A year and a half ago, I met Pastor Ken Shigematsu, senior pastor of Tenth Church in Vancouver, where 2,000 people attend each Sunday. He was preparing to deliver a sanctity of life sermon on abortion and asked me to preview his outline and give feedback. Unfortunately Pastor Ken is rare—all too often church leaders avoid doing what he did: they avoid preaching on abortion from the pulpit, especially on a high-attendance Sunday morning. But that needs to change.
After working through his outline and doing my own presentations in various churches over the years, I developed a resource to make a pastor’s job as easy as possible when preparing to speak on this sensitive subject. By clicking here you can access my PDF “Notes for a Pro-Life Sermon” and share it with your church leader. In fact, last fall Bishop Dewane of the Diocese of Venice, Florida, circulated this resource to all of his priests. Regardless of denomination, this document provides insights and resources a pastor can work with to deliver a pro-life message that is his own.
And why should he? Because of the following:
1) Abortion happens a lot: 56 million of the youngest humans among us, pre-born children, are killed by abortion—every year around the world.
2) Abortion happens amongst Christians: According to the Guttmacher Institute, 13% of women obtaining abortions identify as Evangelical Protestant, 17% as mainline Protestant, and 24% as Catholic. That means that over 50% of women aborting align themselves with a Christian faith tradition of some sort. [Note: The source for this comes from the Guttmacher Institute (GI), which is a pro-abortion organization; however, they collect statistics that are otherwise difficult to obtain. Furthermore, GI is an American organization. Similar statistics are near impossible to get in Canada since statistic-collection regarding abortion in Canada is limited. However, given the similarity between both countries regarding abortion rates and public opinion on abortion, it is reasonable to deduce that Canada’s statistics about the faith background of women having abortions would be similar to those of the US.]
3) Abortion happens amongst women who have already made that choice: As I’ve written in the past, some of the post-abortive are pre-abortive, as pointed out in the Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology Canada (2012; 34(6): 532-542) which stated, “At least one third of women undergoing induced abortions in Canada have had a prior abortion.” So not only can preaching spare women from ever killing their children, it can spare women from killing more of their children.
These statistics alone highlight the importance of preaching on this topic. And any fear a pastor may have that people will react poorly needs to be addressed by this point: People may react poorly if the topic is handled poorly. But the opposite of poor preaching is not no preaching—it’s good preaching. This PDF will equip pastors to preach well on the topic of abortion in order to bring justice, mercy, and healing to our world.