saudi Arabia? We have plenty of planks in our own eye, but it is very difficult to maintain that the Christian-based West is more oppressive than, for example, cultures based on atheistic communism or Islam. (Although held to be a creator, Allah is not believed to have dignified his creatures with his own image, as the Jewish/Christian God has; the imago Dei is unique to Judaism/Christianity.) The freedom even to write and read things like this is not something that could be taken for granted in many parts of the world today. The great measure of liberty, equality, democracy, rule of law, care for the vulnerable that we have up till now enjoyed in this part of the world, is absolutely derived from a Christian worldview. Countless hospitals, schools, orphanages worldwide are the result of Christian-based philanthropy, especially in the wake of the evangelical revival of the 18th century. Slavery is as old as time all round the world, practised by almost every powerful “civilisation” including ours to our shame, but very few cultures have ever turned around and abolished it, sacrificed so much for emancipation, even if it was with much struggle and reluctance from within. Running Out Of Gas Someone might retort, “But we’ve long since departed from Christianity in the West and we’re doing fine! Human rights continue to advance!” Do they? Are we doing fine? True, mercifully our society has not completely disintegrated since departing from Christianity. But in large part that’s only because we are still benefiting from the moral capital of previous generations far more than we care to realise. Like a car that’s run out of petrol, our momentum is keeping us going for a while, but when you really find out you’ve got no fuel left is when you try to accelerate, or go uphill, or bring others with you. We’ve got nothing left in the tank. Indeed, the wheels are already coming off. Some of those who think they are the world’s leading campaigners for human rights are actively agitating for the killing of more humans. Some who claim to care for black lives seem not to care very much when the black lives in question are not on the same political side as them. Some of their actions actually result in the death of the very people they say they are trying to help. That these casualties are tolerated is proof that it is not humans that are the intrinsic good here, it’s certain ideological outcomes; people matter only insofar as they are pawns in these political manoeuvres. Now that we in the West (through our laws) have formally dispensed with the intrinsic worth of all human beings, things are going to get much, much worse. Throwing The Baby Out The statistic that really discredits all our puffed-up notions of moral progress and integrity is this: Last year in England and Wales one quarter of babies in the womb were deliberately killed by our doctors, with our permission and our money. Worldwide, some 50 million babies are killed every year. This killing is far more prolific – and state-sanctioned – than any other killing in the history of the world. It is inexcusable hypocrisy to fight for justice for one group and yet at the very same time stand by and tolerate, even show support for, an even larger injustice waged against an even more vulnerable group. We did not find ourselves able to forgive Colston for this great sin. But it is even more absurd when the vulnerable group from whom we are withholding human rights, are human babies, since every single person that we are campaigning for, was once a baby. If babies don’t matter, no-one matters, because each of us was a baby to begin with. It’s just a stage of development. In this sense, the rights of the child in the womb are the defining human rights battle of the day. Not all of us are black, Jewish, disabled, or female. But every single one of us was once a baby. If babies don’t have intrinsic value, none of us do. If babies do matter, all of us do – because if we mattered then, we matter now. There can be no true justice for black lives, blue lives, or any lives, unless we first establish that baby lives matter (black, blue, or otherwise). Anyone who declares “black lives matter” whilst upholding “access” to “abortion” contradicts themselves instantly and their campaign is set to self-destruct. Black lives don’t matter if baby lives don’t matter. How can it be argued that baby lives do matter? Pathetic, speechless, weak, undeveloped, needy, inconvenient, productivity-negative babies? Only if a secure basis for the intrinsic worth of all human beings, regardless of function or capacity, can be convincingly presented. For that, you need a loving Creator, who has endowed even the least of us with this immeasurable dignity: that we are made in the image of God. That, and only that, is why lives matter.

- and I'm glad we haven't In the wake of George Floyd’s suffocation to death by police officer Derek Chauvin, a global movement of anti-racism sentiment and protest has swept much of the western world, including the churches. Here are some things I haven’t heard church leaders saying: 1) “I’m not ‘pro-racism’ or ‘anti-racism’. It’s not a black-and-white issue. I prefer to avoid polarising language. It’s possible to be both!” This is so patently non-sensical that it barely merits comment at all. If racism is violence, which it is, and if human beings are its victims, which they are, you cannot stand against the violence and for the victims at the same time as upholding other people’s right to inflict violence on them should they choose to do so. The only possible motivation for wanting to be seen as both “pro-racism” and “anti-racism” would be to try to stay in with both crowds, to avoid being pigeonholed as one or the other and thus being rejected by one group or the other. But it's clear that one simply cannot have it both ways - it’s absurd - and even if one could, to do so would be to miss the whole point: injustice is not a fashion statement to be worn but a reality to be exposed and dismantled for the sake of the oppressed. This is so blindingly obvious you are probably wondering why I am taking the time to spell it all out. Well, the reason is that we hear exactly this kind of nonsense all the time when it comes to the killing of babies in the womb: “I’m not ‘pro-life’ or ‘pro-choice’. It’s not a black-and-white issue. I prefer to avoid polarising language. It’s possible to be both!” Now why on earth is that? 2) “The graphic video of George Floyd’s murder is gratuitous, inappropriate, counter-productive, and downright offensive. You have no idea what people have been through who might have to look at that. It could be immensely triggering. Why are you resorting to shock tactics?” Of course, the video of George Floyd’s murder is shocking. I was viscerally affected. It was hard to watch it all the way through – I instinctively looked away several times – but I felt somehow an obligation to see it through to the end. Why? For the simple reason that this just happened. Here is a real human being, who has just been killed by another human being. And as Martin Luther King said, “injustice must be exposed”. It’s never comfortable, it’s always upsetting, but it has to be exposed. We have to see it. It may be that the footage of Floyd’s murder will find its place alongside pictures of the victims of the Holocaust used to warn school children of the capacity for evil in the human heart with the clear message: This must never happen again. To make an understatement, it is the murder itself that was gratuitous, inappropriate, offensive. The evidence – although it captures and therefore relays those uncomfortable aspects – is a friend, not a foe. The evidence exposes the injustice, brings relief to the oppressed, the wherewithal to convict the offenders. Anyone who actually cares more about these things than their own feelings will welcome the footage painful though it is. But when it comes to discrimination against babies in the womb, it seems that all the fundamental principles of exposing injustice and effecting social reform are suddenly overturned? “Graphic abortion imagery is gratuitous, inappropriate, counter-productive, and downright offensive. You have no idea what people have been through who might have to look at that. It could be immensely triggering. Why are you resorting to shock tactics?” Now why on earth is that? (It’s worth noting that my friends Laura Mann and Pauline Peachey, to name but two, who’ve both had abortions, regularly call upon churches to show the evidence of abortion. Why so many pastors think they know better than these two post-abortive women what post-abortive women and the rest of us really need I cannot understand.) 3) “Racism is a political issue; we wouldn’t want to be seen as political!” Fundamentally, racism is not a political issue, it is a question of human dignity, equality, and rights. But of course, as with many significant moral issues, it has become a political issue also. We adopt a vanishingly small version of Christianity if we think that the moment something has entered the "political" sphere, it is no longer our place to comment. Indeed, to say that we won’t speak into something because it is political reveals how politicised we have really become! We shouldn’t look or sound the same as those who adopt a more secular or self-centred approach to politics. With the gospel we are equipped to go deeper, sacrifice more, love our enemies, look beyond – “those who buy as though they had no goods, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it. For the present form of this world is passing away” (1 Corinthians 7:30b-31). But engage we must. We must be more than political - but not less than. But as I say, no-one has been raising this objection. Why? Because when the humanity of the victim is so apparent, and the inhumanity of injustice is so abhorrent, Christian compassion simply must speak out. There is no time to get hung up on hair-splitting, man-made distinctions. Which is interesting, because when it comes to the industrial scale slaughter of more than 200,000 human babies a year in England and Wales alone, apparently the fact that abortion is “political” is a good enough excuse to say and do nothing. Now why on earth is that? 4) “The last thing we’d want to do is let racists – or people who might be pro-racism – feel condemned or judged.” I don’t think this has occurred to almost anyone, within or without the Church (which could actually be a problem for those of us who say we believe in scandalous grace – how much do we believe in forgiveness for racists?). The reason it hasn’t is that it would be felt to miss or indeed jeopardise the point. The great pressing need in any injustice is to defend the welfare of the victim, not the feelings of the oppressor. If the feelings of the oppressor are paramount, no-one will ever move to stop the injustice. It is quite right that we don’t allow the feelings of racists to direct our engagement on racism, though we’d do well to remember that we are no more deserving of the grace of God than the worst racist on the planet. “There but for the grace of God go I.” But when it comes to abortion, this is precisely how our engagement is directed: according to the thoughts and feelings of more or less everybody apart from the primary victims of the injustice, the babies. Justice for the unborn is utterly scorned in the name of preserving the emotional status quo of adults, including the very ones who are oppressing them. Now why on earth is that? 5) “Racism is a very divisive issue. This isn’t going to help with church unity and harmony. It’s not the right time!” There are only two basic concepts of racism: God’s view and some other view. At best the latter can approximate quite closely to God’s view in form or conclusion, but it struggles to find a strong foundation for the utter equality of all human beings regardless of ethnicity, ability, sex, etc. The only way racism can be a divisive issue in your church is because people are not yet sufficiently aligned with God’s view on it. This is all the more reason to address it head-on. It is a discipleship opportunity, a discipleship necessity. For the pastor who prefers the “peace” of blissful ignorance as to what their people really think or do in private over striving for conformity to Christ and readiness for his return, it will never be the “right time” to address a contentious issue. I’m reminded of Martin Luther King’s words: I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action;" who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a "more convenient season." This surely has been a problem in the past with regard to racism, even the very recent past, but since Floyd's death I haven't heard anyone saying that now still isn't the right time to confront racism. (As an aside, one has to wonder whether we ever question the schedule and tenor of conversation as dictated to us by the prevailing currents of the culture around us. The UK Church sadly tends to confront issues only when forced to by those outside; this is often when it’s too late. How much slavery was tolerated, how much child abuse has been covered up, because the institution was put first? Confronting injustice will always harm the institution, in the short term at least...) Rightly, thankfully, most of us now acknowledge that killing racism is far more important than preserving any kind of “negative peace”. But when it comes to abortion, apparently it still really isn't right time, it still is just too divisive. Now: why is that?

For it is time for judgment to begin at the household of God; and if it begins with us, what will be the outcome for those who do not obey the gospel of God? And "If the righteous is scarcely saved, what will become of the ungodly and the sinner?" 1 Peter 4:17-18 Let me start by reiterating what I appreciate about The UK Blessing – this is an excerpt from an e.mail I sent to Tim Hughes and some of the other producers a few days ago (he was kind enough to get back to me): May I add my thanks to the thanks of many others for all your hard work on The UK Blessing, which has turned out beautifully and touched many. It is a fine sentiment to wish a blessing on the nation at this time, and stands as a great example of "thinking outside of ourselves" when we can be tempted to hunker down and just hibernate until the storm has passed. I am writing to ask whether you would be so kind as to consider adding to your message a very important clarification? I’ll go on to outline what this plea was in a moment but before that I want to make it ever so clear – as I tried to also in this e.mail – this is not an attempted judgment on the people contributing to this video, whom I love as brothers and sisters in Christ, and I am not calling into question their motives, which were probably as generous and sincere as human motives can be (I appreciate Terry Virgo’s comment on not judging others’ motives). At one level this is all very simple: God’s people just wanted to bless the nation, and they did so with enthusiasm and from the heart. And that is a wonderful thing, I really do mean that. However, for all the good intentions there are dangers with this video as it stands, and heavy though this may come across I think this video taken in context could be almost a Rubicon moment for the UK Church as it encapsulates and confirms the essence of much of our public witness at this time in our nation’s history, speeding us down a certain path. Let’s start with the message itself. MESSAGE Here’s the essence of my concern about the message, copied from my plea to the producers: …in its present form the message - quite unintentionally I am sure - dangerously misleads the lost as to their spiritual standing before a holy God by insisting and repeating, without qualification, "He is for you." Of course God...loves all people (Psalm 145:9), Jesus came to save sinners, not condemn, we all agree on that, but is his message to lost sinners one of affirmation only?… "He is for you" unaccompanied by anything else suggests that God is pleased with unrepentant sinners as they are, who neither know, love, nor follow him - there is no hint in this song that people need to turn to this God and change their ways, in order to experience his full blessing. The Bible repeatedly states, “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.” (e.g. Psalm 138:6; Proverbs 3:34; Proverbs 29:23; Matthew 23:12; Luke 1:52; James 4:6; 1 Peter 5:5.) The truly humble are not those who care for the vulnerable, or NHS workers (by means of paid work or voluntary service), but those who acknowledge their sin and turn to God. Have we forgotten that all our righteousness is but filthy rags before a holy God? Those who do not accept this truth, regardless of whether they are doing kind and compassionate things at this time, remain enemies of the living God, cut off from him, and condemned to death for eternity if they don’t repent. We actually read in many places that he is "against" even his own people when they are sinning. (e.g. Ezekiel 5:8; Nahum 3:5; Rev. 3:3.) Jesus's opening words were not "bless you" but "repent and believe the good news" - and his followers carried on in the same vein in the evangelistic sermons we read in the Book of Acts. Please could you consider adding, for example, one of the following verses, perhaps with a brief explanation, to convey this vital aspect of the gospel message? Acts 3:26…Isaiah 55:6…Romans 8:1… I notice that in the description section there is information on some of the charitable works that churches are doing. Would it not be better to let good works speak for themselves, and speak what good works can’t: the gospel. That only through repentance and faith in Jesus, can we truly say that anyone is blessed, and included fully in the words of Romans: “Neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:35)… I hope and pray that you receive this message in the spirit in which it is intended. I desire to see Christ exalted, the Church purified, the lost saved… All I'm suggesting is the addition of, for example, Isaiah 55:6: "Seek the Lord while he may be found; call on him while he is near." THE MESSAGE ABOUT OUR NATION In part the problem arises from the fact that the words of this song, the Aaronic blessing, are lifted out of context. In Numbers 6:23 it is expressly the people of Israel that are the recipients of this blessing, not the pagan nations. Moreover, even for God’s own people the blessing is not exactly unconditional. By chapter 14 of the same book God has judged this entire generation of Israelites for their lack of faith and disloyalty, killing some of them instantly with a plague (which confronts any simplistic dismissal (“He’s not like that”) of the possibility that God has sent Covid-19) and condemning almost all the rest to die in the desert during the following 40 years of wandering. There are curses as well as blessings in the Torah, and many, many laws to do with holiness. I am not saying that it is wrong to seek to apply or to wish a blessing upon a pagan nation. “God bless you” is good! “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare” (Jeremiah 29:7). But I am saying that this message needs clarification, qualification, or it can mislead and in fact achieve the very opposite of the blessing that it’s seeking to bring. The question is – and we’ll come back to this at the end – what actually is the real blessing we can give to our nation at this time? “He is for you” (repeated many times) makes a significant break from the rest of the song in at least two ways. Not only is it not in the original Aaronic blessing, or in any of the other similar blessings cited; it is a declaration, a statement, whereas everything else in the song is a prayer, a request (“May…”). We have to be more careful with statements we declare over people than we do with wishes or hopes. We have to make sure such a statement is true and not misleading. Anyone who’s seen me try to kick a football into a goal can imagine how damaging it was when I was led to believe, through an off-hand comment by a coach, that one day I could make it into the 1st XI! More seriously, when a toddler is running towards a road, a message of “Well done, look at you go!” is inappropriate - irresponsible, in fact. A doctor does not affirm habits that are killing her patient. Spiritually, a godless nation is on the road to destruction, and our affirmation merely speeds them along that path, suggesting that they’re in no danger whatsoever. This is spiritually irresponsible. I felt the same spinetingling sensation from this song that everyone else felt, until the addition “He is for you” went on repeat and I started to feel very uncomfortable with what this could communicate to a godless nation. THE MESSAGE ABOUT OUR CHURCH All this is one half of the message – the message to the nation about the nation. The other key element in this message is a message to the nation (perhaps to ourselves as well) about the Church, expressed through what tops and tails the video and is found in the description section underneath. The message is that the UK Church is “very much alive”, as evidenced by the production of this song by so many Christians and churches joined together in unity, and by our good deeds: Many of the churches included in this song have assisted with supplying over 400,000 meals to the most vulnerable and isolated in our nation since COVID-19 lockdown began. This alongside phone calls to the isolated, pharmacy delivery drops and hot meals to the NHS frontline hospital staff. I have to say that publicising this here – I don’t say the acts themselves, they are just simple acts of kindness – but publicising this here is nothing more than virtue-signalling, seeking to impress the culture about how good the Church is. I don’t say that it is done with malicious intent – I’m not even claiming it’s done consciously – but the purpose of this text is plain for all to see: it's to signal our virtue, and I want to suggest that it’s off-key, because it is Church-proclamation in the place of Christ-proclamation. Is it coincidence that the only causes cited here are of the kind that are likely to impress the secular world around us? And nothing here that might offend? Can you imagine here, “Proudly defending the lives of thousands of unborn children from abortion”? Of course not. For one thing, it wouldn’t be true (we’re hardly doing anything at all to defend the babies), but for another, even if it were true, can you imagine it being trumpeted on a video like this? No. Because the whole point of this pronouncement is to earn brownie points with popular culture, exalting the Church according the criteria of the world, rather than exalting Christ according to the criteria of the Bible. Seeking to win favour in the world’s eyes, rather than in God’s eyes. There is a big difference. This is in the middle section of the Venn diagram at best – but there’s no middle section when it comes to our hearts and who our Master is. Intended or unintended, this twofold message from the UK Church to the nation – “You’re ok, and we’re ok too” – is problematic in and of itself: it deviates from the authentic gospel which declares that no-one is righteous and we all need Christ. But the problem is intensified when we consider the context of all this in a little more detail. CONTEXT THE NATION Civilised though this nation may appear to be on the surface – the police are generally quite polite and friendly, most people obey traffic lights, we’re rather good at queueing and saying “sorry” to strangers when we’ve done nothing wrong (e.g. looking at the same item on a supermarket shelf) – in reality we are one of the most wicked nations on earth. Almost every year we kill more unborn babies proportionally than any other country in Western Europe – last year it was 1 in 4 babies in the womb, more than 200,000. More than that, we are global accelerators of this worldwide genocide, pumping hundreds of millions of pounds into killing babies in Africa for example through the likes of Marie Stopes International, whose CEO we paid £434,500 last year with our taxes, and whose founder was a racist and a eugenicist. Our streets are red with the blood of innocent children, and not content with the bloodshed here, we go abroad to spread violence there too. Is this the nation that, as Neil Bennetts sought to clarify, receives “the applause of heaven” which we are “joining in with” as we sing this blessing over them? Is God pleased with our nation? As Jesus makes clear in Luke 13 – helpfully expounded by Andrew Carter here – we should be very careful before grading some people as more evil than others. We should also exercise a healthy agnosticism when trying to understand why, for example, a certain nation might have been struck particularly badly by a plague, as J.John constructively points out here. Peter Saunders is absolutely right that we can find Old Testament and New Testament examples of God actively sending plagues in direct judgment of specific sins. But it would be a bold thing to claim to know exactly what and why God is doing right now with Covid-19. However, one thing is crystal clear, wherever one lands on the question of whether God sent or allowed this (and all the above, including Jesus, make this point emphatically): the response is always to be the same: repent! At the very least, what we are seeing here in our nation is a wake-up call. Is the Church at odds with God’s wake-up call? By way of our soothing, affirming lullaby saying to the nation: “It's ok! Go back to sleep”? Are we muting his wake-up call to the nation? Is this really the time for a “well done”, a round of “applause”, a “we’re [God's] right behind you”? Needless to say, it is the very NHS that we praise so uncritically that is funding the slaughter of all these innocent babies. We ought to be careful before we say in any simplistic way, with Neil Bennetts and Justin Welby, that all health workers globally are doing the will of God or bringing his presence "regardless of whether they would name it as such." Bloodshed and idolatry (which abortion is, as a form of child sacrifice offered up to the gods of our age) invoke the curses of God, not his blessings. Of course we know and rejoice in the fact that at the cross Jesus became a curse for us: he bore the wrath of God for our sin, and made a way for us to be saved. Neither idolatry nor bloodshed are unforgivable! But how will our nation know about this if we don’t proclaim it, especially when we have such an incredible opportunity to do so as this crisis and this song which has reached millions? The gospel is not learned by osmosis, or by people feeling positive about a song or good about the Church. Repentance must always be preached but it seems especially out of tune for the Church to omit it at this time, singing a song of affirmation to our nation when we are so godless and so bloodthirsty, when a genocide (greater than the Holocaust) is raging on our watch. I fear that this may come to be known as our “Sing a Little Louder” moment. This leads us from considering the context of the nation to the context of the Church. THE CHURCH Is this really the time to be trumpeting our own vitality? Are we really healthy? Last year we sought to engage the organisers of the HTB Leadership Conference (many of the churches taking part in The UK Blessing were represented there; I spoke personally with the leaders of some of them), pleading with them to address the urgent matter of the genocide taking place under our noses. I am not sure that it is possible to overstate the level of apathy we encountered, both on the part of the organisers and the delegates. Favouring culturally more popular causes and subjects in the programme, abortion was avoided, and so we took to a large street display outside to educate these 5,000 church leaders on the reality of the global genocide that we the people of God need to stand against. It wasn’t a protest; it was a plea for help. As one volunteer put it, thousands of church leaders walked by on the other side in an “outbreak of Levitis”. Some even mocked. I can count on one hand how many I saw sincerely engaging with the reality of the genocide. None of this would matter, if it weren’t a reflection of our wider and consistent response to this genocide over the last 50 years. We have turned a blind eye, and walked by on the other side. Moreover, by refusing to teach on abortion within the Church, we have created environments hospitable to in-the-womb child abuse within our churches, we've enabled it; we tolerate child sacrifice within the Body of Christ. The idolatry and bloodshed of child sacrifice invoke the wrath of God like almost nothing else in the Bible (e.g. Psalm 106:34-42). It causes him to be “disgusted” with his own people and seems to be the final straw that prompts him to hand them over to their enemies in defeat and exile. Our churches – not only our land – are soaked in the blood of innocent children, slain at our own hands, offered up to the gods of our day. Is this really the time to trumpet our own vitality, when we won’t even admit this problem? The Bible has something to say to those who sing songs whilst neglecting justice: Away with the noise of your songs! I will not listen to the music of your harps. But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream! Amos 5:23-24 Those who offer religious acts with blood on their hands are shunned, their ceremonies are useless, even their prayers are despised: When you come to appear before me, who has asked this of you, this trampling of my courts? Stop bringing meaningless offerings! Your incense is detestable to me. New Moons, Sabbaths and convocations— I cannot bear your worthless assemblies. Your New Moon feasts and your appointed festivals I hate with all my being. They have become a burden to me; I am weary of bearing them. When you spread out your hands in prayer, I hide my eyes from you; even when you offer many prayers, I am not listening. Your hands are full of blood! Wash and make yourselves clean. Take your evil deeds out of my sight; stop doing wrong. Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow. Isaiah 1:12-17 I remember watching in shock as the cameraman for the HTB Leadership Conference came out and stood, just feet away from huge banners showing the victims of the violence of abortion, angling his camera slightly away from them of course, and took footage of happy young welcome team members and delegates for the slick montage video that was to capture all the highlights of that year’s conference. In a sense, so long as you know what was just to the left of the shot, nothing could capture the atmosphere of the conference more accurately: smiling and laughing and ignoring a genocide. When we consider how seriously God takes child sacrifice and injustice, and how unseriously we take them, it seems a strange time to declare triumphantly that we are “very much alive”. In fact, I think the words of Jesus to the church in Sardis might be much more appropriate for us today: I know your works. You have the reputation of being alive, but you are dead. Wake up, and strengthen what remains and is about to die, for I have not found your works complete in the sight of my God. Remember, then, what you received and heard. Keep it, and repent. If you will not wake up, I will come like a thief, and you will not know at what hour I will come against you. Revelation 3:1b-3 I remind us that these words were written to Christians. We have blood on our hands, it’s critically significant, and a well-produced song or hot meals for the NHS doesn’t even begin to address it. A song that suggests “you’re good and we’re good too” seems especially out of tune when we consider our context. RECEPTION The way in which the song has been received by many confirms some of my worries. These reactions collated by Premier sum it up pretty well. Many have taken a fuzzy feeling as proof of the Holy Spirit’s presence. The Holy Spirit can be felt, of course, but let us not forget that he is the Holy Spirit – he is not really known apart from repentance and faith in Christ, and as the letters to the churches in Revelation confirm, the manifest presence of the Lord Jesus in a given church is contingent on their listening to his voice and obeying it. It is not wrong to feel good about a worship song, but there’s a distinct lack of “thinking caps” in the reactions to this one, which is concerning when one remembers how almost any song well sung by human voices in harmony can make the hairs on the back of your neck stand. We need to be discerning. Others have celebrated the sheer numbers of people getting together to make this video and the numbers of people viewing it (2.5 million) as evidence that God is in this and the Church is onto a good thing. We count and hold it up as a sign of vitality; King David counted (1 Chronicles 21) and was judged for it (interestingly, with a plague – yet again challenging the idea that God “isn’t like that”). The New Testament letters show a colossal lack of concern for numbers in the churches. We really need to move away from this worldly way of thinking. Still others have claimed that the unity of all these different churches and denominations contributing to the video, in and of itself, is a sign of vitality. And this is becoming an increasingly popular idea – that if only the Church will unite, we’ll see revival. The problem here is that it puts unity first, rather than Christ and his word first. Unity in and of itself means very little; it’s all about what or who unites you. If we pursue unity, and try for example to skate over issues of truth or ethics, we’re going to run into trouble. The crowd was united in Luke 23 in shouting for Jesus to be crucified. In the past the Church has been united in her racist attitudes. Today we are fairly united on our tolerance of child sacrifice. In none of these instances has consensus made something right. In fact, Jesus in his famous prayer for unity (John 17) also prays that the Father will “sanctify” his followers “in the truth”. There is no Christian unity apart from in “the truth” and in holiness. This is key because if we put unity first, aside from truth or ethical conduct, we will start to shut down discussion and drift further and further from authentic Christianity; anyone who questions or criticises (like me) is considered an enemy of unity and therefore of revival. But the New Testament does not seem to share this allergy to correction, discipline, and where necessary division. In his interview with Premier, speaking of unity, Tim Hughes made the point that "we have all these petty disagreements over silly things, but the bottom line is, God loves us". This is absolutely true - we do sometimes have petty disagreements over silly things, and God does love us. But the truth is that some of the issues in the Church today are not "silly" - not in God's eyes. There are things that God calls an abomination which we are beginning to tolerate, defend, and even promote. How God feels about our behaviour matters, even if we would prefer to overlook it. I am acutely aware of how pedantic and negative this may come across, but we cannot afford to miss this key opportunity to observe what’s in our hearts, what makes us tick, and what makes us think that something or someone is spiritually vital. Does it align with God's heart? The health of the UK Church is probably the single most important thing for our country – we’d do well to be clear on the truth of the matter. REPENTANCE What then? Lots of negativity, lots of criticism, I hear you say: what should the response of the Church be in the present crisis, and what should be our message? In a word: repentance. Yes, we should do acts of kindness, yes we should pray a blessing on our nation, but if we do not repent and proclaim repentance, we are not being the Church – we’re just another culturally acceptable, indistinct club. 2 Chronicles 7:14 is often quoted but not much time is spent considering that it is God’s people who are required to turn from their wicked ways, before the blessing and the healing can come. Indeed, it was the evil deeds of God’s own people that brought on the drought, and the locusts, and the pestilence in the first place. I fear that repentance has all but dropped out of the vocabulary of the UK evangelical Church in 21st century. We expand, rebrand, amplify, multiply, but do we ever repent? Does it ever occur to us? What if it’s us? What if it’s because of us that our nation is in such a state – and I don’t just mean the pandemic? It’s on our watch that unrighteous law after unrighteous law has been passed and we’ve hardly said a thing. It’s on our watch that sexual perversion and destruction of the family have been promoted, and it's teenagers and children that suffer for it. It’s on our watch that God’s precious image-bearers, 9 million of them, have been cruelly killed before they even saw the light of day. It’s on our watch that the Church has imbibed the morals and idols of our day: we’ve followed the ways of the world and rarely been a voice for truth and justice. It is time for judgment to begin at the household of God… And if this is where judgment begins, it’s where repentance needs to begin too. With us. If you were to ask me, I would say that right at the heart of our spiritual adultery in this generation is a fear of man. We’ve turned it into a pastoral philosophy, an evangelistic methodology, a church-growth strategy. We avoid offence and persecution like the plague: “If only they like us,” we tell ourselves, “they’ll come in.” Again I do not say that this is intentional or even conscious. I know that I myself have spent entire years under the sway of this idol to some degree at least without even realising it. It's possible to genuinely believe that this is the way to grow the kingdom. But an idol it is, and it needs to be toppled, and repented of. We need to repent of this golden calf that renders us so impotent and irrelevant in this generation, unable to truly proclaim Christ and confront sin and stand up for real justice. To wish a blessing on the nation is a fine thing. But what would be a real blessing to our nation at this time? It would be to get right with God ourselves, to get real with God ourselves, and then to call – with all grace, clarity, and boldness – the nation to come back with us to God the Father through Jesus Christ his Son, in whom alone there is salvation and life. “Send revival, start with me.” Only then will we be singing a song that’s truly in tune and a blessing. This is Part 3 of a 3-part series of blogs examining the UK Church's response to Covid-19. It is hoped that they make sense as stand-alone pieces, but you are warmly invited to read Part 1, which asks why the response to coronavirus has been so much greater than our response to abortion, and Part 2, which considers the impact of our becoming a "Non-Prophet Organisation".

You adulterous people, don't you know that friendship with the world means enmity against God? Therefore, anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. James 4:4 Everyone wants to be the nation’s friend. No-one wants to be the nation’s prophet. I’m using the word “friend” here as it’s used in James 4:4 (the thought is similar in 1 John 2:15-17). We are of course called to love our neighbour as ourselves, to be true “friends” to all people. But “friendship with the world” is something else, and something we need to be very wary of. It is not loving the people of this world that is wrong: it is loving the “things” of this world. Worldly desires, worldly ambitions, worldly thinking, worldly idols. And it is wanting the world to love us back too – because comfort and popularity, polar opposites of persecution for the sake of Christ, are among the things held by the world in high esteem. One of the most disabling errors of Western Christianity today is that we suppose that we are only loving people properly if we find that they are all loving us back. Very few loved Jesus back: was his love deficient? Friendship with the world has a twin: the fear of man. And I’m using the word “prophet” here to signal in particular someone who will stand and speak against the currents of the world. (These currents will be found both within God’s people and without.) This is not an exhaustive definition of a prophet; confrontation is not the prophet’s only role. But it is, perhaps, the prophet’s distinguishing feature or at least, as I shall be trying to argue, the feature that we have airbrushed out of modern Christianity. I am not talking here about people who receive to themselves the title or position of “prophet” (some may even use a capital “P”!), but rather I am focusing on the function or the action of speaking prophetically into (against?) the culture – be that the culture of the Church or the culture of wider society. Inasmuch as a prophet, put most simply, speaks the very words of God: anyone who claims to speak authentically for God must be prophetic, must confront, because the gospel always confronts, always divides, is always catastrophic – even as it brings new life. So what we are really talking about here is being an authentic mouthpiece for God. No-one wants to be that. Why? Because to be that means to forsake, to forgo, friendship with the world. What has this to do with coronavirus? In my last post I considered how it is this temptation towards friendship with the world that has censored us from speaking about certain issues like abortion, whilst we quickly scramble to rehash all our words and actions when faced with coronavirus. The culture tells us what we should and shouldn’t be talking about. The very fact of our response to corona (in the absence of any response to abortion, for example) reveals that we look to the culture for permission for our programmes. Here I want to consider the nature of our response to corona itself and see what this might tell us. Don’t take a fence Imagine a Venn diagram. One circle, on the left, represents a God-honouring response to coronavirus. The other circle, on the right, represents a worldly response to coronavirus. There is, at least at face value, an overlap. Some things belong in both circles: we all agree that we should look out for our neighbours, obey the Government guidelines, try to stay safe and mentally healthy. It is not difficult for churches and other Christian voices to harp on these things. Friendship with the world is satisfied – and we think that God is happy with us too. We suppose that we have found a comfortable fence to sit on, where no-one takes offence. We can have it both ways. Only that James 4:4 and 1 John 2:15-17 tell us that there is no fence. Friendship with the world is enmity against God (did you read that??): we have to choose one side or the other. There is no fence; there is a slippery slope. I know from my own sinful experience that toying with man-pleasing virtue-signalling is subtly but highly addictive. Before you know it, it has a hold on you, it’s controlling everything that you say and do. We like to imagine that by saying the same things, we are building rapport and bringing people closer to the kingdom. In fact, we are the ones being influenced. We’ll find ourselves keeping quiet about things that live in the left-hand side of our Venn diagram, if we want to stay “in” with the “in” crowd. At the same time we’ll find ourselves drawn further and further into the right-hand side of the diagram where God’s pleasure is suddenly nowhere to be found. An example of this today, stimulated by the coronavirus, is to be found in our attitudes to the NHS. Doctoring the gospel Should we be thankful for all the good that doctors and nurses are doing? Absolutely. That’s right in the middle of our Venn diagram. Should we hero-worship them, and uncritically celebrate the NHS in its entirety, as has become not only very popular but a strong nationwide expectation? “The NHS expresses everything that is best in what has made this country what it is. It expresses our Christian values…it expresses the values of people of faith and no faith. It is a place of hope and giving. Thank you NHS. Let us applaud the NHS.” So spake the Archbishop of Canterbury. He has also said that NHS workers (including those who are not following Jesus) are “doing what God calls them to do”; he has also said that it is when we behold the NHS that we understand that “love and service are what leadership looks like”. It is beginning to sound like the NHS is the fulfilment of all that Christ prophesied. Even the kind of uncritical appreciation that stops short of idolatry needs to be questioned. The NHS, for all the good it does, also intentionally kills 200,000 (1 in 4) human babies every year. A veritable genocide. Is that part of “everything that is best in…this country”? Does that “express our Christian values”? If not, why praise the NHS wholesale, repeatedly, but never once speak out against abortion? But they mingled with the nations And learned their practices, And served their idols, Which became a snare to them. They even sacrificed their sons and their daughters to false gods… Psalm 106:35-37 Welby has chosen friendship with the world in refusing to criticise the NHS – even when they are committing genocidal child sacrifice. “Let us applaud the NHS.” He is not alone in slipping into this side of the Venn diagram. Countless leading voices have jumped on the bandwagon, honking their horns for the health service – but where can anyone be found calling out the colossal bloodshed, which is advancing all the more aggressively now under the cover of the coronavirus crisis? Or who will even simply warn against the spiritual dangers of putting our trust in health workers and organisations instead of in Christ? The culture doesn’t need us to point out that the 99-year-old man who raised £28m for the NHS is charming and admirable –they already know it. What the culture does need us to do is to identify idols, expose sins, and proclaim Jesus – the things that no-one else will do. But these are the very things that we often shrink from. The world is crying out for hope. By parroting the culture, we withhold from them the very truth of the gospel that they so desperately need. Ideological goal-hangers, we tap in someone else’s shot with a flurry of Christianity-light, perhaps slapping some Christianese jargon on top (“radical love”, “stewardship”, “environmental justice”, “creation care”), and we call this cultural engagement. Do we expect to be thanked for that? We agree with everything, disagree with nothing, and become irrelevant. A Non-Prophet Organisation. “Choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve…” Joshua 24:15 Mercifully there have been some exceptions (we’ll consider some of these in our third and final post). But for huge swathes of the Church, this crisis is exposing what we’re made of and the results are troubling. Crises are times of judgment, and “it is time for judgment to begin with the household of God” (1 Peter 4:17). If we find that at a time like this – even at a time like this­ – what drives us (at least in part) is fear of man instead of fear of God, let us thank God that he is graciously revealing that to us now and let us quickly mend our ways. A Non-Prophet profits none. This is Part 2 of a 3-part series of blogs examining the UK Church's response to Covid-19. It is hoped that they make sense as stand-alone pieces, but you are warmly invited to read Part 1, which asks why the response to coronavirus has been so much greater than our response to abortion, and Part 3, which examines the viral video The UK Blessing and suggests what our response at this time ought to be.

What would it look like if we responded as decisively to all of God’s priorities as we do to government guidelines? What if the things that bothered him most bothered us most? What if God’s word drove our behaviours more than the cultural currents that surround us – or whatever we had planned for this Sunday? Churches tend to be sluggish things. It can take years to get the pews removed, decades for an organ, and if you try to get a church to act upon or even just speak into the daily industrial scale slaughter of human babies in our own nation – well, you could be waiting a lifetime. It never seems the right moment somehow, or there is yet another stage of consultation required. What a thing then to behold every church in the country springing into action in response to Covid-19. Not only have we seen creative responses to the ban on public gatherings (livestreamed services and the like): countless bespoke messages have addressed the phenomenon of the coronavirus head on, offering a Christian response specifically to this crisis. And words are being matched with action. One high-profile Christian leader broke his social media fast to give an urgent message on corona – and said he had 8 meetings the following day, most of them about corona. A large and well-resourced charismatic evangelical church in London has “appointed a special task force to oversee the church’s social response to the Covid-19 situation”. And even a flagship example of the more conservative evangelical churches who normally only mention things “when they come up in the text” – they’re not into topical teaching, apparently – has published written and spoken messages specifically on corona. And all this is very good. But the very fact that churches are responding to corona so decisively (we’ll consider how churches are responding in our next post) is noteworthy. It shows that we can do it. One might surmise from the decades of inaction and silence on, for example, 9 million slaughtered babies, that the Church is quite unable or unwilling to respond to anything – but corona is showing us that this is not the case. Where there is the will or the compulsion, the Church can indeed jump to it. The fact of our response to corona has exposed all our classic excuses for avoiding abortion. If we waited for the word “coronavirus” to come up in the Bible before addressing it, we’d be waiting forever. If we protested, “But we’ve already got things planned: a speaker, a series, a system,” we would stick out like a sore thumb for our lack of appropriate cultural engagement. If we insisted that we’re just here to preach the gospel, not address issues like corona, someone would rightly point out that there must be such a thing as a gospel response to corona. An interesting thing about the three examples above of rapid response to corona, is that these three people/churches specifically have refused to give public statements or any kind of public steer on the crisis of abortion. I know exactly what they think about corona and how they are responding to that; I still can’t see anything on abortion. When you consider that abortion is the world’s leading killer – some 40 or 50 million babies every year worldwide, 1 in 4 babies in the womb in our nation – compared to the global corona death toll of 20,000 at time of writing, why is our response to this virus by orders of magnitude so much more serious than our response to the intentional and violent killing of millions of unborn children? Is it because God is more outraged by corona than he is by child sacrifice? Imagine if a church leader ignored government guidelines, convened a Sunday gathering, and one person caught corona as a result and died. The leader would be slammed as selfish, cavalier, irresponsible – and probably unfit for office. And yet there are thousands upon thousands of babies killed every year – in the Church and beyond – precisely because we are carrying on as if nothing is happening. And we accept this. Why the discrepancy? A concern for human life could explain our response to corona, but not our lack of response to abortion. Likewise reverence for God’s word could explain the former, but not the latter. Why? Why are some issues on the table whilst others are firmly off? We join in with the corona chorus, but we omit the abortion solo. The only thing that can make sense of our continued silence around abortion, is that we are terrified of upsetting the culture, whereas we should be terrified of upsetting God. We are looking to the culture for our lead. The culture tells us what’s on the programme, and what’s not. The culture tells us what we can talk about, and what we can’t. The problem is not only that our conclusions are dictated by the world around us (see next post), but also that subject matter itself is dictated to us: not just the answers we’re giving but the questions we’re asking. We spring into action on an issue like corona, but circumnavigate issues like abortion, because our Sat Navs are set to avoid persecution. We don’t want to upset the applecart. We don’t want to upset ourselves. The world has told us not to touch abortion, and we’ve all said, “OK”. Real babies perish as a result. The fact that we are responding so resolutely to corona, whilst continuing to ignore abortion, ought to drive us to ask some searching questions of ourselves. What are we made of? Whom do we fear? This is Part 1 of a 3-part series of blogs examining the UK Church's response to Covid-19. It is hoped that they make sense as stand-alone pieces, but you are warmly invited to read Part 2, which considers the impact of our becoming a "Non-Prophet Organisation", and Part 3, which examines the viral video The UK Blessing and suggests what our response at this time ought to be.

“Brexation” isn’t just the latest in a string of deplorable Brexit-related neologisms; it’s what’s gripped our national consciousness for more than three years and counting, and is likely to dominate the way that many of us vote on December 12. But how many of us will be casting our votes with the real issue of our day in mind? Long after the dust has settled after our departure from the EU, supposing that it does eventually happen, future generations won’t look back in horror or disbelief at this juncture in our relationship with our European neighbours. What they will look back on in horror and disbelief, is that we were the country that killed a quarter of its babies in the womb, consistently. Just because we’re not talking about it, doesn’t mean it’s not happening. It’s time to make abortion a voting issue. Why abortion? Last year 205,295 babies were intentionally killed in the womb in England and Wales; 98% of them were perfectly healthy. Some were suffocated to death, others were crushed and dismembered alive using metal tools resembling tongs, others received a lethal injection to the heart so painful that the American Veterinary Medical Association prohibits its use in euthanising animals without prior anaesthetic. (Anaesthetic is administered to unborn children undergoing a beneficial operation (e.g. for spina bifida) – a clear admission that they do feel pain – but no such kindness is afforded to those being dismantled through abortion.) The majority of these babies were disposed of down the toilet; others were thrown in with the “biowaste” at medical centres. The inhumanity of this procedure is unspeakable; that’s why it needs to be seen to be believed. Putting things in perspective Judging by quantities of ink and airtime, one might be forgiven for thinking that climate change is a contender with Brexit for the real issue of our day. We are told that it is an emergency and that radical action is urgently required. The World Health Organisation estimates that 250,000 extra deaths will be caused by climate change per year globally. Supposing that this is a reasonable estimate, it signifies a real issue that deserves attention. But we have nearly that number of babies being killed already through abortion per year in our nation alone; worldwide abortion is estimated at over 40 million a year. The WHO’s projected climate change death toll is a fraction of the already-happening abortion death toll. This is an emergency. “Changing the law won’t help” There is a myth that “pro-life” legislation would achieve nothing or even make things worse. It is interesting that we don’t hear that argument applied to anything else (“Let’s not legislate against drink-driving or domestic abuse; it will only drive it underground.”), and it is obvious that the abortion lobby doesn’t seem to believe it, given how hard they fight for legislative “gains”. But the real torpedo against this assertion is simple statistical evidence. Wherever abortion has been legalised, it has quickly rocketed. Wherever it has been made illegal, it has quickly plummeted. Obviously. Like anything else. “Statistics” for illegal abortion have always been fabricated or grossly exaggerated by those who wish to come in and provide legal abortion as the solution. Bernard Nathanson, an American doctor who performed 75,000 abortions, later admitted that he and other abortion advocates had simply invented their statistics for illegal abortions and resultant maternal deaths prior to Roe v. Wade. “I confess that I knew the figures were totally false, but in the ‘morality’ of our revolution, it was a useful figure, widely accepted, so why go out of our way to correct it with honest statistics?” In our nation 100,000 illegal abortions a year was the number doing the rounds in the 1960s. If that were true, it would mean that “backstreet” abortion was incredibly safe for the mother, given how tiny a percentage therefore resulted in medical complications! But in fact the BMJ estimate of 10,000 illegal abortions per year in the UK before 1967 is much more realistic. We now have a steady 200,000 abortions per year in our country. The law has unleashed industrial scale abortion. The claim that making it illegal again wouldn’t significantly reverse this trend is simply ludicrous. The truth is that hundreds of thousands of babies’ lives are on the line in our country precisely because of our laws. Their lives would be safe if our laws were different. Their lives depend on our mounting pressure for a change in the law. Our most vulnerable neighbours need this to become a voting issue. “But what can I do?” At this point someone will agree that change needs to happen – but what can they do when the books seem so closed on this, and every name on their ballot paper is pro-abortion? We need to start with a sober recognition that the reason for this is that we simply haven’t cared enough to make sure that it’s on the ballot paper. This will become a voting issue if we choose to make it a voting issue. If it’s not a voting issue, it’s because we’ve not chosen to make it a voting issue. Insofar as we are a democracy, politicians don’t lead us, they follow us. Here’s what you can do to get started: - Expose abortion for what it is – it needs to come out into the light - Get to know and publicise where each party stands on abortion (do you know which one has abortion up to birth in its manifesto?) - Question your candidates by e.mail and publicly at hustings - Vote for a person or party that supports the sanctity of life from conception to natural death - Call upon your candidates to sign the Both Lives Pledge (it takes about 30 seconds to do) Change won’t happen overnight, but if we choose to make this a voting issue, and we’re willing to pay the price whatever it is, one day we will see righteous laws passed once again in favour of the most vulnerable members of our society. “Let us not despair; it is a blessed cause, and success, ere long, will crown our exertions. Already we have gained one victory; we have obtained, for these poor creatures, the recognition of their human nature, which, for a while was most shamefully denied. This is the first fruits of our efforts; let us persevere and our triumph will be complete. Never, never will we desist till we have wiped away this scandal from the Christian name, released ourselves from the load of guilt, under which we at present labour, and extinguished every trace of this bloody traffic, of which our posterity, looking back to the history of these enlightened times, will scarce believe that it has been suffered to exist so long a disgrace and dishonour to this country.” William Wilberforce before the House of Commons 18 April 1791

"What are we doing that bothers you?" This question is put to prisoners of war to find out which activities are actually being effective. For those whose concern is winning the war, the question is not, "What are we doing that folks back home will understand and appreciate?" The question is not, "What are we doing that those funding us are into?" The question is not, "What are we doing that doesn't provoke too much of a backlash, so that we can live peaceably enough alongside those on the other side - since we can never win anyway?" The question is: "What are we doing that bothers you?" Because the answer to that question shows what is actually making a dent in the enemy's position. The enemy may not be too bothered if you blow up bridges that he never intended to use again. But the enemy's attention will be caught if you hack into his intelligence and communications, if you destroy key arms factories, if you bring down strategic strongholds, if you damage morale. If he's upset by something, you know you're doing the right thing. Now for purposes here I'm going to sidestep the rights and wrongs of military warfare and of the questioning of prisoners of war. I'm also going to, for the avoidance of doubt, make it clear that I agree with Ephesians 6:10-13 which tells us that our fight is not against "flesh and blood" (i.e. human beings) but against "the cosmic powers over this present darkness...the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places". The real enemy is not who it appears to be, and for that reason spiritual armour is required, and prayer; nevertheless the enemy's agenda is carried out through human agency, industries, and ideologies. The point I wish to make here is simple: in this war - and it is a war - the principle holds. We need to ask, "What are we doing that bothers you?" The answer can be read from reactions. I'll make one more comment before applying this question to the war over abortion. Winning Matters Someone has recently poured scorn over the idea of "winning" being the most important thing. This person seems to understand what's at stake here as a (probably intractable) "debate" and therefore trying to "win" as a rather childish ambition - perhaps even counter-productive (which I have refuted here). Politeness, and an acknowledgement that we can never win, are to be preferred, this person has suggested. But in fact what's at stake here is 800 innocent lives every working day in our nation. This isn't a debate, it's a genocide. Winning is essential. This isn't about you, and isn't about me: it's about getting relief to the hundreds of thousands of babies and women abused by abortion every year in the UK. I'm not talking about winning at all costs - I'm not advocating for an ends-justifies-the-means, throwing all other morality and caution to the wind. We will never lie. We will never be violent. We will always be respectful and gracious (though maligned as being the opposite). But let me be absolutely clear: winning is essential. Stella's Slip So, what do the abortion industry and its acolytes lose sleep over? What strongholds do they not want to be compromised? What makes them angry? The pictures. The visual evidence of what abortion actually does to babies. Nothing blows a bigger hole in their web of rhetoric, euphemisms, and deception, than the simple truth about abortion. The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. The truth about abortion really hurts the abortion industry. This is why Stella Creasy has been working overtime the last couple of weeks doing anything and everything (and she will use the ends to justify the means!) to get these pictures out of the public square. She tried to get the police to do it. She is trying to get Parliament to do it. She bullied the advertising agency into doing it. She leant on Walthamstow Council to do it. She has appealed to her constituents to do it. She's happy for vandals and harassers to do it. Why all the effort? Could it be that these pictures are doing damage to her abortion agenda? In the meantime she has been trying to discredit the pictures, repeatedly claiming, falsely, that they are unscientific. Is it because she knows, and fears, as Tim Stanley of the Daily Telegraph has said, that when people see the reality of life in the womb and what abortion does to babies, it reframes the debate? She has also been frantically changing the subject. "This is not about the rights and wrongs of abortion," she has repeatedly insisted. It's about "intimidation", "harassment", and the fact that she is being "personally targeted". By crying victim, she is trying to draw attention away from the real victims: the babies. And she has been tearing strips off CBRUK in a barrage of ad hominem attacks and false allegations (ever the sign that someone's arguments are weak). For the truth, click here and here. But again, all this is just another way of changing the subject. Why? Why is Stella so bothered by these pictures? Why doesn't she want people looking at them? Because when seen for what it is, abortion protests itself. Only if you're up to something dodgy do you feel harassed when it's exposed to the public. It's much harder to claim that abortion is healthcare when people can see with their own eyes that in fact it kills babies. History Repeating Itself This is nothing new. The history of social reform is riddled with reformers exposing injustice with visual evidence, and those overseeing the injustice scrambling to cover it up. Thomas Clarkson, friend and ally of William Wilberforce, made it his business to ride the length and breadth of the country on horseback gathering and distributing visual evidence of the slave trade - pictures such as these. So hated was he by those with a financial interest in the slave trade that he had to have a personal bodyguard. He was very nearly assassinated on a pier in Liverpool by a gang of sailors. The slave trade had been resting on the fact that very few folks in England had a clue about what this business - far off in the West Indies and the shores of Africa - actually looked like. The truth was incredibly damning. If space permitted we could list case after case of where the pictures have radically changed the temperature and brought about societal change - right up to the picture of Alan Kurdi, which Stella herself has obviously been moved by. A brief introduction to some of these cases can be found here. But let it suffice to say here: it is a fundamental tenet of the history of social reform that injustice thrives in the dark. “Like a boil that must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed to the light of human conscience before it can be cured.” – Martin Luther King Jr No-one has ever ended systemic injustice by covering it up. No-one with an interest in injustice has ever shown appreciation for its being exposed. Whose Side Are You On? Stella's anger and the history of social reform bear witness together: the pictures are doing something. The industry hates the use of imagery. It does damage to their interests. I have therefore a question to put to friends of mine in all sincerity - friends who describe themselves as pro-life but who, along with Stella, are angered by the use of imagery and would like to see these pictures banished from the streets: Whose side are you on?

Personal confrontation and offence - is this the Christian way? Doesn't backlash prove that instead of winning hearts and minds we're moving backwards? Those who preside over systemic injustice tend not to let go of the reins voluntarily. When challenged, they are liable to harden and retaliate via any means available. Peaceful confrontation as well as persuasion must be a weapon in the social reformer’s - and Christian's - armoury. Bricks Without Straw When Moses obeyed the call to confront Pharaoh (Exodus 5), things got worse before they got better. Pharaoh became incredibly defensive. He made personal attacks and lied (“It is because you are idle that you want to go.”), he accused them of lying (v. 9), and he made life even more difficult for the Hebrews in the meantime just to make his point (“I will not give you straw.”). The chapter finishes with Moses’s own people roundly condemning him – “The LORD look on you and judge, because you have made us stink in the sight of Pharaoh and his servants.” – and Moses himself in the throes of some kind of existential crisis: “O Lord, why have you done evil to this people? Why did you ever send me…you have not delivered your people at all.” But of course, that’s not the end of the story. God reiterates his promise at the beginning of chapter 6 – “Now you shall see what I will do to Pharaoh…” – and through a series of ten plagues he hammers Pharaoh’s fist open and finally releases his people. As Gregg Cunningham has said: “Change rarely happens until the cost of maintaining the status quo becomes unbearable.” History Repeating Itself Martin Luther King faced similar complaints as he deliberately but peacefully brought racial tension to the surface in America in order to expose it before the world. His own people begged him to stop, begged him not to come their city, because he was making things worse! But King understood that things had to get worse before they got better. It is a well-observed principle of the history of social reform that liked reformers are not successful and successful reformers are not liked. Many, put off by that job description, opt for more consumer-friendly engagement strategies, but they are by definition less effective in overturning systemic injustice. #StopStella Today it is no surprise that Stella Creasy is pulling out all the stops to get pictures of living and aborted babies off the streets, that she is declaring herself the victim, that she is lying about herself and us, and that she claims that we are the ones who are lying. She does all this because the pictures work. Nor is it any surprise that there are some on “our” side who claim that what we are doing is counter-productive, because it has provoked such backlash. What these people don’t see is the historical (and biblical) perspective. Injustice has to be exposed, and it has to be appropriately personalised – because it is real people driving this agenda forward or allowing it to continue. And so long as they can get away with it unnoticed or unchallenged, they will. When such campaigning is undertaken, of course there will be backlash. “The first response to truth is anger.” Eventually, however, as injustice is exposed, it protests itself and becomes unthinkable. This is why, despite being a passionate abortion advocate, Stella hates people seeing the reality of abortion. How To Lose Friends And Influence People There is a largely unspoken assumption in Western Christian circles that the way to achieve God’s work is to be liked by everyone. The problem is that whilst this may suit our comfort-loving, man-fearing proclivities, it has no biblical warrant. None of the Old Testament Prophets would have won a popularity contest, nor would John the Baptist (did he never stop to think how seekers would feel before criticising people’s sex lives?) or the Apostles. Need we be reminded that almost all of them were killed for their contributions to society? Jesus himself was executed within three years of going public, and it would seem that by the time he was strung up on the cross, he only had a handful of committed followers left. By the time of his ascension this had risen to about 120 – perhaps as many as 500. Moreover, Jesus explicitly warned his disciples that if the world hated him it would hate them also (John 15:18-20). He even went so far as to say (Matthew 5:11-12) that it would be a blessing, a crown of honour: “Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.” Of course this isn’t a carte blanche to be insensitive just for the sake of it, or to wilfully burn bridges; rather, as we stand up for righteousness and bear witness to the suffering Christ, it is inevitable that we too will suffer sometimes horribly. So the question is, as it ever has been, will we go Christ’s way or ours?

Dave interviews Pauline Peachey from Post-Abortion Support for Everyone to hear from someone who had an abortion herself nearly 50 years ago.

Is involvement in human rights and social justice an optional extra for the Christian, a question of personal preference or individual interest? We hear a lot about "a woman's right to choose" when it comes to the issue of abortion, but what about the "Christian's right to choose" - to choose whether or not this has anything to do with us? Let's consider whether there is a clear biblical mandate for the Church to mobilise on behalf of the unborn... As the 19th century draws to a close, English missionaries in King Leopold II’s Congo Free State face a heart-searching dilemma. The increasingly well-known systematic atrocities against the native people in the pursuit of lucrative rubber production include the cutting off of hands for the crime of failing to meet the quota. The population is even terrorised by brutal native soldiers weaponised against their own: they eat people, including children, in full view of their fellow-villagers as punishment for under-production. The decision faced by the missionaries – uniquely placed to provide evidence and expose this injustice– is whether or not to speak out publicly back in Europe, to apply international pressure on King Leopold for change. To speak out, or not to speak out? The problem was that the Congo Balolo Mission and the Baptist Missionary Society – the two major English missionary societies then active in the Congo – felt that they depended on keeping King Leopold “sweet” for their work. The missionaries “naturally hesitate to say much, considering the precariousness of their situation”, said one MP at the time.[i] Grattan Guinness, director of the CBM at the time, summed it up succinctly: “the difficulty is to do good without doing harm.” By putting Leopold’s nose out of joint, they could risk expulsion from the Congo Free State. How could they be sure it was worth it? A conscience issue? The notion that the missionaries’ course of action was to be weighed according to expedience and predicted outcome, rather than being a question of simply obeying God and doing the right thing whatever the result, is a premise worth scrutinising. The former construal would appear to be a thoroughly unchristian way of making decisions; Joseph, Moses, Esther, Jesus, the Early Church, and the Reformers stand as positive examples of the latter: men and women who risked and gave their lives in obedience to God without ever stopping to wonder whether it would be “worth it”. The critical question is whether social justice and activism are an optional extra for the Christian, to be adopted or rejected on the perceived risks and benefits with reference to other aims and priorities, or whether loving our neighbour as ourselves is actually a command of God, a core and integral part of what it means to be a follower of Christ. If it is the latter, we are left with only two possible responses: obedience, and disobedience. And to find out whether it is a command of God, we need only turn to the Bible. Love your neighbour as yourself Whilst we are free from the condemnation of the Law and could never have been justified by it,[ii] Jesus is quick to clarify – and the rest of the New Testament follows him in this – that we are not excused from obeying it.[iii] This is especially true of its “more important matters – justice, mercy, faithfulness”[iv] – and of the timeless summary that Jesus affirms more than once: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength, and love your neighbour as yourself.”[v] Jesus helpfully illustrates what this looks like with his Parable of the Good Samaritan. The love shown by the Good Samaritan is not evangelism, but practical, sacrificial, risky help. And the application of the parable is ever so simple: “Go and do likewise.”[vi] Whilst evangelism is a command of God, it is not the only command of God, not the only form of interaction we are to have with the world around us. The heart of God “What have you done? Listen! Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground.”[vii] Justice matters to the heart of God. The Mosaic Law is packed full of justice for the oppressed, and all too often it is Israel’s sins of omission – not ensuring justice for the downtrodden – that grieve God’s heart, and taking up their cause once again is part of the tangible repentance and real worship he repeatedly calls for.[viii] Nothing pierces God’s heart more in the Old Testament than the sacrifice of children to Molech – and all the more so when his own people adopt the practice.[ix] This is perhaps unsurprising when we consider what a special place there is in God’s heart for children,[x] and how much he hates injustice and idolatry.[xi] Child sacrifice is a meeting-point for so much of what God detests. Notice that tolerance of child sacrifice – and not just child sacrifice itself – is a sin, and God holds his people corporately responsible.[xii] To go back to the Parable of the Good Samaritan, the people whose failure to be neighbours Jesus highlights the most are not the robbers, but the religious people, who saw the man but did nothing and “passed by on the other side”.[xiii] As long as missionaries in the Congo held back from speaking out on behalf of the oppressed, there’s a sense in which, by their silence, they cooperated in the sacrifice of humans upon the altar of their mission. Certainly, whenever we allow God to back the “success” of our “ministry” but disallow him from speaking to us about other issues such as justice, we make God in our own image and engage in a form of idolatry. Great Omission or Great Commission? A decision faces us today, not of weighing possible consequences against certain goals, but of obedience to one of the central commands of God: Will we be a neighbour? As for who our neighbour is today, it would be hard to think of a harassed people group more numerous, more vulnerable, and more unable to speak for themselves, than unwanted babies in the womb. If anyone is in doubt as to whether the unborn really are our neighbours, the question can be settled quickly, scientifically and biblically. The videos freely available at ehd.org show remarkable footage of living, growing embryos and foetuses at all stages of development. The Bible is full of the humanity and personhood of the unborn, from David being sinful from the moment he was conceived,[xiv] to John the Baptist leaping in the womb for joy.[xv] As for the nature and scale of abortion in the UK today, consult abort67.co.uk. Since the unborn is our neighbour, and since it is a command to love our neighbour as ourselves, can there be any doubt over the biblical mandate to defend the unborn and speak out against abortion? Loving the unborn is not the gospel and it’s not evangelism, but it is part of behaving as disciples of Jesus Christ because it is obeying what he taught. The fact that Christian leaders today can say that speaking out against abortion is somehow at odds with “gospel” work only serves as evidence, if any were needed, that Gnosticism is very much alive and kicking. Thankfully Guinness and the CBM did come out publicly against the Congo injustice in 1903, a year before the British Government’s “Casement Report” came back and turned the political tide, with the help of the newly invented Kodak. Sadly, the BMS only came out after that fact, once there was no real political risk in doing so. My prayer is that we will think and therefore act rather differently from our forebears. Guinness’s initial reticence sounds nuanced and wise and is echoed by many church leaders today with reference to abortion. But “difficulty” should be utterly normal for cross-defined ministry rather than a metric that causes hesitation, and outcomes should be left up to God. The decision is not to take the course of action that we think is “worth it”, the decision is to deny ourselves, take up our cross, and simply follow Jesus, obeying his commands. But wasn’t that always the deal? [i] Sir Charles Dilke, who spoke vigorously against the injustice. [ii] Romans 3:20-24. [iii] Matthew 5:17-20; Romans 6; James 1:22-25. [iv] Matthew 23:23. [v] Luke 10:27-28; Mark 12:28-34. [vi] Luke 10:37. [vii] Genesis 4:10. [viii] Isaiah 58; cf. James 1:27. [ix] Jeremiah 7:31. [x] Matthew 18:10; 19:13-14. [xi] Proverbs 17:15; Exodus 20:4-6. [xii] Leviticus 20:1-5; Psalm 106:34-40. [xiii] Luke 10:31-32. [xiv] Psalm 51:5. [xv] Luke 1:41-44.