On January 15, 2020, The Colson Center for Christian Worldview released a symposium on Breakpoint called “What’s Ahead for the Church in 2020?” and it included reflections from various Christian leaders. Below is Stephanie Gray’s submission:
There are many “issues” Christians need to be prepared to address, but there is really one theme at the heart of them all: The Gospel message—or its opposite. The choice facing our world is this: Do we pick selflessness? Or selfishness? Do we trust God as authority? Or do we make ourselves the authority?
In Luke 22:19 Jesus gives us the path to life: “This is my body given for you.” He set the template for us to follow, but tragically we humans constantly find ourselves in a state of rebellion, making choices that essentially declare the opposite: “This is your body given for me.”
That is the mentality that drives the issue I focus much of my time on: Abortion. With some states limiting access to abortion while others are expanding access to it, this conflict is readily seen. Abortion is a selfish expression of “This is your body given for me,” but all of us reading this have experienced the selfless love of our mothers who, when pregnant with us, by carrying to term, essentially communicated, “This is my body given for you.” Their action was surrender, not servitude. And as recipients of this greatest love, we should joyfully pay it forward to others.
Christians need to be equipped to articulate that, even in evil circumstances of someone’s conception, namely rape, abortion does not erase the injustice. Moreover, the worth of the innocent life conceived is not affected by how she or he came to be.
We need to know how to explain that when a pregnant woman’s life is danger, saying that the “road is closed” to having an abortion doesn’t mean there is no “detour ahead”—in other words, it is possible to still help her, but in an ethical manner. And we need to help people see that in the face of a poor prenatal diagnosis, the child with physical and genetic difference should not be viewed as human doing with less than adequate performance abilities, but as a human being to love and be loved by.
Image Source from Unsplash: Alicia Petresc, @alice02
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