The most common by far is with the implementation of pregnancy help centers or pregnancy help ministries. Some places they prefer to call them pregnancy help teams. There have been over 6,000 of these pregnancy help centers or pregnancy help ministries that have been established throughout the world over the last 50 years. It’s really an astounding pro-life movement that God has initiated through His church. Many of them are doing it in remote places in difficult circumstances with very little funding coming in from any source, especially the local sources. Many years ago a young couple from Zambia started working with what they had which wasn’t much, but they opened up a pregnancy help center in Zambia that to this day remains a very active place for babies, mothers and families to be rescued from the appall of abortion.
In Cuba we found the highest rate of abortion in the world. No other country in 2016 when we started going to Cuba had a higher abortion rate than did Cuba. We have indications that may have slipped a little bit now. So to the glory of God they may be number two or number three in the world. That would be a great thing and we’d like to see them continue sliding on down the list of high abortion rates. But when we got there, we first found a people who were interested in learning how to recover and repair their lives because they were people who had experienced and were responsible for abortions in their own past. So the first thing that we implemented in Cuba was a series of classes for abortion recovery. Emotional recovery of what we call biblical peace with God is going back and doing self reflection, prayer and exercises to help people understand the biblical concept of what it means to be restored, even in the face of graven sin and error. Those who joined together to do these abortion recovery classes were the first to organize as pregnancy rescuers in their culture. So in Cuba they started going out setting up pregnancy help centers and ministries. At first it was just in public places or going door-to-door or living room to living room. This is really an amazing story. We were able to bring them a handheld ultrasound machine where they could go into the privacy of someone’s home and offer a very simple pregnancy check and then do an ultrasound on that pregnant girl and let her see her baby right there in the privacy of her own living room. It’s a wonderful thing that some now have become brick and mortar pregnancy help centers where they are gathering money together to be able to provide resources, classes, clothing, formula, diapers, practical help for the girls who come into their center looking for help with their crisis pregnancies.
And they are making disciples. They’re going out around Cuba now and are multiplying their efforts by teaching other church communities how they can do the exact same thing and find the exact same pleasures and fruits in ministry that they have been able to find.
One of the things that has really taken off in recent years in the country of Vietnam, for example, is apologetics training so that people are able to understand the basic ideas of making a case for life using science, logic and reasoning to show that you don’t necessarily have to have a spiritual reason to be a human being that stands for the protection of other human beings. They are teaching people how to combat the hard questions, how to uncover the red herrings and recognize the fallacies in people’s logic as they are making a case for abortion in that culture that can happen in any culture. Apologetics training is something that you might be able to find in the comfort of your own home just by doing research on the PassionLife website, on YouTube and the various channels where you can learn from good pro-life apologists.
One of the things we’re seeing in India is that they have started a rapid and multiplying strategic reteaching of what we call the Four Questions, our core theological training document. They’re training the Four Questions in churches so that churches can call their people to be willing to say something when it matters most–when life is on the line, when a neighbor or a co-worker or a family member is considering abortion. These are Christians who are learning to say, I am not any longer going to keep silent. I’m going to open my mouth. They are rallying the pro-life leaders who used to be disconnected in various parts of India and bringing them together into conferences. I’ll be on my way to India in just a number of weeks to keynote one of those conferences where other people are coming in from various parts of India to hear pro-life presentations and learn from one another.
In the country of Columbia there are a lot of different pregnancy health ministries that are going on, but one of them is that there is this local pregnancy help team who has decided to open a safe home for girls who just don’t have anywhere to go. They need to get off the streets and they need a job. They’re being threatened by boyfriends or by husbands or by fathers because they’re pregnant and they need somewhere to live. So another way that Christians around the world are rescuing the innocent is by providing safe homes for pregnant girls.
And of course, all of our work in PassionLife started in China. China has begun to open beyond belief, I mean it really beggars belief. China has been able to open pregnancy counseling centers inside the abortion facilities of government-run hospitals. Using a local NGO, they go in and work with the officials, the abortion doctors and OBGYNs to help them separate out those who come in looking for an abortion versus those who come in just not understanding how they can get by on their circumstances and need some help figuring things out. There have been parties at the hospital to bring the girls back and they report on how thankful they are that the hospital helped them figure out a way to choose life in the face of difficult circumstances.
In fact, there was a video made of a young couple where both the man and the woman had cerebral palsy. They met each other, fell in love, and soon there was a baby on the way. No one would support their pregnancy and everyone was telling them that they had to abort because they wouldn’t be able to take care of this child. And their child might be sick too and they couldn’t be a good mother or father. The Christians working with this young girl have taught her to be a very good mother, being able to change diapers and clothes with her feet because her hands are so gnarled from the cerebral palsy that she doesn’t have the ability to use them properly. So this is just another encouraging example from around the world.
I could go on and on with a list of examples of how PassionLife affiliates and friends are doing these kinds of pro-life works around the world. I’m going to be on my way to Africa. John just got back from Zambia in Africa, where he was a speaker at a conference where they are now gathering together pro-life leaders from not just all over Zambia, but they are the first place that we know of in all of the world that has a continent-wide vision for affiliating pregnancy help works and pregnancy help personnel to be able to come together under AFLA, the Association For Life of Africa to learn how to resource one another better and stand for life better in that culture. They are going from country to country teaching people how to do good pregnancy health work and obey, as we say, the biblical call from Proverbs 24 to rescue the innocent.
How are you going to follow one or any of these examples or come up with a creative way on your own to obey that call in your own life? That is the question and challenge that PassionLife would leave you with: How is God asking you to come deeper into the Pregnancy Help Ministry and answer that call to rescue?