The Crisis of the Cross

Introduction

What Is Rescue and Where Is It Going?

When you see a two year old child wandering out into the middle of a busy intersection, you don't stop to ask some very important questions like, "What if I get killed trying to save him?"; "Would I be a responsible parent to my children if I get hit by a truck?"; "Wouldn't I do more good if rather than risk my life (and my family's well being) I tried to do something about the parents and children on my block who do not seem to take the dangers of the street seriously?"; and finally the real question, "Kids are always wandering out into streets all over the city why should I try and save this one?" And besides, "A lot worse can happen to a kid than getting killed by a car. And if he is killed, he will probably go to heaven."

These are very reasonable considerations. We would raise them if we had time to stop and think. But thankfully, for all the children who have been snatched out of streets, those running to their aid did so spontaneously, they did not stop to act reasonably in their own best interests. But this poses an ethical dilemma: Is it the spontaneity which makes rescuing the small child right? Had we reasonably measured the risk to the small child against the risk to our families, and social responsibilities, we may well have concluded that it was not morally right to risk it all just for one small life - or would we?

Operation Rescue was like that. As the Jews of Nazi Germany knocked on their neighbors' doors seeking refuge, the children being ground up in our local abortion factories were knocking louder and louder on the doors of our hearts. When Randall Terry showed us a way to respond to that knocking and literally rescue them, thousands of Christians poured out all over the country. Hundreds of children were confirmed saved directly, and thousands more indirectly. They had such high hopes. They figured a few months of this and surely this nation will wake up, repent, and child killing will be a thing of the past....

But, the spontaneity passed. The abortion industry was thoroughly grounded in an abortion culture. We stepped back and began to ask some of those key questions which weigh the value of the effort of rescuing the life of a child, against our many important responsibilities, ministries, and possessions. As we did, many who led the war cries of the Church-to-the-rescue a few years earlier, concluded that the little ones were indeed worth some suffering to protect, but we had to be reasonable about the value of their lives and seek out other strategies which would "rescue" them with less risk to our way of life. These other strategies run from prayer and witnessing, to activism, to politics, to personally harassing the doctors and staff, to bombing.

Having been intimately involved in the designing, founding, launching, and flying of Operation Rescue, I am amazed at two things. First, that we succeeded at all - that American Christians today had what it took to even cross the street in somebody else's behalf, much less risk jail and imprisonment. The second, is how few seem to understand the heart of what we were trying to do. Whether for or against it, most people mistakenly confuse Rescue with the modern movements of social dissent and protest. There seems to be little appreciation of how Rescue is a coming into its own of a distinct Biblical methodology for dealing with entrenched social evil. This distinctly Christian response to evil takes its cues, neither from theologies of revolution, nor from the modern movements of social dissent, but from the work and nature of Jesus Christ.

The spirituality and distinctly Christian nature of Rescue runs much deeper than the fervent worship which often characterizes the rallies, Rescues, and jailings. Rescue at its heart is about issues which are of the essence of Christianity. When Rescuers waver from them, then Rescue will simple become some activist's, or politician's tool, and we will devolve into seeking a king like the other nations.

The first key issue Operation Rescue raised was that of our complicity in the carnage - "We permitted public child murder for sixteen years, we must repent before God and stop permitting it." This idea is not unique to Rescue. All pro-life efforts have in their view stopping what we have permitted for so long. What Operation Rescue did was make our personal responsibility and repentance a central theme. We then Rescued. We made possible a way to withdraw our permission for the child scheduled to be murdered today, and in so doing, withdrew the Church's cooperation with the abortion industry and culture.

The second issue this immediately raised was that of the cost of protecting these children: "Can we afford to stop cooperating with child killing in America?" What will be the price of such a repentance - such a withdrawing of permission - and can we bear to pay it? This is a very practical consideration: If you try and physically protect an unborn child, his killers will come after you instead. So, who can afford to try and protect the unborn?

Since the idea that God has commanded us to love and protect the innocent helpless is at least as old as Jesus and Moses, what do you do when the state decrees that we may not protect them? This second issue presents us with the cost of living as if God's word really is final. Who will be our God? America? "Law and order at any cost?" Our church buildings and houses? Our organizations? Our reputations? Our jobs? Who is the final authority in our life?

You can see why such issues would create intense controversy. The first implies that we are somehow responsible for abortion. Thus the accusation that Rescuers are judgmental - Rescuers leave the safe neutrality of Pro-life causes. They point the finger directly at themselves and all who believe it murder. They accuse us all of granting de facto permission for each abortion performed.

To those who feel judged by the first issue, the second will seem even more so. It implies that Christians are idolaters who have sold out to materialism - that they prefer the things of this world to obedience to God - that they prefer dead babies to living babies if the price of protecting these children would cost them their jobs, homes and Church buildings. Neither message will make you a popular preacher.

There is no question that such a message, preached by untried and unproven messengers - Operation Rescue leadership - would have to fail... but then who else in the success oriented American Church could afford to risk their ministry with such a ministry destroying message? Only Christian leaders of the highest integrity, like James Dobson, James Kennedy and a few others were willing to risk their public relations ratings. It is also why both the critics, and many popularizes, of Rescue have tended to focus on the simpler side-track of the relative merits of bringing about change through social unrest, rather than on the truly offensive issues of Rescue - that obedience to God costs you everything.

But it is time to tell the truth about this movement whether in the form of epitaph, or foundation for the future. To do this, we must get to the heart of what Christianity is and what Rescue is. Operation Rescue as an initial popular movement had to fail. The seed was sewn in thorny, rocky soil. But we also succeed beyond our hopes. The seed grew more than anyone imagined it would.

The soil and the Church's lack of root finally shriveled it, but in the mean time, it managed to bear a small fruit which struck terror to the heart of both the pro-abortion world, the Christian Church, and much of the established pro-life world as well, because it came the closest of any attempt yet to put the raw, unadulterated case of the children before the nation - not the case of the politicians, lawyers, theoreticians, philosophers, and theologians, but the case of the children who though being dead yet speak.

We tried to let the children speak for themselves through our willingness to suffer to protect them. We do not need to speak in behalf of a mangled mutilated baby. He speaks very well for himself. The question is, will we answer his question? If not Rescue, what? That question terrifies the Church and the world. All of our philosophers, theologians and lawyers work over time to tame and render it harmless. The harmless Rescuer rubs our nose in it, not by his judgmental rhetoric, but by his simple willingness to act, and his incredulity that any Christian could find such a life saving act objectionable.

With the taming of Rescue as a movement, the voice of the children, crying out through the lives laid down for them, has been briefly silenced. But not all the seed fell on thorny ground. There are hundreds of thousands of Christians in whom it is beginning to grow. It will take a bit more time to see fruit, but the pressure of this holocaust will begin to build, and something will touch it off. Next time, there will be tens of thousands in the streets. Will we remain non-violent? I believe so. If we can learn the lessons of 1988 and '89.

In this book I want to share with you, not another argument for Rescue, but the heart of what the Rescue Movement is all about - taking up the cross of our Lord. This book could just as easily be a book about world missions, inner city ministry, Christian businessmen, or the Christian marriage and home. The material would not change significantly, because this book is about the thing which is at the heart of all of these things - the cross. This is a book about missions - God's commission. I do not want to recruit you to some organization, because God requires much more and the hour is late for our generation.

No, I want to help you transform even the way you wash dishes, whether or not you sit-in at an abortion clinic.

Discover the thousands of years of Rescue history which stand behind us - not in a history lesson, but in the simple doctrines of orthodoxy which we pass on to our children at age three and six - the doctrines of creation, providence, the atonement, and incarnation: God created everything good; We are sinners; God punishes sin; Jesus loves you; Jesus is God become man, so God could punished Jesus instead of you; God through Jesus can make everything clean and new; Jesus wants you to obey Him; God will provide for you in everything; Jesus wants you to be like Him.

Kids, now that you've learned your Sunday School lesson, who wants to tell God you're sorry and from now on you want to obey and be like Jesus?

Who wants Jesus in his heart?... Well, the more I have discovered about this Jesus, the less I like Him. I would rather be like the Positive Public Image portrayed of a successful evangelist, or missionary, or conference speaker, or Christian businessman, frankly! Jesus is dangerous. I am very uncomfortable with the Jesus who came into my heart, the Jesus who stands in righteous anger at the door of the Church - my church - knocking. He is not very nice. He insists that we either open to him, or He destroys that door, our house with it, seizes His candle stick, snuffs out our light, and goes away.

When you start taking these Sunday School doctrines seriously, you find that the core of authentic Christianity is Rescue. Not the act of sitting-in at abortion clinics, not a complex systematic theology, but the heart of utter abandonment to God on behalf of others regardless of risk and price - something even a small child can understand. It is this core I want you to see. Usually we only see it in moments of crisis.

But it is not a spontaneous act in the face of a crisis which makes selfless action at great risk right, it is the cross itself - something which God thought thoroughly through from the foundation of the world and then took it up anyway. It is still right today for us to take it up whether in a moment of passion, or with cool-headed forethought. Reading this may not get you arrested at an abortion clinic, and that is fine, if only you understand the way of the cross for what God has called you to do. You see, the problem is not that we do not want to leave everything and follow Jesus. In some sense we do want to.

We sing about it. We read about it in our Bibles and missionary books. But for most of us it is an idle dream. Most of us could not lose our lives in order to find them even if we wanted to. That is the tragedy which Operation Rescue merely uncovered in the Church by showing us how we could not even cross the street to save a baby, much less be bold in witness to our neighbors, or tithe, or deal with pornography, or keep our churches from splitting over hairs, or lower our personal life styles a notch so as to enable others to do more work in the Kingdom, or even get out of personal debt.

When we learn to die to self, then we still may not sit-in at an abortion clinic, but the idea will seem quite normal - neither heroic, nor radical, nor wrong. The fact is, in America, we do not want to put ourselves in a position where we must die to our own agendas for victory. Dying to self has become an internal existential experience which makes us feel at peace in our little hearts. But even this can be exciting if you listen to the right television preachers and schools of Church Growth.

It was into this exciting world of Spiritual Warfare American Style, that Operation Rescue came with a beautifully tailored program: Die to yourself on the weekend and still make it to work Monday (or Tuesday) morning. We became popular because all Christians know the undeniable urgency of dying to ourselves, obeying God, and saving a baby's life. Operation Rescue showed us how we could sacrifice like a hero in a way which fits a busy schedule. It was like not having to win the Congressional Medal of Honor posthumously. You can see both why we succeeded, as well as why we had to fail sooner or later.

If we are ever going to impact our world for Jesus Christ in any arena, we must go beyond activism to true Christianity: A faith that is a pearl of great price. Operation Rescue poked into our tents the camel's nose of what it means to live like a Christian in only one small part of the American culture. The rest of that camel is not encouraging to us if we consider the pattern of the cross for dealing with pornography, drugs, government schools, ever expanding government "solutions" to social problems, national and personal debt, and the government's battle to control both Church schools and Church hiring practices. In all these arenas we have been willing to cooperate with whatever the world wants to do - just like abortion - if they would only leave us alone to raise nice Christian families in nice churches and politely object to their abominations from time to time.

In Rescue is a clear pattern of the cross, one which needs to be applied in every area of Christian life. The only problem is, it runs counter to everything America teaches us about how the successful Christian life ought to be lived. The cross not only runs counter to all forms of cooperation with evil, but it runs counter to how we want to deal with evil once we decide to try. The cross does not always honor the First Amendment.

American Christians are caught between two inadequate alternatives: being spiritual on the one hand, and being an activist on the other. I wish I could find Biblical support for either of these extremes. But there are no such comfortable solutions in the Scriptures. The support for these extremes comes from the American Way which calls us to either the soul-warping personal peace and prosperity of do-nothing spirituality, or the life-warping ideological excitement of the battle which is activism.

God preserve us from either, or from an illegitimate union of the two, because, like Christianity, the theological framework of Rescue is neither of these. Rescue is nothing less than the warp and woof of Christianity. And Christianity is the warp and woof of true civilization - true government, true churches, true families, true men and women - in covenant with the true and living God for all their needs. Transforming the world by laying down your life is the heart of Rescue. It is the heart of the Cross. It is Evangelism.

When you are done, my goal is not that you get arrested, but that you never again fear what men may do. I want you hungry to begin to set your affairs in order to do whatever it is God gives you without making law suits, tax exemptions, going to jail, and losing your job, the major considerations. This will take time, what are the first steps? Where can you begin to die to yourself in order transform the part of the world God has entrusted to you?

Most of us were not ready to die to ourselves to protect children from abortion/murder, because we have not died to ourselves in the mundane areas of dish washing, careers, report writing, finances, obeying our parents, making up our beds, picking up our own socks, tithing, being Christian businessmen, being a husband who reflects Christ - dying for our wives that they might stand resplendent in all their gifts, free to build the future - or we were wives who rejected God's offer to establish the future and instead chose to be someone else's secretary and "fulfill" ourselves.

These are the lessons Operation Rescue can teach us. Operation Rescue as a movement stalled. Had we succeeded what would we have done with our success? Can we afford "success" built on short term commitment and fever pitch, crisis, crisis, crisis excitement? Would it be success to seize the mere external reins of power and change a law temporarily whether through political or social activism? I think not. We need to be instruments of true heart change - a change evidenced in our willingness to lose everything for what is right and true - a willingness to serve.

Whether the Christian puts his hope and energy to bring about change through revolution, normal political process, or prayer divorced from simple obedience, they share the same weakness which only a personal willingness to lay down one's life begins to address. I believe the days of ten thousand person Rescues are still ahead. I believe we will see huge crowds of Christians descend on free standing clinics and each take a brick home with them. I know for a fact that most abortionists expect this of us.

But, this will require a tremendous spiritual transformation in each of us for this to be not only possible but a positive step. This transformation in the Church will come as a result of enough Christians trading their lives for the children, thereby purchasing the right to speak to our society. The power to serve is the power to rule. If we want to rule in the world we must first learn to lay down our lives in service.

The Church in America must again become the Church of Jesus Christ, not a crusade, not an inquisition, not a mass evangelism rally, not a recruiting pool for activist and political issues, not a spiritual bath house, not even a think-tank, but rather, functioning Christians in functioning churches unafraid to lose everything. Someone will have to begin this process. While it may be a first step for many of us, it is only our first steps down an old well worn path, trod by the Church through the ages. Is God calling you to take your first steps with that company of saints through the ages?

If so, stopping child killing may not even be the arena you lose your life in. But where ever it is, God calls you to continue down that path. This is the Crisis of the Cross in America.

Joseph L. Foreman 1991 Fulton County Jail; Atlanta, Georgia.

Section I: The Principles and Practice of the Cross

Because we have strayed so far from our heritage, of sacrificial obedience to God, in all arenas of life, peacefully stopping a baby murderer seems extreme. Because we do not Rescue in any area of life, Rescue at an abortion clinic seems pushy. Face it, Rescuers - which is to say, Christians - are pushy where life and death, or heaven and hell are at stake. The cross does not wait until a more polite, humane era when people can be crucified with their clothes on, and take anesthesia for the pain. We take up our cross, period. And if you do not take it up where God has called you, that "humane era" will never come. We fail to remember that God rescued us, therefore we can never be embarrassed to risk rescuing others. So consider the rock from which you were hewn.

1. What is Rescue? 2
2. The Theological Root of Rescue. 6
3. The Tactics and Goals of Rescue. 10

Chapter 1: What Is Rescue?

The Challenge to God's Name In 1960, there was a day when the Sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan also came among them. And the Lord said to Him, "From where do you come?" So Satan answered Him, "From going to and fro on the earth and from walking back and forth on it." Then the Lord said to Satan, "Have you considered my servant the American Church how there is none like them in all the earth for seminaries, missionaries, budgets, buildings and programs to advance my kingdom, how they fear God and shun evil."

So Satan said, "Do they fear God for nothing? Look at them. You have given them everything they could possibly want, you have hedged them about. You deceive yourself. They do not love you, they love the things you have given them. They worship your blessings. They will never do something which might risk losing them." "Yes?" "I will not say that I can get them to curse you to your face - I failed with Job. But, I will say this: your people are incapable of even the most basic acts of Christian faith and charity, acts by which you yourself said that others could determine the difference between your children and my children, your sheep and my goats."

"Yes?" "Yes." Said Satan. "You say your people follow you like sheep? You will not be able to get so much as one Christian to follow you across the street to save a baby's life. Then you will have to turn, remove their lampstand, and visit their land with a curse." In 1973, Roe v. Wade struck down all anti-abortion laws in America establishing the right of all women to hire a doctor to kill their children at any time before birth for the full nine months. Its companion decision, Doe v. Bolton on the same day, established that a woman could do so for any reason she wished.

And no Christian could be found to so much as cross the street to physically intervene for these children. And the slaughter grew quickly to 4,500 a day. A slaughter carried out in most hospitals and in publicly advertised centers, established to make the killing quick and easy for everyone. So acceptable did it become that most Christian women thought nothing of having the same doctors deliver their own children who would be as willing to kill them, or go to child murdering hospitals, or buy every day necessities - from cheerios to toilet paper - from companies who helped promote child killing organizations. Pastors feared rebuke from their congregations if they mentioned the "A" word too often.

Again, in 1989, there was a day when the Sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan also came among them. And the Lord said to Him, "From where do you come?" So Satan answered Him, "From going to and fro on the earth and from walking back and forth on it." Then the Lord said to Satan, "Have you considered my servant the American Church? 50,000 have crossed the street and physically protected my little ones from murder though you incite me against them to destroy them without cause."

"Skin for skin!" Answered Satan. "Touch their houses, their Church buildings, their families, their careers, their savings, threaten them physically with beatings by police, beatings and aids infested urine from pro-abortion demonstrators, long jail sentences, and you will see them abandon your command to love and serve you only, as they scramble to abandon their neighbor.

In fact, you will see the very Christians who spoke the loudest in defense of rescuing them from my butchers become the leaders in justifying, in your own Name, why they should no longer protect them physically but seek some other way to "Rescue" them. You will see them bow and worship the same gods the feminists, the mothers seeking abortion, and the doctors worship - the god's of respectability, career, self-preservation. They will cry out to these new gods to preserve their organizations, reputations and bank accounts - even those of the Rescue organizations themselves.

Yes, your people will knowingly allow my doctors to offer me sacrifices of the fruit of the womb, and these will become sacrifices on behalf of your people which they believe will purchase for them the peace, prosperity, and blessing which they crave. They will make peace with me to preserve their good way of life at all cost."

1. * * *

Job never did get a clear revelation of the divine issues at stake in his life, he just lived with integrity and let God be God. I believe that all saints in their hour of testing experience this same mystery. Their purpose and vision only seem clear as we look back on the battle they fought. Like them, we can never get a clear look at all which is at stake for us, but we must obey God anyway and hope that as future generations stand on our shoulders, our purpose and resolve will be equally clear. When thousands of children are killed daily in our presence, what else could it be other than a divine question being asked of each of us.

Can it be that so much more is at stake than a sinner's right to be legally sinful? More than just the lives of the children? Perhaps even the integrity of the Name of God in His people? To find out we need to correctly understand both what Rescue is, as well as what Christianity is. Like Job it is important to try and understand what is at stake in the American Holocaust, and so I will begin with our crisis today where Vince Lombardy started with the Green Bay Packers: "Gentlemen, this is a football!"

Brethren, This Is Rescue: Rescue is basic Christianity. A Rescue is one or more people using their passive yet physical presence to prevent others from killing children at an abortion clinic. Usually this involves kneeling in front of the door and not letting anyone in. In some Rescues people enter the building, pray in the killing chambers, and counsel the women waiting to have their children killed. Sometimes Rescuers will lock themselves together, or to something in the death camp, with case hardened steel bicycle locks, to slow down their removal. Sometimes they will render the murder weapon harmless by damaging or destroying the suction aspiration machine.

While the doors are blocked, other Christians stand outside to meet the women coming in for their appointments with death. As long as the mothers cannot get in, they have the opportunity to hear about the reality of abortion and are offered compassionate, caring alternatives. In almost every Rescue one or two women will change their minds directly and their children will not be killed. Many more will drive by and never return.

The common thread in all Rescues is that child killing is made impossible by Christians who are physically, but peacefully, preventing it by standing in solidarity with the unborn. It is important to grasp the simplicity of Rescue. Often when people argue about Rescue, those against it are arguing against sit-ins which break the law. Those arguing for it are arguing for us to prophetically imitate Christ whose name - Yeshua - means God Rescues. It is not hard to see why a sit-in does not seem to carry the same prophetic weight as the name of our Lord. This book is both about Rescue in the grand scheme of God's plan, as well as about sit-ins.

"Rescue" has come to refer to the simple act of protecting children by a sit-in at an abortion clinic. The arrest, the prayer, the suffering, the prison, the fear, the challenge to the legal powers of darkness in this age, these things grow out of the Rescue, but the Rescue itself is when a mother comes and fails to kill her child because Christians would not let her in that day and her heart was moved to spare her own seed.

Many other things "rescue" children - picketing, prayer, sermons, burning down the high place, changing laws, properly loving and raising our children. In no way are these things minimized by reserving the title "Rescue" for a specific event. In fact, it is because we recognize the validity of Rescue itself in the grand sense, that we can recognize all these activities as being Rescues in a derivative sense, and for the child led to slaughter, the primary form of Rescue would be when someone stops it cold. And that is what this book is all about: the connection between Rescue at abortion clinics, and Rescue in every sense - the Christian life, or being a citizen of God's Kingdom.

The Rescue often ends with the arrest of the Christians. But arrest is never the purpose of a Rescue, nor is a Rescue's primary purpose to challenge the legal or political system. That is why we always speak of "risking arrest," instead of, "going out to get arrested." Christians who rescue, will rise to whatever legal or political challenge comes their way following the Rescue, but their heart is in saving lives by physically preventing the killing. The power of their challenge to the legal-political system, and the clarity of their witness to the world of the saving power of Jesus Christ, depends on the focused purity of the Rescue itself - it rests on trying to save a particular baby scheduled for execution today and letting the chips fall where they may.

So We Tried It as a New Strategy... When we began to rescue we got arrested. Now what? Do we do it again? Did we try and save lives just to make our point? Or is physically protecting children a normal way of life for Christians? We figured it was worth trying again and again. But still it was a strategy it was not proposed as a normal way of life for a Christian.

The courts understand civil disobedience as a strategy. To be sure we keep it a mere strategy, the courts and police will beat us, or throw us in jail, or seize our property in lawsuits. The courts want to intimidate us out of protecting children again. They are happy to let us make our point, but want us to stop after one or two times. The court's idea is that protecting the pre-born is a mere political issue for Christians. They do not believe that we really will act as if the children have equal value to a person who is born just because God tells us they do. The suffering with which society threatens us becomes their intimidating yardstick for our faith. How much suffering is that little life worth? How much suffering is God's Name worth? How much suffering is God's word worth?

For the most part, the strategy of the abortion culture and its courts has been successful. They discovered that we were not prepared to treat the pre-born as equals in real life, only equal in theory. Therefore, we drew back. We were not prepared at this time to "love not our lives unto death" - or even much jail. Nor were we prepared to "endure joyfully the seizure of our property," for that matter. Are the children's lives really worth risking the loss of everything? That is the question.

The Abortion Culture's has called our bluff. "If you really believe they are human, why do you spend so much of your life acting as if you don't? Why don't you picket every day? Why don't you rescue every day? Why don't you bomb these "death chambers" as you call them?" These are not unreasonable questions based on simple pro-life ideas. We must ask, if defending innocent human life is a calling or an obligation? Is it a strategy, or a way of life? Is it what we do when it is convenient, or is it fundamental to Christianity and even Civilization? In Operation Rescue, we have called it fundamental and yet treated it as a neat strategy. Which is it?

Even though today, Christians by and large, refuse to lay down their lives and suffer for others in any ministry, I believe that this will change in the next few years. Ultimately the response of the Church will be to throw all caution to the wind and lay down its life. Until then, a few Christians will risk losing everything in order to rescue even one child, or one marriage, or one reputation, or one Church from splitting, or one sould from hell. That is the cost of building a road for the world to follow.

While this road is a very old and well established road, it has become badly eroded and overgrown in our day. It can be resurveyed with our words, but, it can only be cleared and repaved with our lives, as it was by the lives of the saints and martyrs who went before. For those who are rediscovering this road today, the Rescue does not end with arrest and a kangaroo court's probation.

The Rescue continues as Christians become witnesses throughout the legal system by declaring with their lives what the saints have always declared, that there is only one God and we will love and serve Him at any cost - and in the arena of child killing we will not cooperate. Rescue seeks to fulfill not only the second table of the law, but the first as well.

More and more Christians, who continue to Rescue do not do so because of the strategic possibility of saving a few lives in a way which enables them to keep their jobs, nice houses, and Churches, while making a large media impact, and stirring consciences. They rescue because it is right. They ask: "If it is right to try and physically save a life, then will I let a legal system make me act like it is wrong?" In other words, "Will I go back to acting as if the unborn are no longer worthy of my protection?" Whenever the legal system is through with its punishment, whether jail, fines or probation, there they are again physically standing between the abortionist and his tiny victims. Will Christians ever learn? Learn what? Learn that it is right to join the state in protection of murder? No, they will never learn this.

... And Discovered It to Be the Christian Way of Life To answer the world, many have had to reject Christian compassion as a "strategy", and replace it with Christian compassion as a way of life. A local pastor in Milwaukee summed up this commitment when he was brought before a local judge for the 45th time. The Judge asked, "Reverend Trewhella, aren't you ever going to get tired of this? When will you quit?" To which the pastor replied, "When are you going to quit being a judge? You chose your career because it was a good one and you probably plan to keep it as long as you can. That's how I feel about protecting children from butchers. It's a worthy way to spend the rest of my life and I plan to do so until they are safe. I am a minister of the gospel, what else would you expect of me?" There is a new kind - or should I say, a refreshingly old kind - of Christian emerging.

Rescue is the cutting edge of the Church's compassionate intolerance to legalized child killing. It is not a crusade. It is about laying down your life again and again until this holocaust is over. It is only out of a general population marked by repentance, intolerance to murder, and open hearts and homes to provide loving alternatives, that laws will spring forth with sufficient power and clarity to rid us of legalized child murder and the supporting culture which so readily accepts killing the weak or "unfit" as the solution to society's problems.

This example of sacrificial obedience no longer exists in the American Church. Therefore, our culture must be transformed, not by politicking for a surface change in the law, but by the example of Christians who are not afraid to live what they believe - who would rather lose every church, house and, job they have, than to go down in history as the Christians who presided over the greatest human carnage in the history of the world - Christians who preferred to rescue their things instead of neighbors.

When we dabbled with Rescue, we found that as a strategy it was fun at first, but costly in the end. As a way of life... well, it is becoming very dangerous to everything we hold dear in this life. Will enough embrace simple compassionate Christianity for the Gospel to get a hearing in our Churches and in our land?

The Crisis of the Cross

Protecting a baby is one of those fundamental requirements of life. Protecting the lives of babies may be among the fundamental issues of any society and even a watershed test of faith in the living God. Protecting innocent children is not "activism", but among the deeper implications of orthodox Christianity as it is displayed in not only Rescue, but in the possibility of civilization, law, order, prosperity, civil rights and any other good and perfect gift God might have to offer this or any other society.

In the early days of Operation Rescue we made the mistake of tying Rescue only to the second great summary of the Law, "Love your neighbor as yourself." We did not see as clearly then, how loving God was the primary issue facing the Church in our country. Will we love God though it costs us everything? This may seem judgmental, but I believe that there is an acid test: If our churches were characterized by an all consuming love for God, then the cost of lawsuits and prisons would never have intimidated us to seek out and cling to strategies which were "safer" than Rescue.

Had we considered the value of that blood which bought us in all our other areas of life and ministry, we would laugh at the paultry counter-offers the world made for our soul in this matter of getting us to protect abortion/murder with them, instead of the babies being murdered: "Give us your soul and we won't sue you; Give us your soul and we won't send you to jail." they murmured soothingly. We would have joined God in laughing at the derision of His enemies.

Did they think so little of our Lord and His cross that they thought they could get us to defend child killing with them and sell out our Lord because of a few beatings, jail time, and loss of property from lawsuits?

Yet, instead of presenting the grand issue of Rescue - love the Lord with all your heart soul mind and strength - we got tied down in petty arguments about strategies and tactics. We wondered if this or that form of activism was better than this or that form of prayer and politicking. The reason so many Christian leaders cannot see the relationship between blocking the doors of an abortion clinic and the broader Rescue ministry of the Church, is that in American society we have all but abandoned the broader costly ministry of Jesus Christ. We follow a Jesus who cannot say, "No!" to the comforts of this life - church building projects, homes in the suburbs, and a well paying job to support these necessary blessings of the Kingdom of God.

In Hebrews 11:35 ff., the writer describes how God's people "chose to be tortured not accepting release because they looked for a better resurrection... they were sawn in half, scourged, imprisoned... they wandered in goat skins and sheep skins, living in holes in the ground." This level of commitment simply has not characterized our faith at any level, so how could any of us have been expected to sacrifice to protect and provide for children in the womb and their mothers?

If we are unable to be called, "people of whom the world was not worthy... whom God was not ashamed to be called their God," then, how could we be expected to see the relationship between our faith and the lives of the children? The point is not to berate us for our prior blindness, it is to ask, "How long will we use the excuses of 1989 to justify why we cannot leave all and follow the Lord in 1991." Where is the offense of the cross in American Christianity? What will prevent you from losing everything for our Lord in 1993?

What Is Rescue?

When we get to the heart of it, Rescue is doing something which will put someone else - his benefits and comforts - first. Rescue is doing it in a way which sacrifices our benefit and comfort for another. If a sit-in does this, we might call it a Rescue. But there is more. When we protect others sacrificially - in a way that honors God first - we begin to tear down the idols which rule our life today. Where the specific act of sitting-in does not reflect this tearing down of idolatry, then it is a mere sit-in, not a Rescue.

It is still a very good thing, like money, a good reputation, and ministry programs, but not sufficient. For the children who are saved, the sit-in is a very-very good thing, but still not sufficient to stem the tide. The idols we use to justify and preserve our good life must be torn down. These idols are manifested in our daily response to human sacrifice which goes on not ten minutes from where we live, work and worship.

Rescue is physically intervening to protect a child from legally protected murder in a way which does not hurt anyone, and which causes us to throw in our lot, our reputation, and our future with that child whose life has been declared refuse. We become refuse with him in the name of Christ who became refuse for us. All solutions to abortion must clear away the idols at their heart or in the end they will become merely nice variations of idolatry.

What makes a statue an idol? The place it stands in our life. What makes the material and social blessings of God an idol? When we seek to preserve them at any cost to our soul, to the lives of the children, and to His Name.

Chapter 2: The Theological Root of Rescue

Ethics Must Be More Than Spontaneity On the coldest day of 1984 a small child wandered out the front door of our house dragging her snow suit behind her. She walked half a block up the windswept Philadelphia street and looked both ways before walking out into the middle of the busy intersection. It was below zero, and the wind chill made it 30-40 degrees colder than that. There she was. Standing pitifully in the middle of the intersection holding her little coat, too cold to even cry. Only her nose ran. Did the traffic stop? No, their careers and lives called them on that morning and they rode past on either side as she stood there. No one felt led of God to help this child. God understood why there was really nothing any of them could do. He had given each passerby an important ministry and call that morning.

I remember it so vividly because she was supposed to be my responsibility. My wife was earning some extra money baby-sitting and she had stepped out for a moment and left the front door unlocked by mistake. The little girl had tried to follow her a few minutes later. By the time she was in the street I was searching the house frantically. I'm sure if you had driven by that day you would have immediately stopped your car. You would have risked breaking the law and walked out into traffic, or even blocking the whole intersection until the girl was safe - she was not even two years old.

You would have had some angry thoughts about whoever it was who was so careless of innocent trusting little ones. You would not have checked yourself to repent of those hostile thoughts aimed at me. You would not have felt like a hero, but you would be shocked to think that anyone could argue against you or condemn you. You would laugh at the idea that blocking the whole intersection could be compared to the civil rights activists who did the same thing in the '60's.

You would be stunned to hear that leading Christian pastors looked down on you because you brought child to safety, instead of doing the Christian thing which would be to prophetically stand by the edge of the street and preach powerfully to the cars as they drove past, or perhaps break a pot like Jeremiah to symbolize what God would do to such a careless generation. You would be amazed that leading Christian thinkers would scoff at you because you did not stop to consult with them to gain a proper perspective and analysis for when someone should or should not break the law.

You would not write a treatise called, The Theology of Rescuing Small Children in the Street. You would not have started a movement called "Operation Rescue". You would have just Rescued. Unfortunately you were not driving by that morning.

Rescue was like that for many of us. We stopped driving by and rushed across the street to the abortion clinic and saved a few lives. But unlike the little girl I was responsible for, it is no accident which brings the mothers and their helpless babies to the clinic. Our abortion culture is dead serious about killing. Now we have to think about why we wanted to Rescue in the first place. If we cannot respond in simple spontaneous Christian compassion, can we still respond? Were our instincts to Rescue correct, or just emotionalism? These are the questions which the continuing attempt to protect the people in the womb raises to all Christians on both sides of the fence.

Whether Rescuing a child in the street, or a child in the womb, we see one of the more striking examples of orthodox Christianity in daily practice. It was this that moved 50,000 God fearing, law abiding people to get arrested protecting children.

Rescue: the Heartbeat of Faith It may be argued that they rescued, because they took to heart what actually happens to the child if no one tries to rescue him. Also, 16 years of frustration were waiting to ignite. But there is more to Rescue than the publicity of a serious demonstration; more than the opportunity to challenge bad laws in the branch of government which spawned them - the judiciary; more than the attempt to save a mother from being exploited and her child from being killed. Beyond these lies much deeper the true heart and root of Rescue which is starkly theological emanating from the center of our Christian faith.

Rescue showed people that saving a baby's life is as normal and an expected part of a Christian life as church attendance, prayer, and Bible reading. People understood that to refuse to save a child whom we could have saved is to incur the guilt of innocent blood. People saw that even though saving a life may lead you to break the traditions of men, which are in this society falsely called "law", saving an innocent life is not breaking a law, no matter what the policemen and judges of this age might think, because God not man defines law. Those who Rescue understood these things, but it still does not get to the heart of Rescue.

There is no end of arguments which try to balance Romans 13 with biblical examples of godly obedience in the teeth of evil government decrees - Daniel, Moses, the Prophets and Apostles. But those who accepted, or rejected, Rescue did not do so based on them. At the bottom of it all is one simple fact which explains why people rescue as well as why people flee Rescue: Rescue resonates with the deepest heart-beat of what it means to be a child of God. This explains its attraction - what Christian does not want to respond joyfully to that which touches the wellsprings of his life?

But being challenged to the core exacts a price. It uncovers a willingness to peacefully coexist with the vilest evil. Even as we rescue, we discover our overwhelming desire to keep the comfortable tokens of our faith around us - a nice home, job, and freedom to worship. Until Rescue we could honestly say, "What can I do about this child being killed today?" We feared the consequences of the only other real solution to child killers we could think of - do unto them before they get a chance to do unto the little ones."

But, the closer the children are to the heart of God, the more Rescue could not simply be taken for granted. The more perfectly that Rescue reflects the cross, the more dangerous it became to the comfortable sense of our spiritual "business as usual" approach to life. We could not just take this for granted. We either have to reject it or go live it. There is no neutrality where the cross is concerned.

What Did Jesus Do? People Rescue because it agrees with almost everything the Church and the scriptures have proven to be true in theory as well as in practice. Protecting an innocent child from dismemberment in a way which offers compassionate help to his mother strikes a deep chord in the life of Christ and His Church. It is not what Jesus would do. It is what Jesus did do. He Rescued. Did He become a political activist? Did he lobby? Did He only help those who could find His name in the yellow pages? Did Jesus picket? Did He only preach and pray? Did He even visit John the Baptist in jail? Did He start Hospitals? Did He run for King, or Caesar? No, His name is Rescue, and that is what He did.

Jesus went to the heart of the matter - He personally took up His cross to shield us from the butcher of souls and on that cross, in our place, he suffered and died. Foolish? Yes. From the perspective of Peter's plans for Him - the perspective of big crowns, big crowds, big budgets, big building programs with cushioned pews - very foolish. But, it is where Jesus put the center of His ministry, and He says, "The servant is not greater than His master." In the end, His pattern is the only pattern for any ministry that calls itself Christian: "Whoever does not bear his cross and come after me, cannot be my disciple." In this light hear His last command: "Go make disciples of all nations." For these unborn neighbors and their mothers, their only knowledge of the cross in this life will be when those who claim to bear it dare to defend them from the butcher who seeks their life.

The Three Principles of the Cross There are three facts about the cross which define Rescue:

1. It is an act of physical intervention. The greatest preacher of all time did not save us by His words alone. The greatest man of prayer did not emerge from Gethsemane and say, "It is finished." When Peter tried to take the cross out of our Lord's ministry, Jesus called him Satan. Jesus did not just talk about physically intervening on behalf of the helpless, He did it. He Rescued us. Had he simply proven his dedication at the cross, but walked away at the last minute delivering himself from death, we would not be saved. Therefore we do not walk away from abortion clinics regardless of the consequences. His substitutionary atonement not only uniquely saves us, it also becomes our "take up your cross and follow me" example for ministry to others: Stand in the path of harm intended for others.

1. He was harmless toward His enemies and took destruction to Himself. Rather than come in wrath against the world, He took the wrath on Himself. He did not harm the soldiers, or the priests. He suffered in our place. He had to be harmless in order to take the wrath in our place, and to identify with our weakness. That's why he refused to walk away from His position on the cross which directly intervened between us and the wrath we deserved - he could have, but he did not, because we could not walk away from our sins. to save us he had to limit himself to our limitations.

It was not Jesus' arrest and walk to the cross which saved us, it was the cross itself - from that point, Jesus stopped walking. Which is why we stop walking when we get to the point of intervention - not our arrest, but our blocking the door. Jesus did not swerve from His place of intervention by coming down from the cross, and so we strive to remain harmlessly in the path of destruction for the child, his mother, and our society. It is why we do not fight back when we stand in the place of others.

We cannot assist in the removal process itself by walking away, otherwise we would no longer be harmless toward the children.

3. He identified with us. God became flesh. Then He became sin. He did not Rescue from afar, He personally took on our helplessness. In essence the cross explains His incarnation to us: "If you reject them, you reject me." And He bore our rejection in His person. He then calls us to bear the rejection of others and so minister to Him: "In so much as you do it to the least of these, you do it unto me.... Have in you the mind which was in Christ Jesus.... Let us therefore go up with Him outside the camp, bearing His reproach." This is the incarnation as we are to practice it by throwing in our lot with the fatherless, the widow, the stranger, and poor, imitating Him who threw in His lot with us.

Rescue, brings these three principles together into one action: 1) we physically intervene, 2) in a way which does not harm anyone, 3) taking on punishment and judgement to ourselves so that children and their mothers (not to mention the doctors and police) might live. This explains why we are non-violent, and yet we insist on physically blocking access. It explains why we go limp rather than assist the process of our removal - as long as we are standing between children and killers we, like Christ, will not walk away from the cross. Like Christ, we identify with the child's helplessness. The child cannot flee, neither do we. The child cannot post bond, or pay a fine, and so save his life, neither do we do so to protect ourselves. Some Rescuers remain helplessly limp throughout court and prison in solidarity with those who are helpless before their murderers.

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Principle #1: Principle #3: PHYSICAL IDENTIICATION INTERVENTION (with pre-born) RESCUE

Principle #2: HARMLESSNESS

The Law of Love Now, if the incarnation and atonement are not enough to show what Rescue means in the Christian life, consider how Rescue applies the two great summaries of the law: First, through the cross Jesus Christ secured an inheritance which would love the Lord their God with all their heart, soul, mind and strength. In other words, God's inheritance - the Church - is to be like Christ and put no authority or standard higher than God's regardless of the personal cost to them.

Second, in the cross Jesus established the pattern of loving His neighbor as Himself by being His brother's keeper. He was no mere "righteous" bystander. He did not pass by on the other side. In the cross God gave us the heart of all law which is binding on a Christian as a pattern for life - love of God and love of neighbor regardless of cost. The cross is God's final answer to evil. Is it ours? Or do we answer evil with bombs, prayer meetings, picket signs, and politics? Surely there is a place for these, but what is our final answer? The Christian lays down his life for his unborn neighbor - the love of Christ compels him.

When it comes to unborn neighbors, our Nation's laws say: "You must not love your neighbor as yourself." God says, "Be not conformed to this world, but be transformed... Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength and love your neighbor as yourself... Do unto others as you would have them do unto you... In so far as you have done it unto the least of these you have done it unto me... For all who desire to live godly in Christ Jesus will suffer persecution" Whose love will control our lives? Whose standards will guide our actions? Will we obey trespass laws and protect abortionists? Or will we obey God and protect the unborn?

Rescue, then is practical, basic Christianity. It reflects in one activity the atonement, the incarnation, the law of love, and God's final authority. In the face of legalized human sacrifice the Rescuer raises the cross. Here is his guide for behavior and his hope for this generation: "Whoever wishes to make himself a friend of the world, makes himself an enemy of God."

Rescuers hold fast what Christians have always understood about their faith - it is directly related to the fate of the real world they live in. If the cross is the center point of history, as well as of the believer's faith and life, then until churches grasp and live by this principle of laying down their lives for others, they will be peripheral to God's work in history and infants in the faith - they will not see revival, only more innocent bloodshed, more pornography, more messianic government, more mindless revolutions, more poverty, more cultural bankruptcy, and more conversions to dead faith. Without revival, our entire civilization hangs in the balance. Over what, a call to sit-ins? To activism? No, over the call to compassionate, prophetic, godly obedience in every part of our community - to have the mind of Christ.

God willing the Church will always call for and stand behind its representatives, its missionaries, who are willing to break every compromise with evil in every arena where the Church is at war. God willing, we will never use the fact that we do not rescue in one arena as an excuse to hide our eyes, heart, and support from those who are persecuted for rescuing in another. The Church which will neither suffer itself, nor stand with its missionaries who suffer, is a church which cannot follow Christ.

Chapter 3: The Tactics and Goals of Rescue

Doctrines of Demons Fulton County jail was going to be my home for the next several years because after I got out I was going to go back to the death camps and try to protect children in Atlanta. So I was making the most of this phase of my missionary ministry to the unborn with Bible studies and ministry to the prisoners. Most of whom were mere shells of humanity.

These men were precious. They had all prayed the sinner's prayer to accept Christ. They would go forward at every Sunday chapel service when a local pastor would come in to preach and give an invitation to invite Christ into their lives. And they would return to cell block 500 with the same foul vocabulary, humor, and dreams of sex and drugs. Throughout the week they would pray with me for God to do more than be invited to live in them, but to change them, and yet the grip of the world seemed unchallengeable in their lives.

I did all I could to instruct them, but they were already evangelical Christians. They believed everything you and I believe: God is Three and One, Father, Son and Holy Spirit; Jesus is fully God and fully man; He died so that we could have life; The virgin birth, the miracles; The Bible is God's infallible word; His work on the cross must be personally accepted; We are sinners and cannot save ourselves. We must grow in grace and purity. Many of them had even prayed to receive the baptism in the Holy Spirit and some of them spoke in tongues. And they prayed desperately to God and found so much joy in our Bible studies. But the world still claimed them.

Their lives were almost unchanged. What was I doing wrong? Suddenly what James had to say about the doctrines of demons took on a new light. When James defined the doctrine of demons he pointed out that they believe the truth just like us. They believe in one God. By implication, they also believe that Jesus is God, the Bible is God's word, that Jesus died for our sins, the Trinity, and every other tenet of the faith once for all delivered to the saints. So what is the difference between Demons and Christians? Living faith and dead faith. Doesn't faith save you? Faith which transforms you saves you. Is the other kind really faith? Or is it demonic?

I remember struggling with this dilemma into the night and suddenly waking up with a powerful realization: If God has a place reserved in heaven for the first evangelical Church of Atlanta, or any other city, then he has a place for the sinners of cell-block 500. Is this good news for the inmates in my cell block? Or is it bad news for the evangelicals of American Christianity when you stop to consider that if there is a room in hell for the denizens of cell block 500 who share the same faith, there might be room for them as well?

The comparison between nice suburban evangelical faith - faith which has supported and financed the growth of the Church around the world in this century - and the wasted faith of the average prison Christian is not obvious at first until you start thinking about the implications of basic doctrines for how we should live when they are killing babies. We all have a way of easing into the good life and fashioning a faith to fit, whether fit to the life in the urban jungle, or in the suburbs. These are the doctrines of demons: Transforming truths which fail to transform us. Rescue is nothing more than orthodox Christianity transforming Christians in the arena of legalized child murder. Fundamental Christian doctrine can transform even something as established as the Pro-life movement... or the American Church.

Rescue Is Not the Same as Civil Disobedience Unfortunately, many commentators, have not seen how the cross defines Rescue for two reasons. The first is their general knowledge of Gandhi, Thoreau & King. They suppose that little more can be learned in the area of "nonviolent civil disobedience". And certainly not from this unlettered rabble of Rescuers. Their general knowledge gives them a false sense of knowing the issues at stake. As a result, they feel little need to glean facts first hand. They content themselves with fitting the few facts they do encounter into their pre-conceived categories.

The second reason these commentators fail to see the heart of what we do is because they do not want to. Such knowledge is too costly. Pro-life literature is full of the slippery slope argument: First they kill the unborn; then the new-born "defectives"; then the old and infirm; and then the "useless parasites" whose beliefs do not square with the state, like Christians. But this is not the slippery slope which most Christian fear. We fear the simple assertion: "Abortion kills children. What will you do today about these children?" Once you start down that slope, where will you end?

To understand Rescue is to actually stop and listen with God to that silent scream - scream after scream, after scream, after scream. There has yet to be a critique of Rescue from within the Church which has the courage to look these children in the eye. Read them. Each one focuses on "civil disobedience", and "strategy", and "long range thinking". They are monumental efforts to justify why it is right to cooperate with baby killers and the authorities who protect them... anything to keep the screams of today's children out of mind and heart.

For some reason, those who argue about the best strategy to overcome legalized abortion never seem to think that laying down your life is a reasonable strategy. But what is wrong with this long range strategy: "We forty million Christians in America would rather sit in jail and see our houses and churches seized for the next 100 years than possess them at the expense of cooperating in any way with child killing."? True, they will not do it, but would it be wrong if they did? Then what of a strategy which is within my reach: "I would rather spend the rest of my life in jail than cooperate with child killing."? What of sacrificial obedience as a long range strategy, and teaching tool, and political motivator, and gospel witness?

Framing the issue in terms of Civil Disobedience and protest is a very convenient and scholarly way to keep the matter an "issue" instead of a child. But it constructs a straw man. Rescue theory, while bearing the resemblance of a 2nd cousin to civil disobedience theory, is not reducible to it, in the same way that Jesus' ministry, though having points in common with mass evangelism and seminar ministries, is not reducible to the categories of mass evangelism. The things we do are shaped by very different concerns:

1) Lawbreaking - We do not break man's law in order to make a point, show our resolve, or even protest the injustice of the law we broke. At the outset we contend that we have not broken even man's laws because we saved a life. The value of human life still precedes mere property in American law. Never the less, since the police and courts value property more than life in this matter, they charge us with law breaking. But even if you see our actions from their point of view, we still "break man's law" only at those points where to fail to break it will make us accomplices of the abortionist's murder. Getting arrested does indeed make a point and show resolve, but this is not even close to the heart of Rescue.

2) Protest - People are forever calling Rescues "protests". To do this displays only ignorance of the most fundamental facts. Traditional civil disobedience advocates law breaking as a means of protesting injustice. It is obvious, however, that if you were protesting an unsafe pool in which a man were drowning you might shout, "I hate drowning!" or, "It's immoral to permit pools with no life guards!" And you might even write your congressman, or picket offending pools. But if you were engaged in stopping this man from drowning you would not shout, you would jump in with something to bring him to land. This is Rescue.

Protest is important, but incidental to Rescue. We could use civil disobedience to protest abortion in many ways: We could tie up city blocks at rush hour; shut down businesses; picket on private property; or even sit-in at city hall. All of these would be classic acts of symbolic civil disobedience. But for what has come to be called "Rescue", the cross, not Gandhi, or Thoreau, controls where we go and what we do. Rescue goes far beyond promoting the idea that abortion is wrong, which is the goal of a protest - even a civil disobedient protest. It goes on to shape an activity which says, "To permit abortion is wrong."

The Two Goals of Rescue There are, then, two goals of Rescue. The first and controlling goal is that of saving a life. The second, is to do so in a way which conforms our message and method to the principles of the cross so as to bring lasting heart change to our Church and society.

Goal #1: Saving Life: Every symbolic and tactical point in a Rescue and its aftermath in courts, jails and politics, flows out of this central concern. The Christian shapes everything he does by his desire to quit protecting child killing himself and to make it impossible for courts and politicians to protect the killing. He goes to the doors of the abortion factories, and personally closes them. In court he becomes a witness to proclaim the God whom he serves at any penalty, and to defend the children whose lives he has protected -- never himself.

Goal #2: Symbolic clarity which will bring change to the hearts of men and the standards of society. To go beyond mere revolution and surface change, Rescuers realize that every action must preach a very particular message. This symbolic dimension of Rescue is defined by the cross of our Lord. It is not enough to just save a life, we must do so in the way Jesus himself laid out the pattern. Even small details of our tactics are agonized over for the message and symbol they will convey to the watching world.

In a nutshell, the message is: "The Church will stand with the helpless children and against their killers, and whoever seeks to forcibly protect their killers." This message preached by the cross is the necessary heart of true social change - good law requires the fertile soil of hearts prepared to live and die according to it. As Christians become that rich seed bed of practical righteousness, child killing will become illegal from within our system as it becomes intolerable to our lives.

As Screwtape might comment to his nephew: "If the church keeps protecting the little ones, then the government might as well change the law to make abortion illegal, because the Christians won't let our doctors do it anyway."

These two goals may be added to the last chapter's diagram by adding two rings. The inner ring is the more primary goal of saving a life. And the outer ring is how we focus our actions and how we describe them. But there is more that we can do to this diagram to illustrate how the principles of the cross define Rescue. Many critics have misunderstood and misapplied these principles, not seeing how they work together. If you take each principle and press it to its extreme, you have an activity, but it is not Rescue. Rescue is where all three principles come together:

EXTREME CONCLUSIONS EXTREME CONCLUSIONS Extreme of #2: DO NOTHING Extreme of #1: Extreme of #3: DESTRUCTION SELF- IMMOLATION Goal #1: Save lives RESCUE Goal #2: Principle #1: Change Hearts; PHYSICAL Symbolic Clarity INTERVENTION Principle #3: IDENTIFICATION with pre-born Principle #2: HARMLESSNESS

Basic Principles of the Cross

These three principles of the cross establish the three boundaries of each Rescue tactic. If you follow any one or two principles too far, you are not taking the "next logical step" of Rescue. Rather you are stepping out of the realm of one clearly defined activity - Rescue - into the realm of some other activity. Press harmlessness to its extreme, and you do nothing. Press identification with the child, and you have self-immolation. Press intervention and you have bombing. Put them all together and you have none of these, you have only Rescue.

Thus the most popular criticism of Rescue - that in principal, or logically, Rescue leads to violence - is seen to be as groundless in theory as it is obviously groundless in fact: while many people went from Operation Rescue into doing nothing, or politics, or CPC work, not one has gone on to burn down clinics. Those who argue this way mistakenly put all pro-life activity on a simplistic continuum between doing nothing and violence. They then set man's law as the barrier which prevents them from crossing over to violence. Then they reason that since Rescuers "break man's law" there must be nothing in principle which holds them back from violence. This diagram shows how their continuum is a distortion of the facts in addition to a distortion of the Scriptures and logic.

The Tactics of Rescue Consider, then, the tactics of Rescue bounded by God's pattern. Each tactic can be seen to be directly related to a particular principle and yet so modified by the other two so that Rescue cannot be fully reduced to any one principle. In the same way, different Rescuers seem to be moved more strongly by one principle or another.

This not only makes for heated debate as the Church hammers out how its historic principles of Rescue apply to the child killing arena, but it also leads to confusion on the part of onlookers who often only see one or two of the principles expressed by the Rescuers they know. The popular phase of the movement is still so young (barely 3 years old) that most Rescuers themselves cannot articulate the deeper unity which the cross gives to our thinking even though they all sense that it is there.

What follows is a catalogue of the 3 principles, the extreme version of them, the sort of Rescuer who represents each, and the tactics each suggest.

1. Physical intervention - The extreme interventionist would be the bomber. But within Rescue, the person motivated primarily by this principle will be the one who encourages more aggressive and confrontational tactics - move people around strategically, crawl past officers, link arms, go limp on paddy wagons if it prolongs removal, and crawl back to the door after being arrested. Once in the legal system, the intervention continues as an element which makes it hard for the system to hold you. They have falsely arrested you, now it is their problem to punish you falsely as well.

I will say more on this under Principle #3 below - Identification. This confrontational element is limited by the example of our Lord's harmlessness and by our willingness to take on the helplessness of the child - we will not intervene in a way which hurts anyone. But intervening means more than keeping the doors closed, it also means having aggressive and sympathetic sidewalk counselors; providing homes on the spot for mothers who change their mind and need a place to stay; having doctors lined up for alternative care; and finding churches willing to help with other needs.

Intervention requires both the courage to confront and the compassion to provide for physical needs.

2) Harmlessness - The extreme of being harmless would be the proverbial Christian couchpotato. But the Rescuer motivated by this principle tends to be either the conscientious pacifist, or the quiet middle class businessman who simply detests demonstrations, or making a fuss in public. We generally walk once in custody and our being limp no longer prolongs the removal of ourselves or others. It affects the demeanor we try to maintain at Rescues. Even chanting, or any kind of verbal response to the abortion advocates is discouraged. It is why we crawl rather than risk a direct confrontation. It is why we sit or kneel, and why we avoid picket signs, why we call those who come to watch, "prayer supporters."

1. Identification with the child - Most people understand the first two points. This third point deserves more discussion. The extreme of identifying with the victim would be some form of self-immolation - suffering for suffering's sake. The Rescuer motivated by this principle will tend to be the one who gravitates toward those tactics which will give him the least amount of personal defense. He wants the world to see in his helplessness before an unjust legal system and society, the far greater helplessness of the child.

Though most misunderstood, the tactics related closely to this principle also touch the deepest chords of concern to end this holocaust. As we identify with the children, people suddenly realize that our mistreatment is only the shadow of what they know must be an indescribably greater horror. We become the visible representatives of the children whom church and society refuse to see. When several fully grown Christians decide to be as helpless as the tiny child in the womb, it poses a genuine problem to a legal system which recognize the rights of the one but not the other.

We can grind up their tiny remains, but what do you do with a 200 pound man who refuses to move? Does he have rights? Or can he be ground to hamburger too?

We have found that the more closely you identify yourself with that part of a society which has no rights, the more you will be hated by that society and lose your rights. Both established pro-life groups as well as the pro-abortionists will join in their resentment of you, which always begins with a studied attempt to ignore you. This phenomena was seen in the 1850's as both pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions joined to curse the abolitionist.

What has added to the misunderstanding of this third principle is that within Operation Rescue circles, most of the tactics which flow from it have been discussed as mere bargaining, chips with the police, and as ways to crush or clog the system - going limp through the whole system, giving your name as "Baby Doe", refusing to post a bond, or pay a fine. In many negotiations with police, I have threatened noncooperation as means of gaining the limited cooperation of police and courts to prolong the Rescue, streamline processing, permit our defense of necessity in court, and limit the sentences. But this misses their powerful symbolism. I believe the most significant development in the Rescue movement will be the development of this dimension of Rescue. Of course it has been there all along articulated by Joan Andrews, Richard Cowden-Guido, Tom Herlihy, and many others.

What does it mean to become the visible representatives of Jesus Christ when we stand with the children? The child cannot walk away from the abortionist and save himself, so we do not exercise our right to preserve ourselves and walk away from the door, or seek to escape judgement in court by paying fines or accepting probation. The child cannot purchase his life by paying off the abortionist, and more and more Rescuers will likewise refuse to by their freedom by paying bail, or a fine. There are no cheap solutions.

Some Rescuers will carry this identification through court by never walking, never recognizing the authority of the judge, but after giving him a chance to repent, they will literally turn their back on him as a visible renunciation of his usurpation of power. They then call themselves "Baby Doe." They reason that if rights are denied any of us then we should all renounce those rights until they are restored to all. The purest form of this is called Category Zero.

What keeps these tactics within the field of Rescue is how they are bounded by the principle of physical intervention and harmlessness. By refusing financial solutions, the Rescuer will help the courts realize the futility of harassing rescuers (Principle #1), and will in the process inspire others by his act of courage to act themselves. Because the Rescuer insists on identifying with the helplessness of the child in a way that renders him harmless, (Principle #2) his goal is never to crush the system or choke it, but to be merely a witness who does not participate in its injustice.

To walk where a jailer or judge tells you to walk is to treat that jailer as if he had legitimate authority to prevent you from protecting children. If it is important enough for him to put you somewhere, other than outside the jail, then he will have to pick you up and move you. Every day you are held is a day that your jailers (and the Church which permits them to hold you) is directly accountable for the bloodshed you might have prevented were you free.

Someone is always willing to argue that officers strain their backs and courts get bogged down and cannot attend to legitimate criminal matters. But this is precisely our point - in direct proportion to the extent that police and courts wish to aid and abet abortion/murder they merely bring judgement and confusion on themselves and their bureaucracies. They chose to arrest and drag us away. They choose to hammer us with long trials and prison sentences. It is the courts who clog themselves. All we do is make ourselves helpless, harmless lambs led to slaughter in place of the little ones.

They could always simply not arrest, not press charges, or give us "time served." Our "slaughter" in God's economy will simply bring judgement on them and serve as a sign for the Church. When will the rest of the Church realize this and prevent it? If they cannot hold us "for fear of the people" then we can make abortion first impossible by our presence, unthinkable by our witness, and illegal by our votes.

Identification, then, is one of the dominating symbols of Rescue and an opportunity our Lord extends to all of us to join Him outside the camp by standing in the place of His little ones. We intervene on behalf of the helpless in a way which is both harmless and yet also shows forth our identification with their helplessness.

What Is the "Next Step"? If you can see the internal dynamic of Rescue, then you can see how determining the next logical step is not a simplistic matter of taking one principle to its extreme. It is as unreasonable to say that Rescue "leads to" violence as it is to say that Rescue leads to doing nothing. The next step cannot be violence, that is just the extreme of intervention. It cannot be a return to doing nothing, that is the extreme of the 2nd principle. Nor can it be mindless suffering or self-immolation which is merely cutting free the principle of identification from the requirements to remain harmless and to intervene.

It is clear that with the rise of Rescue, clinic bombings dropped off almost completely. With Rescue's apparent demise as a publicly perceived force, the bombers will no doubt return. Will Rescue lead to these bombings? To credit us with leading to bombing, one must credit us with the increased political activity and picketing which has followed in the wake of Operation Rescue's decline. But if anything leads to bombing, it is the absence of a clear sacrificial call to live and die a Christian. This vacuum leads to every other "solution" - from politics and Jericho marches, to bombings. For most of us, the pearl of great price just is not worth the cost of what we would have to sell to purchase it.

There is no further "step" outside of Rescue which its internal dynamic leads to. The only real question will be, "Will we finally learn that it is wrong to try and peacefully save a baby from murder?" When all is said and done, regardless of how you handled the legal system, whether through complete non-cooperation or through complete cooperation, will you try and protect the unborn again? Or will you have learned your lesson? This is the driving question behind fellowships like the Mission to the Pre-born and others. Is saving life a way of life, or is it just another strategy to fit into our busy schedules?

Rescue does lead to two things, but they are not outside of Rescue itself. The first is to free ourselves from those things which become idols in our lives. We cannot free ourselves from every responsibility - like marriage and supporting a family - nor would we suggest doing so. But we can make every responsibility a reflection and springboard to Rescue. We can begin to take steps today so that within a year or two we will be free to do more.

We can begin to prepare ourselves, our possessions, our families, and our churches to do those things which might cause us to forfeit everything we and the pagans cling to in this life. The tragedy is not that so few Christians are ready to sit-in. The tragedy is that so few Christians are free to leave everything behind to follow our Lord no matter what the issue might be. This must change. Every time you cannot Rescue, you should be supporting someone who does.

We cannot be free of responsibilities, but we can keep our responsibilities from being our excuses to let the children die, to let the inner city die, to let the nations die, to let our churches experience a living death - we must not let our legitimate responsibilities become illegitimate idols.

The second thing Rescue will lead to, is greater clarity in people's minds as to how it is merely an application of the on-going historic ministry of the Church. Rescue uniquely fulfills the Church's obligation of compassion toward people in the womb, and discipleship outside the womb, in a way which no other pro-life ministry does. This does not nullify other pro-life activities, but rather it fulfills them. It provides them all teeth and final credibility. On the cross Jesus did not nullify his preaching and healing ministry, nor did he do away with the law of righteousness - rather he fulfilled them.

We need to bring Rescue into the full ministry of churches so that they no longer fear what men can do to their tax status and property. But there is only one way to effectively communicate this and that will never be in books like this, but in our lives. How does someone looking at your life know that you refuse to compromise with evil? How can they tell the difference between your faith and the faith of those in cell block 500?

The Ministry of the Church Rescue is a ministry of the Church. When a Christian is held in jail, or goes to court for righteousness sake, he gives the Church a striking opportunity to minister to the world in its unique role as prophet, priest, and king. The Church should call forth, lay hands on, send out, and support missionaries to these people in the womb: men and women who will refuse any compromises with whatever worldly principle or law is sending Christians to jail for obeying God. By doing so we all become:

1. Prophetic: The church by defending its own, speaks a clear message to the legal-political system: "Let my people go that they might serve me!" Society cannot receive God's blessing by persecuting the righteous, nor can the Church by ignoring their persecution;
2. Priestly: The Christian in jail for defending children gives churches a priestly ministry to the Rescuer and one of interceding on their (and the children's) behalf to the authorities holding them;

3) Kingly: The church sets the example not by coercive decree, but by suffering and service. By standing in solidarity with Rescuers, and through them the children they protect, the whole Church becomes a living example of the law of love. In love of God they serve Him at any cost. In love of society, they suffer by standing in the path of its sinful destruction of others and itself. As our King led through suffering service we do too: we suffer rather than accept either the extreme of striking back at society, or leaving society to its own devices. For love of the little ones we stand in their place.

The church by standing with the Rescuers - its direct representatives - makes its ministry of healing compassion known by personally paying the price to establish justice even if for the moment that price means the seizing of our houses and sanctuaries or the inconvenience of a daily phone call to hold a judge accountable to the King. If we cannot express our kingly office as He did, on a cross, then we are not fit to change any law or seize political power through lobbying and voter registration.

We serve God even if that means jail, and as God sees fit, let whatever authority He gives us come to us there rather than lust after it in our political caucuses. The power to rule is the power to serve.

It would be a shame if the cost of the cross as expressed in Rescue would cause the church to draw back from this unique opportunity to stand in the gap either personally, or through direct support of our missionaries who stand there as much for us as for the nameless little ones.

Section II: Issues of the Cross

It is not enough to determine whether or not the world permits something. We have to ask whether God allows us to permit it.

We tend to approached the question of intolerance backwards. When you are dealing with mass killers, and their protectors, you must justify those points at which you tolerate and cooperate with them, not those points at which you do not tolerate them. The day may come when we are in danger of being too intolerant to child killers. Until then, what must be explained is why we are so cooperative.

1. Idolatry pg. 16
2. Brutality pg. 21
3. Intolerance pg. 24

Chapter 4: Idolatry

God Jus' Gonna Have to Unnerstan' I do not know if I had any lasting impact on the lives of my fellow inmates. But I know that many of them left me changed forever. Take Slim, for instance. He was an engaging young man who could talk his way into or out of most anything. Jail was just a momentary problem. Of course he would never wind up back here again. In fact, God was going to get him out soon, he was confident, because God is a good and merciful God and Slim was his son - he was a Presbyterian you know.

Slim was not that bad. True he had sex with an awful lot of women. But they all seemed to love him and understand and he was very gentle and compassionate with them. He really liked them. Drugs were just fun and harmless enough. He was able to work for a good living. He was proud of his college education and his ability as a brick layer. He loved the Lord too, with all his heart, and we would often pray and read the Bible together. I thought that surely this good man just needs a little more education and so we would study together and we reviewed over the months what it meant to be a Christian - His doctrine was orthodox.

Then one day, we were studying the book of Galatians, "No whore-monger, adulterer, etc. shall inherit the kingdom of heaven?" He looked at me and said, "Rev. I believe in God jus' the same as you. I know that sex and rocks (crack cocaine) is sin. But I know that God forgives sinners otherwise I cain't be saved. I confessed my sin, an' I prayed for God to give me a new heart. So I guess God is jus' gonna have to unnerstan' that I need that shit to get along, that's all. God's jus' gonna have to unnerstan'."

I was stunned. Here was a man who had neatly combined salvation by grace with free sex and drugs. But it was not his audacious feat which stunned me. What hit me was the voice of the Church speaking through him: "We know that abortion, pornography and secular government education are destroying lives all around us. But we've confessed our sin and prayed for God to give us a new heart. So I guess God will jus' have to unnerstan' that we cain't risk all the good things o' this life jus' to obey him and get rid of abortion. We need this [stuff] to get along, that's all. God's jus' gonna have to unnerstan'."

What Slim meant of course, was that he could count on Good ol' God to keep on accepting him the way he was even though he refused to give up what to him were the good things of this world. We are shocked at the presumption of someone who thinks that God will wink at persistent physical fornication and drugs.

But are we as shocked at Christians who have drugged, their heart and mind with materialism to the extent that God just has to understand that their spiritual fornication with the good things of this world must be accepted because they cannot give them up in order to do what it takes to be a light in this world - protect the unborn, bring an end to pornography, transform the entire government and education system - to sacrificially bear witness to the saving grace of Jesus Christ to lost souls.

Well, we are bright lights for Christ except where it gets threatening to our things, and of course good ol' God understands. He was once flesh like us. Right? The Kingdom of God is the blessing of meat and drink?

My eye wandered down the passage in Galatians, "uncleanness, jealousy, wrath, factions" and I thought about other similar passages which include, gossip, bearing a grudge, even cowardice, and drawing back, which "God jus' has to unnerstan'" in our lives. How much of our life is built on the same arrogant presumption toward God. How deep is our fornication against Him. How many god's infest our pantheon. How much our fear to rescue only reveals the fact that we need Rescuing from all these other god's first.

Does God overlook and understand Slim excuses and save him? Does he understand the excuses of the American Church any better? The whole matter of being Rescued from bondage to the other gods in our life - whether the god's of sex and drugs, or the gods we make of our house, job, church building, and the American Way - is bound up in the question of authority.

It does no good to protest that houses and jobs are not sinful in and of themselves as are Slim's god's of sex and recreational drugs. Nothing may excuse us to disobey God whether it is a good thing in and of itself or a sinful thing in and of itself. Do these other gods have authority in our life to compel us to disobey God?

Let's list them separately: 1) Does a government have the God-like authority to command us to protect murderers? 2) Does our house have God's authority to command us to protect abortionists lest we lose it in a law suit? 3) Does our church building, or ministry, have God's authority to forgive us for letting children be murdered because our ministries were more important than their lives? ("Is this the sacrifice God requires?" Isaiah asked.) 4) Does our family have authority to replace God by threatening to disintegrate if we put God first and lay down our lives to protect His little ones? 5) Are we really putting our families first in a biblical way when we use them to justify why we must protect the rights of child killers instead of the rights of the children being killed?

In all of these ways we make idols out of our families, or the law, or houses, or ministries. All of these good things will rise up and condemn us one day as the Queen of the South and Sodom will rise to condemn Israel.

These questions boil down to one: If God calls Slim's attempt to maintain his way of life "physical fornication", will He not call our attempt to maintain our way of life "spiritual fornication"? Will he find either acceptable? Can either of us escape damnation? Who has authority to refuse to commit spiritual fornication? That depends on who authorizes us to protect the innocent vs who authorizes us to protect their killers.

Who Authorized Rescue? After hearing what a Rescue is, in Section I, there are many who feel that we have rushed ahead in our explanation and rhetoric. They want to go back and ask, "Why - by what right and in whose name - can an individual claim authority to physically stop the killing of children when the government has made it legal and is even willing to protect these killers with its police, courts, and jails?"

This is a question of authority: does the Bible give you the authority to protect a child's life? If so, is your authority to protect the child, greater than the state's authority to protect the child's killers? Some say the state has the authority to stop you at a property line and prevent your going on to save a baby from being murdered. Not to stop at that line, they say, is rebellion against God's authority as it is handed down to human authorities - the state. In other words, if asked by God, "Why didn't you try and physically rescue these children? Why did you join with the state in protecting their killers by stopping your activities at the property line?" They believe they can confidently answer God, "Because you gave us no authority to protect these children when the state commands us to protect their killers."

The problem with this understanding of authority, is that there are no instances in Scripture where a human government at any level was given the authority to frame laws which protected those who killed its innocent citizens. In fact, the exact opposite of this is the case. Much of Scripture deals with the judgement God brings against the rulers who frame such laws, against their people who obey those laws, and even against those who tolerate those laws by permitting them to be obeyed by others.

The implication of this is clear. Because God has not given the state the authority to pass laws which defend those who slay the innocent, then clearly when Christians rescue the innocent they are not in conflict with any authority which God has given the state. What is more, if the state does not have the authority to command you to disobey God by protecting baby killers, then it has no authority to justify you when God calls you to account for protecting child killers. Romans 13 establishes these limits put on the governing authorities to, "reward good and punish what is evil." Coercing people to protect child murder is not good, therefore they have no authority to bind your conscience or behavior.

The Challenge: Let the Children Speak for Themselves Even though there are literally hundreds of reasonable answers to those who claim we have no authority to protect the innocent from murder, I have discovered that most people are neither for or against Rescue because of the dictates of cold reason. On a talk show once, I was called insulting for insisting that a caller explain how it was she could believe abortion to be the public murder of a fellow human being - equal to her - and not think it right to literally save that life. I was accused of treating those who were against Rescue as if they were not pro-life by suggesting that they come to grips with the simple statement, "Abortion kills children." The next caller said, "Of course we believe abortion is murder, why do you keep saying that we are denying this belief just because we are against Rescue?"

This accusation took me quite by surprise, but I'm afraid many have a similar misunderstanding of why I go back to the bottom line again and again: it is not because those against Rescue do not believe abortion is murder, it is because they do believe it to be murder and I am trying desperately to get them to see that under any other circumstances they would say that it is never wrong to prevent murder, regardless of the price one might pay, for trying to rescue the victim. I am not saying that those who deny the validity of Rescue are not pro-life. I am saying that they are inconsistent with what they believe.

If you believe that abortion is murder, but also that we must obey laws which protect each murder, try this: write Human Life International and ask for one of their postcards of a dead child, and put it on your bathroom mirror. Forget this book, let the child speak for himself. This is perhaps my most offensive challenge: I do not believe that you can do this for long and continue to object to Rescue. There may be a thousand reasons why we do not set up that picture, but they all boil down to one: We cannot.

We do not have what it takes to listen to the testimony of this child for even five minutes a day and still say it is wrong to physically protect him. I am not making a moral argument here, I am simply stating a fact: you cannot do it without your life changing. If you think I have condemned you of a moral lapse, then you need to examine why you think being unable to look a dead child in the eye is a condemnation of you.

What has happened to us? There was a time when the only argument we had about babies was whether or not to baptize them. How is it that now we are seriously arguing that it is wrong for someone to physically protect babies from murder? And why is it that so many leaders feel like they ought to defend why they are not doing it, by condemning those who do try to save these children's lives?

"But who is condemning who?" asks the non-rescuer. "Isn't this whole book a condemnation of those who don't do sit-ins?" No. It is a book about why we refuse to sit-in at abortion clinics. It is about how sittingin can reflect a God-centeredness to our lives which no other activity yet proposed can. It is also about how sitting-in can be just another idol. God wants our hearts, not our treasure, not even our sit-ins, because He knows that where our heart is there will our treasure be also.

This book is about the cross in all of our life, not just in the pro-life part, or the Sunday morning part, but in all of our lives - manifesting a fearlessness of those who can only destroy the body and a reverent fear of Him who can destroy body and soul. Idolatry - looking to something other than God to save or provide for us - cuts us off from God, not just in the small realm the idol rules, but finally for our whole life, twisting and stunting it, because God will not tolerate a rival.

There are five blessings of God which have become idols in the sanctuaries of our churches and lives, The cross threatens them. We will either put them in their proper place, or God will put us in our proper place of judgement.

5 American Idols in Our Churches Today there is a growing number of people who no longer assume that being human has any fundamental connection with having a right to life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness. How can the Church speak prophetically to them? If we purchase our freedom to do what we want to do - worship, build buildings, be incorporated and tax exempt, have ministries, and "obey God" - at the expense of permitting doctors to kill babies, why should not the world purchase its freedom to do what it wants to do by killing babies? Ask not for whom the mother sacrifices her child.

1. The idolatry of thinking man's laws can save us. Where does the idea come from that if we just seize the reins political power in the land then, we can make it illegal to kill the unborn? Moses could have become the next Pharaoh and brought legal emancipation to Hebrew slaves. But God knew that Pharaoh's law could never free His people from the slavery which dwelt in their heart. He knew that no secular government could grant freedom to His people, or they would look to governments instead of Him. This slavery always looks to Egypt, Chaldea or the American Constitution for liberty rather than the word of God.

This slavery always asks the laws of the nations to define what is permissible and impermissible for the Christian. It says, "Show us the way, nations of the earth, that we may walk in it." He knew only a desert could begin a process which is still going on today 4,000 years later. We His people still hate that desert as much as ever, and are still whining around looking for some way to get out of that desert without having to face the giants in the land. Instead Moses identified with God's people against the "law" of Pharaoh, preferring suffering and reproach with God's people to all the treasures of Egypt.

He would not tolerate a citizenship which forfeited his identification and citizenship with God or His people.

Daniel, like Moses, also refused to identify with the world against God. Can you hear the Jewish elders approaching Daniel to remind him that God had given him political obligations which should not be thrown away by breaking a temporary injunction against prayer: "But Daniel, it is just thirty days that you cannot pray. If you throw away the political stewardship God has given you, then who will protect Israel in exile from men like Haman? God has put you here. God has not given you a lion's den ministry!"

Can you hear Daniel's scorn: "You blind elders. You think the lions you can see are the ones which can hurt me? They can only crush flesh and bone. It is the political lions you cannot see whom you ought to fear - they purchase your very soul for a compromise. You say God has put me here? So He has. And if I am to be faithful to Him politically, if I am strong enough to protect your skins from persecution, then I must be strong enough to stand up to mere physical lions, or I will never have what it takes to withstand the true test in the political arena where spirit and soul are bought and sold."

How many times have we heard, "The real solution to abortion is to change the laws!" This is idolatry. Are we who are afraid to lay down our lives for our neighbor fit to wield political power? "Maybe if we can just get worldly power we can make everything right." We mutter to ourselves. Thus "change the law" becomes little more than a chant to our new God, "Law-and-Order." Maybe he can make it so we do not have to take up our cross in this generation. Maybe Law-and-Order can enable us to keep our possessions and save babies too.

The solution to legalized murder must go deeper than a mere law against it. This is why politics is a false God, a false solution to abortion - or any other social evil - white-wash on a tomb. Yes, we must change the law, but never as an excuse to avoid taking up the cross. In fact, only cross bearers in the political arena - those who do not worship man's laws, law courts, or voters' whims - will be able to change it.

2. The idolatry of thinking that saying the right words or pushing the right education program can save us. We must do more than make people aware that the unborn are human. We must raise up a generation that will do what it takes to personally and corporately defend the innocent. Our society's legal and social structure is built on the foundation of the sanctity of all human life and the personal responsibility of each citizen to protect his neighbor. This foundation stone - that all men are equal and obligated to protect one another - was not the insight of secular men, but is itself rooted in the more profound cornerstone on which Christ built His Church.

In Matthew 16, Jesus said that Peter's confession, "You are the Christ the son of the living God." would serve as the cornerstone of the Church and nothing could prevail against it. Peter did not realize that intrinsic to being the Messiah-King was the requirement that He lay down His life for His people. So in the next breath, Jesus had to rebuke Peter for wanting to build the Church on a different cornerstone. In fact, Jesus played on the two stones by calling Peter's rejection of the cross a "stumbling stone" and called Peter, "Satan," for even suggesting it.

The cross - dying to our self and living for our Lord, laying down our lives for each other - this is the foundation of the Church. Against these things the gates of hell will not prevail. The captain of our salvation leads in these matters - He is the cornerstone and we align our lives on His as stones are aligned on the corner stone. "If any man would be my disciple...." Jesus ended his comments to Peter that day.

If words could make us free, then men would not have died because of the Gospel, or for the Declaration of Independence, or anything else. At best words can only survey the path of freedom, they cannot walk it for you. If a constitution could make men free, then the 75 banana republics which have constitutions identical to ours would be free. If education could make us free then Jesus would not have bothered to die, he would simply have instituted a new Rabbinic school.

The religious root of the Declaration of Independence and the fundamental principle of law which has made our civilization possible is the universal call to lay down our lives for the least of these among us. This is what equality means. We must live as if we are not equal by chance or by choice. Rather, because we were created equal before God, we have rights only because we are endowed with them by our Creator. Only when the Church lives or dies as if this is true, does the world have a chance at freedom.

This religious cornerstone, and the political house built on it are under serious attack, in this nation, because we have reduced ourselves to mere words. Those who kill people who are useless to them, are no longer afraid to use our words and admit that those they kill are "human". The abortion culture is no longer afraid of the implications of destroying unnecessary, unwanted, human life, and they are unafraid of any who might oppose them with cheap words. For the humanist, the value of unborn human life is negligible compared to the value of the life-style of the mother.

Though the American Church may want to answer the world in the name of the Living God, our words fall to the ground: we affirm the humanity and equality of the unborn, yet refuse to protect them. For the Church today, the value of a child's life is negligible compared to the value of the life-style of the Christian. Other things are more important than their lives, things like the world's respect, tax exemption, not getting sued, and our "ministry" - these things are more valuable than the very life of our neighbor.

And this is why the solution to legalized murder must go deeper than mere words and pictures which educate people. Liberty and justice for all is not built on words alone. Education that does not lead to lives laid down a false god, a false solution to abortion or any other evil.

1. The idolatry of thinking that "stewardship" can save us by excusing our disobedience. Most of our "good reasons" for not protecting children come under the category of being a good steward of our possessions, ministry, calling, or family. We have put stewardship of our possessions and career above human life. Could you imagine Jesus telling the Pharisees in Mark 2:27: "God did not create possessions to serve man, he created men to serve their possessions!"?

Apparently the Church today can: "Korban!" we self-righteously declare to the pre-born, and so we set aside God's law for our traditions, "What we would have to lose in order to protect you, we preserve so that we can live comfortably in large Churches and devote ourselves to `Gospel ministry.'" Do I say this because possessions are wrong, or the Gospel should not be preached? Of course not. The Pharisees were not wrong for wanting to hallow the Sabbath, or support the temple.

They were wrong for thinking God is hallowed by ministry, worship, buildings, and budgets established at the expense of innocent human life where these victims could have been rescued. The work of the Kingdom cannot be used an excuse to let someone kill a baby in public.

The solution to legalized murder must go deeper than plans which do not threaten our lifestyles, buildings and programs, otherwise stewardship becomes a false god, a false excuse to permit abortion or any other social evil - a false way to keep our possessions and justify first our making idols of them, and finally making love to them, all in the name of being a good steward of them in the kingdom.

4. The idolatry of thinking that activism - doing the right things - will save us. Rescue does not make us right with God. The act of sitting-in itself must not be treated as an act which absolves us of blood guiltiness. If we preach Rescue at the abortion clinic as if it is the totality of righteousness, then we who Rescue there have been found with a another form of idolatry. We must always keep the prophetic edge of our ministry sharp and not become recruiters for some new activist strategy. Activism cannot become God. Where Rescue is reduced to an activist strategy it loses its prophetic edge.

Ultimately laying down your life for another is not a strategy, it is God's design for His Kingdom. Dying to self is not a matter of the special calling of the activist, it is the pattern of Christian living. "Die to self" must not become the exclusive a code word for "anti-abortion sit-in". If we as different parts of the body of Christ were truly faithfully dead to ourselves in each area where God has called us, then mere jail or fines, or the seizing of our houses would have been irrelevant to our willingness Rescue the unborn - persecution would be a way of life. Yes, dying to self has strategic implications, but the power of any strategy derived from it will be lost if we reduce ourselves to making it an activist strategy. The irreducible core is that we must protect the innocent in theory and in real life, in legal institutions and in history, in Sunday School and in the street.

The solution to legalized murder must go deeper than activism and sit-ins, otherwise these activities can become a false god, a false solution to abortion or any other social evil.

5. The idolatry of thinking that preserving God's material blessings is a reason God will accept for us to permit murder. The abortionist we say worships the God of Money? So do we, fearing to lose the favor of the Money God if we get fined or sued. Do we accuse the women who seek abortions of sacrificing their infants to the gods of Career, Family Name, Respectability, and Nice Things? Then we only accuse ourselves when we refuse to risk our career, family peace, respectability, and nice things to save these children. Far be it from us to incur the wrath of our local 20th Century deities - Baal Money, Baal Status, Baal Family Time.

Do the abortionists and the women seeking to murder their children worship the God of the State by letting what is merely legal dictate their moral choices? Then our obeying trespass laws and injunctions becomes that much more an act of homage to our new lord, the State, by letting his protection of child murder dictate our moral response as we join in the protection scam. To the extent that we draw back in order to protect any part of our lifestyle instead of protecting the children, that part of our life is purchased by infant sacrifice. The mother's sacrifice of her child, which we might have prevented but did not, becomes our sacrifice with her to our mutual gods.

This will only seem harsh and judgmental if we do not take into account that the same God who commanded these women and their doctors saying, "Thou shalt not kill!" has commanded us to be our brother's keeper, to love our neighbor as ourself, to defend the fatherless, to rescue the innocent, to do unto others as we would have them do unto us. In a word, He commands us to have the mind of Christ. All the reasons for not protecting children, may be, in and of themselves, the good blessings God promised us - money, possessions, a good reputation, social stability, honoring the governor, a good job, ministry programs - they are all good, until they are bought with something other than blood of Christ and grasped after as if they can cleanse us of our sin of blood guiltiness on that day when we must give account of why we rescued our blessings instead of the innocent.

Who will justify us on that day when He says, "Why should I not judge you according to your own measure? In so far as you did not find my brethren worth suffering to protect in this life, I do not find you worth suffering to protect in the next."? What god will we then call to be our defense attorney? The Money God? The Reputation and Career God? The Stewardship God? The Political God? The Education God? The Ministry God? the Law-and-Order God? Where are our building programs now? Where is our reputation? Our money? Our Ph.D.'s?

Our pastors, elders and governors who convinced us that we had better things to do than worry about "Abortion". Of these things we made our mighty fortress in this life - a fortress which did not include His little ones - let them protect us now. Whose blood will cover our sin? The blood of Him who said, "Inasmuch as you did not do it unto one of the least of these my brethren, you did not do it unto me. Depart from me you cursed into everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels."?

The solution to legalized murder must go deeper than limiting our efforts to those which do not threaten God's material blessings to us, otherwise these blessings - given by God's hand - become a false god, a false confidence that God will not spew us and our "blessings" out of His mouth as we have spewed out the little children from our lives. Idols never look like idols to those who need them to survive the problems and realities of every day life. All five of these idols in the Church are actually God's blessings which we have bowed down to.

Pointing them out got the prophets killed because God's people would not permit those prophets to touch what had become holy to them. Idolatry is looking for justification, sanctification, wisdom, and authority in this life or the next from any thing other than God. Whose covenant will sustain us, our covenant with God or our covenant with the gods of this world? Who alone can provide for us in all things, God or the abortionist whom I agree to protect? God or my job whom I serve? God or the house and family which I build? God or the city which I vainly watch? These are the issues of Christianity and culture.

These are the issues of Rescue.

Chapter 5: Brutality

Building up the Monuments to the Prophets

"NO! CHRISTIANS WILL NOT TRADE THEIR SOUL TO AVOID BEATINGS BY POLICE, THEIR HOUSES BEING SEIZED BY JUDGES, OR SITTING IN JAIL FOR MONTHS OR YEARS. GOD'S CHURCH IS BIGGER THAN ANY THREAT THE WORLD CAN BRING. THERE IS NO PIT SO DEEP THAT GOD IS NOT DEEPER STILL. OUR POSSESSIONS AND OUR SKINS BE DAMNED! WE WILL NOT SELL OUT OUR LORD." There was a time when such an impassioned speech would be considered heroic. Can't you just hear someone crying out in agonized faith, like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, an abolitionist, or a Christian listening to the roar of the bloodthirsty Roman crowd as he awaits his turn in the arena. Can't you hear them crying out to God in some forgotten jail cell? And it makes you feel all brave and warm inside because you are a part of this great church which has been so often willing to die rather than deny its Lord.

And look what such faith has produced. The blessings of God! The greatest missionary country in the world with the wealth and technology to support massive outreach. "Yes, God heard those cries." We say to ourselves. "And to be honest, we'd risk it all again - I'm sure - if there ever were a real need." It was with similar conviction that the Pharisees brought their flowers to the monuments they had built to the prophets: "Great men! Great men!" They muttered, "Now, had we been there, we would have backed that Jeremiah right up! We'd have walked with him step for step!... Great men!" they used to mutter as they gathered around the tombs. And so, like the Pharisees, we bear witness against ourselves as sons of those who murdered the prophets. "Great men, those saints and Martyrs! Why If I were in ancient Rome, I'd have been right there sticking it in Caesar's face." I imagine to myself.

We Have Met the Pharisees, and They Is Us This is why I have a difficult time condemning the police officers who beat us, or the judges who imprison us, and threaten us with lawsuits. I know that they are wrong for doing these things to us because it is the children who suffer ultimately. But how can I condemn others when I see their sin writ large in my own overwhelming temptation to shrink back?

When I stop to ask, "Who are these judges and police the agents of: the terrible abortion industry? The secular humanist plot?" I realize, "No. They are agents of you and me, of Pastor Smith and Dr. Jones Th.D.. They are agents of all those who know better but would rather tolerate those who protect the killers." It would be one thing if we could just condemn them as pagans, but God gives us no such opportunity for pride.

For one thing, many in the forefront of crushing Christian Rescuers, are not just Christians, but notable Christians - Major Burnette of the Atlanta Police Department for 25 years kept an open Bible on his desk and certificates of distinguished standing with Bill Gothard on his wall. Assistant Chief of Police Bob Vernon of the Los Angeles Police Department, wrote books on what it means to be a Christian police officer.

Yet he personally presided over the systematic torture of thousands of "fellow" Christians ordering 65 year old grandmothers, physically handicapped people in wheel chairs and pregnant mothers to be beaten, all so that women 6 months pregnant could kill their children without delay. And he did so, like Burnette, in the name of the Lord.

Christians like prosecutors Lee O'Brien of Atlanta and the prosecutor of Santa Clara County, California, who defend abortion from the Scriptures in court "because it's my job." Christian men like Judge Guarino of Philadelphia or Judge Catskey of Redding, California take their Christian Faith seriously and yet do all they can to protect the murder of children in their own communities.

I would say that the horror of these men is that they are the professional representatives of the church in the legal system of America today. I would say that the horror is that they are actively supported and defended by their pastors and conscience. This is true and horrible, but it is a bit self-righteous of me to point it out, given my own failure of nerve.

No, the real horror is that those of us who are not legal professionals are just as bought out, just as weighed down by the pressing needs of day to day life, as our legal representatives. We cannot live lives that reflect our faith any more than they can. Even though we are not police officers and judges, we are brought to the same terrible precipice of decision - the children or your job, choose! Most of us are merely simple business men and women, pastors, homemakers, salesmen of insurance, cars, homes - the good life in its infinite forms. Yet even so, we cannot afford to risk leaving all this good life by risking jail, lawsuits, and beatings... we just can't.

And here is the horror: Knowing, as few others do, the ghastly slaughter taking place at the heart of motherhood and humanity in each abortion, we knowingly close perhaps the clearest window God has begun to open into the womb - the window of our willingness to share a small, tiny fragment of the suffering of the unborn. Thus we join hands - on our small insignificant level - with the Christian judges and officers who see to it that the doors of America's Dachau's stay forced open. We voluntarily draw back, not only from Rescue, but from standing with Rescuers who are brutalized by beatings, jail, and lawsuits. Because we are not there, they are not freed to rescue again, and others fear to step up to replace them.

The Window on the Womb This is what abortion brutality means to me. It is not a very flattering perspective. "If wombs had windows," we pro-lifers say with a knowing look, "there would be no abortion!" Well, wombs do have windows - you. How does your life expose the horror of the dismembered child? How does your brokenness reflect their brokenness? How does your unity with them rebuild the ties of a common humanity which are being sundered in our generation child by child, church by church, school by school, Christian by Christian? What do people see in the window of your life? Do they see the reality of the shattered child? Or do they see the sleek easy health and comfort of the abortionist snug in the bosom of our society's esteem?

How can I look down on judges and policemen who refuse to use their authority to give these children a hearing in their courts or a chance in the street? How can I condemn, when I put the cares of my world as much above the sacrifice of protecting children as the judges and policemen do? What is brutality? Brutality is often what God permits to prove the authenticity of His Word and ours. It becomes our crucible. "No crucible, no gold." the scriptures say again and again.

That is to say, as we walk with the Lord at an abortion clinic, we must not shrink back from treating the brutality to the unborn child as He would. Nor should we be surprised when a measure of the brutality directed against the child becomes directed at us in the form of beatings, injustice in court, and long prison sentences when we chose to "be mistreated along with the people of God rather than enjoy the pleasures of sin for a short time, and regard the disgrace for the sake of Christ as of greater value than the treasures of Egypt."

When brutality threatens us personally, it is tempting to shift attention from the suffering of the unborn to the "suffering" of the Christians who defend them. God preserve us from such "compassion" which turns our focus from their murder to our discomfort; from loss of life to loss privlege. To put our suffering above the children is like confusing a window with the things you see through it. God has made you a window for others to see through your life, to the reality beyond. You don't take a window and mount it on a museum wall and autograph it.

Our "suffering" is not an end in itself, it is a window through which we can see clearly what is beyond. By trying to save a life, we become first a window and then a portal through which an otherwise indifferent world might first see, and then enter into a new way of life. We want others to pass through us and be themselves transformed into the image of God, and with Him, take up His cross and follow.

It is not the door or window itself, it is the reality beyond that we seek to frame by our lives. Your compassion for the prisoner of Christ in jail must be compassion that reaches through the brutality against that Christian to lead you to do something to prevent the brutal murder of the child, even if all you do is help free that Christian so he can rescue again.

Your actions to defend fellow Christians from police and court brutality must not be to create a climate where we escape persecution, but rather to encourage Christians to be free to obey regardless of the persecution. Our freedom in this or any country does not depend on what the law says. We are always free to obey God whether in America or in North Korea. The only difference is the nature of the punishment we will receive if we act on our freedom. To treat the laws of a country as if they give or deny freedom is idolatry. Man's laws can merely reward or punish our freedom in Christ. They never grant, establish, or remove freedom from us. We must exercise our God given freedom to protect the innocent, or we are in bondage.

The Martyr's Crown This is why the martyr lies at the heart of Christian witness. He has remained free in His obedience to God - He witnesses to the finality of Christ's Lordship - regardless of the cost. If you think there are no pro-life martyrs, it is only because the windows of our lives have been so clouded by activism, and politics, and sermons, and books, and articles that we cannot see the true martyrs - the 25 million children - much less join them. These children are martyred by Christians who cling to the American Way at any cost to the little ones.

Each child is a unique witness to the creative love and care of his Father in Heaven. Each one is struck down for the testimony he brings to his parents... and to us. The children become in their death, windows into the murderous selfishness of their parents, the doctors, the police, the courts, and if truth be told, our own murdering hearts: Every reason a mother uses to justify her act, and the police and judges use to justify their defense of her act, all of us use to justify our protection of their bloody work.

Should we be surprised if the brutality directed against the pre-born should be directed at us if we stand in solidarity with them? By not walking, by being beaten by police, by going to jail, we pay the price of refusing to assist those who seek to silence their still small voices. When we rescue, we join the children in their word of hope to their mothers, fathers, and even to the whole world. As the police beat us we buy precious time for their mothers, as well as the world, to hear their tiny testimony and turn.

As we prefer jail to paying money for our release, we join them in their inability to buy, not their freedom, but their very lives. The Christian's willingness to spend years behind bars opens up a window onto their plight and our coming judgement: "You have more than theoretical value, your life is worth at least 3 days, 3 months or even 3 years of my life in jail. I will not walk away because you cannot walk away. I will not pay bail or fine to be free, because you cannot purchase your life, much less your freedom.

Because you have had your rights stripped from you without mercy, I will renounce my rights in this society and not use my time in court to plead for mercy for me, but I will insist on pleading for mercy for you." Those years in jail become a picture of what is in store for us if we harden our hearts to their cry.

As we see the Christian sitting in jail, his body broken by the brutality of the Christian police officers, who are directed by Christian judges, ignored by Christian pastors, and abandoned by fellow Christian laymen, may we all see the far greater injustice in the womb - the wrath of discovery poured out on the little ones. As Christians sit in cells bound by the visible walls of concrete, and steel; may we see through them to the far greater threat to our freedom in the invisible walls of our voluntary cooperation with the abortion culture. These invisible walls hold us back from the simple call of the cross to love our neighbors as ourselves, to do unto them as we would have them do unto us. Our invisible bonds of cooperation hold us back as surely as the visible walls hold back the missionary who has become a prisoner of Christ.

Who Is Sufficient for These Things? But let's be practical. How many of us can afford to leave everything and stand with the Church at the door of the death camp? How many of us can afford to lose our jobs, our houses, our church buildings? Isn't it much better to just stand symbolically somehow? This is the example judges like Catskey, prosecutors like Lee O'brien and police officers like Bob Vernon have set for us. Furthermore there is no pro-life leader or follower who has been truly consistent in standing with the children at all cost. Whose example will we walk in? Is it even possible?

Yes it is possible. We have the example of Jesus Christ and we must continue to strive to walk in it. Regardless of how many times we compromise, we must never accept our compromise as a way of life. Today maybe you can't rush out and stand. But you can begin to take steps to take that stand next year. You can begin to protect your property or get rid of it. You can begin to raise support, or take a second job to contribute it to the support of someone who is leaving everything. You can make a daily or weekly phone call to some petty tyrant judge somewhere and tell him to let God's people go that they might serve Him. You can begin to set your affairs and priorities in order so that your whole life reflects the holocaust - so that your whole life becomes a window onto the reality of what is happening in the American womb.

Brutality and injustice toward us raises the question, "Will you stand with the children and so become a window to their world of torture and death?" or, "Will you stand with the world and cooperate with those who protect their killers." The hardness of society's heart, the Church's heart, and even our own heart, makes us realize that we are not prepared to become that window and so we must ask: "What are we doing to be able to stand with them 2 or 3 years from now?" The need is not going away. Will we still be using the same old excuses for not standing then?

The church will stand. I will stand. You will too. Why am I so confident that we will stand? Because God has promised that He will not be left without a witness! Your broken body, your life poured out, may be the only view our generation has, not only into the womb, but onto the cross itself. You know God is calling you. Begin now to answer and prepare for that coming day when you can answer fully.

Chapter 6: Intolerance

What Does It Mean to Be Intolerant? I have this neighbor, and my wife cannot tolerate his loud music. When she asked what we should do I suggested: "You can: block it out of your mind; argue with him; make friends and convert him to your kind of music (or just get him to play his quietly); lobby for a noise ordinance; threaten his (or his dog's) life; throw a rock through his window; picket his house; destroy his hi-fi; move away; or shoot him (or his dog). All of these are ways we can express our intolerance. Which one, will effectively win his heart and end his loud invasion?" To which she answered, "Do we really want to win his heart? A lot of those other things sounded more fun."

Much of our life is spent trying to match the appropriate level of intolerance to the many things that we should not tolerate. Intolerance is what we do to those things which we do not want to see continued in our presence and would like to see eliminated from the world all together. Intolerance conveys closed mindedness, putting you beyond investigation and discussion on the matter. It puts you in a frame of mind to take action, to bring to an end whatever it is you are intolerant of. The key concept of intolerance is "eliminate". In a word, intolerance is the opposite of choice. Almost anything that you would like to see eliminated is something that someone has chosen to bring into being. If we can understand intolerance, perhaps rather than fearing it, we can be proud of it in its rightful place.

Four Expressions of Intolerance.

1. Symbolic Intolerance. If you are intolerant to ideas, you can close your mind against them, be rude about them, speak against them, publish against them, publicly demonstrate against them. This is the battle of one idea against another.
2. Positive intolerance. Usually we think of eliminating something as negative. But sometimes the best ways to remove what we cannot endure is to provide alternatives to it. Prohibitionists, for instance, installed drinking fountains in the work place and on street corners so sheer thirst would not be an excuse for the working man to drink.
3. Physical intolerance of things. If you are physically intolerant of "things", such as nukes or beer, you will attempt to physically neutralize them. Of course you want to make them illegal, but in the mean time you want to do things which will both protect society from them and move others to take their threat seriously. If it is "actions" you are intolerant of, you could prevent them from taking place.

4. Physical intolerance of people. You eliminate the things and actions you cannot tolerate by physically hurting, or killing, the people who do them, or create them. For instance, in 1989 a woman planted a remote control land-mine next to the parking place of the chairman of a large corporation which was involved in animal experimentation. Apartheid and Jim Crow laws are particularly odious forms of legal intolerance directed physically toward people in a minority group. The ANC, race riots, and reverse discrimination in equal opportunity laws are equally odious forms of personal intolerance directed toward the people in the racial majority.

Who Is Intolerant in the Abortion Wars? For pro-lifers, we fear being called "intolerant" about as much as we fear any name they could throw at us. This is because we have confused mercy and kindness with toleration. Often kindness is the exact opposite of toleration. Failure to apply appropriate intolerance toward bad behavior of children can be deadly for the child. And, depending on who the child is, for a whole society as King David found out.

It is time we understand what intolerance is and how we can express it effectively to drive child killing back to hell. We must lead our society and Church to be as intolerant of child killing, and those who defend it, as they are of the Nazi party, and those who defend it. I am intolerant of child killing, of child killers, of the police and political systems which protect child killers, of a society which encourages child killers and of a Church which tolerates the whole lot of them. I think you should be too. I think we need to express our intolerance in a way that appropriately reflects God's intolerance to each of these facets of the growing abortion culture. But, I am amazed that so many people are afraid of being called intolerant when the accusation comes from perhaps the most intolerant people on the earth: abortion advocates.

Go through the four kinds of intolerance in respect to how abortion advocates treat the children they do not want:

1. They are symbolically intolerant by calling them "fetuses", "products of conception", or "parasites"; calling the murder a "termination", or "surgical procedure". They call pro-lifers "violent" when we picket, and "emotional" when we argue.

2) They express no positive intolerance of children - they have never provided alternatives for women who bear their children and need help - because even more intolerable to them than pregnancy is motherhood. What they try and pass off as their two "positive" solutions to children are: contraception - prevent them from even existing in the first place; and government welfare and day care programs - forced wealth redistribution and government control of child rearing - but never an act of personal charity. They fight personal charity because they are so hardened against children that they cannot imagine that anyone else might be capable of simple compassion (see how they fight adoption).

1. They show physical intolerance of things by painting signs on the Supreme Court steps and defacing offices buildings which hold pro-life organizations.
2. They show their physical intolerance of people by bodily attacking Rescuers, throwing aids infested urine and sperm on them, often beating and biting them until bloody. But most pointedly, they show ultimate physical intolerance of people by terminating children they have no use for with what terrorists and the CIA call, "extreme prejudice".

Regardless of how intolerant or violent we become, we will never even come close to practicing the kind of intolerance which they practice 4,500 times a day. If we treated abortionists with the intolerance that they treat their victims, then in two or three days we would run out of abortionists. Another way to put the pro-life movement's intolerance into perspective is to compare it to any other movement of conscientious civil dissent. Pro-lifers have never rioted, looted, or burned down sections of town as happened in the sixties.

More property damage was caused in the 1986 campus demonstrations against apartheid than in all abortion clinic bombings put together since 1973 (about 32 death camps burned). Compare also the harshness with which pro-lifers are treated: The average bomber gets 20 years of prison, the rioters, at most got suspended sentences. First time Rescuers (who are entirely passive) can get maximum penalties.

This Present Darkness It is important to put even the most violent aspect of the pro-life track record into perspective. Because if you listen to the abortion culture, you can easily get the impression that pro-lifers, generally, and Rescuers in particular, are hate filled, violent, and abusive liars. Many Christians are suddenly emerging after a 60 year cultural sleep to hear all of these accusations willingly portrayed by the press. Often, they automatically assume that there must be some substance to them. No one, in their sheltered experience, is willing to lie so thoroughly to slander someone else. "Surely," they think, "if the police say that they were assaulted and even charge someone with a felony, there must be some substance to it. When the child killing advocates say that picketers and sidewalk counselors are rude and abusive - why would they lie?"

This phenomena of bald faced lies on the part of the child killers, the police who protect them, and the willingness of the public to believe them, has disturbed me more than any other part of this battle with the exception of the mangled bodies of the children and the deep scars of their mothers. I have three explanations for their lies and the Church's willingness to believe those lies:

1. The act of abortion, itself, is fundamentally inhuman. Abortion violates everything that men and women are at the core of their being. To uncover it in its stark reality is more than the soul can bear. Any lie, any covering, is preferable. The guilt runs so deep that mothers coming in to kill their young and the staff of the death camps really hear us calling them abusive names when in fact all that is actually said is, "Let us help you, don't kill your child." by one young woman offering a mother help. Their own guilt abuses them. They must flee it.
2. The act itself is the epitome of mindless violence. The image of a mother holding her child still while the hands of a physician trained in healing stalk her helpless child to dismember it for money, defies explanation - it must be hidden. We will accept any lie about those who expose it if only we can redraw the veil of ignorance over it.
3. Knowing that this is taking place publicly in our towns and neighborhoods makes us fellow conspirators. Such knowledge is too terrible to contemplate. It cannot be true! Splatter movies - The Texas Chain-saw Massacres, Jason, and Freddie Kreuger - come close to portraying the reality of innocence stalked by evil. If abortion is what our entire society knows in its heart that it must be, then all of us have helped unleash a monster of this magnitude in our neighborhood. It just cannot be!

The mass hysteria which stoops at nothing to hide this nightmare from awareness has projected its own sin onto the pro-life movement. Intolerance, violence, rudeness, lack of love and compassion - this is abortion. They cannot bear to think of what they have done in the name of freedom, career, sex, love, and personal rights. And yet, listening to the media you would think that it is those seeking to protect the unborn who are guilty of violence. You would think it should be easy to convince people that this insanity should stop. But insanity listens only to its own twisted, guilty logic. Those who could stop it are stunned by the awesome reality which they have permitted to grow up along side them. It cannot be true. We must not let it be true. And so we turn our backs and pretend that it is not true.

Psychiatrists and counselors have often noted the phenomenon of mothers who willfully blind themselves to husbands who sexually molest their daughters and sons. She will do anything to hold her family together. She even thinks that protecting her children from divorce, and the public revelation of their father's evil, is more important than preventing the evil by protecting them from him. Though she "sees" what is going on, she refuses to see it. Facing the reality of her own personal failure to protect her children and family is more horrible to her than the reality of her husband's perversion - and so she continues to let her children be devoured.

It is not unusual for a wife in these circumstances to project the very things she is hiding onto those who disturb her illusions. Any lie will do to cover her sense of shame. She will physically attack anyone who threatens her dream world - including her own children who are seeking to escape. Is this insanity? Welcome to America, the land where 25 million children were publicly murdered in sight of at least 40 million people who believe that it is murder but not only did next to nothing to stop it, they attack anyone who tried to expose it or protect her children.

Can you see why all solutions which lack in principle the element of physical intolerance will never generate the moral force to pierce the layered veil of shadowed conspiracy which shrouds this cancer? The evil is too great. Our guilt overwhelms us. We do not want to know. We will attack whom ever tries to tell us. We will attack anyone who shows us that there is something we can do to prevent it. So we cannot afford to even support Rescuers. That is why any activity which does not deal directly with and overcome our fear of the reality of abortion will never arouse people to penetrate the veil of evil darkness which protects child killing today. This is why we must be visibly intolerant.

Piercing the Darkness Intolerance is usually thought of in terms of narrow minded people who pick insignificant things on which to base their rejection and hatred of others. But there are a number of things which demand intolerance, rape, bigotry, wife and child abuse to name four things. People who are intolerant of these things are not considered narrow minded. We need to know how we can tell what those things are which no one should be free to choose. What should we be intolerant of, that is, what should we not let others choose to do?

Some people say that the law should be their guide to toleration. Some have even made an absolute moral principle along these tolerant lines: "What the law permits (or tolerates) we permit." This principle is dangerously useless for helping someone think through Rescue. It is useless because it is nothing more than a description of what we normally do. It is dangerous because it deceives us into thinking that what we normally do is a moral principle to guide what we ought to do. That is why it seemed so correct on the surface: we follow it most of the time. But that is because in most circumstances the cost of stirring ourselves to be the lone voice against what is at the moment a relatively harmless (i.e. a socially accepted) evil, is more than we care to pay. This does not make our tolerance right.

It is not enough to determine whether or not something is socially permitted. We have to ask whether or not it is something that God allows us to permit. When it comes to answering this question, the "what the law permits" principle is utterly useless. Of course the law permits it. We want to know if God will permit us to join in that sin by obeying that law.

Does God allow us to tolerate or permit child killing? Compare child killing to rape. You may believe that you would try to physically prevent a rape, whether or not there were a law permitting it. But, "Let not he who putteth his armor on, boast as he who taketh it off." It is not surprising that Proverbs 24:11, "Rescue those dragged to the slaughter," is introduced with the words: "If you faint in the day of adversity, how small your strength is." All of us are bold as a lion in our dreams. All of us have joined Corrie ten Boom in occupied Holland, and Richard Wurmbrandt in solitary confinement in the Gulag.

We just know that we would protect Jews and preach the gospel no matter what anyone said. Many of us cling to this self-delusion even in the face of the fact that we do not have the courage to speak out when ethnic slurs are cast and most of us have not shared the Gospel with anyone in the last three months, much less preached it to people who threaten us harm if we continue to bring them the claims of the Most High God.

With Peter we say, "I will never forsake thee Lord!" And yet, in the day of adversity, the Church lets IRS 501(c)3 dictate what we preach. We let the Supreme Court determine where we pray. We let the child-killing trespass law determine our commitment to life.

We forgot that Jesus gave a very simple formula for our love and concern for him: "In as much as you do it to the least of these my little ones, you have done it unto me." "For whoever is ashamed of Me and My words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will also be ashamed of him when He comes in the Glory of His Father with the holy angels." What would you do for Jesus the King of the Universe? Probably as much as you do for the children crying out to you today for protection. Hitler never required the common people to kill Jews. He merely required them to permit him to kill them.

Hitler, Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, the National Education Association, the National Endowment of the Arts, your local abortionist - all they ask for is your toleration of what they do - in effect, your permission.

So how far should our intolerance to child killing extend? Surely we need a symbolic form of intolerance: it must include a philosophical and theological dimension in addition to visible demonstrations, protests and lobbying. We should be providing positive intolerance in our alternatives to murder - crisis pregnancy centers, mom's houses, shepherding homes and chastity based sex education. But because it is murder, we must be physically protective, physically intolerant.

We should be willing to sympathize with and be unashamed of those whose intolerance to child killing leads them to destroy the abortion death camps. But more than anything else we must shine the light of intolerance toward abortion/murder which shone from the cross of Christ as he became utterly intolerant of a world of sin - which goes far deeper than the light created if they burn down at night, as satisfying and good as the warmth of that glow might be.

Shattering the Darkness What we do must reflect the differences, between child killing in the womb and other forms of assault. First, the mother has to be willing to at least go along with it, and usually finance it. Second, our society has degenerated to the point where it can be done publicly even with advertising. It is covered by insurance programs which do not cover child-birth. It is carried out and approved of by the educated cream of our society - the physicians and lawyers. Third, there is a political dimension: the Feminist movement has identified pregnancy as the central tool of male domination. Killing her child is an act of liberation for a woman, freeing her to take her rightful place in western civilization. And fourth, we - you and I - have all permitted it to continue for years on end in our towns and cities.

These realities set the field of combat which has come to be called the pro-life movement. Whenever you develop an analogy to guide what you would do, how you do it must take into account the complex reality of the lay of the battlefield. And the pro-life movement has certainly attacked the scope of the field in the vast array of activities it provides. But they all seem to be guided by divergent principles and yet they could compliment each other as parts of a greater whole: political activism, crisis pregnancy centers, care for pregnant and new mothers, public protest, and sidewalk counseling. These have been going on for sixteen years but have always seemed to lack both a unifying concept as well as something which would galvanize large numbers of people into action more than once a year to fight an evil which goes on 4,500 times a day.

What all of these lack is physically intolerant intervention. It does not matter that physical intervention is not necessarily appropriate to each of these areas any more than shooting a gun is appropriate to the Army surgeon, chaplain or even quarter master. But they must be part of the greater whole, if it is to be called an "army". The Pro-life movement is like a vast army. There are more than enough people and related organizations -- the hospital units, the equipment, the supply lines. But they lack the attack capability to actually reach through the enemy's defenses and choke it to death.

Perhaps the cost of such a weapon stretches the war department - it might cost someone their life, job, or rank. But if the enemy is worthy of your engagement, then the only way to get close enough to defeat him, is to get close enough for him to defeat you. And when you look at the cross you see that the only way to defeat him is to let him defeat you.

Most assume that the only truly effective intervention is legal intervention - we must make it illegal to have an abortion - only the law can forcibly intervene. But the law alone is an inadequate solution, it must be rooted in the intolerance of a community committed to seeing it enforced. The letter of the law is not sufficient to unify the efforts of the battle for life. In Canada, long before abortion was made legal, picketers were arrested for picketing an illegal abortion clinic.

We need more than a change of law, we need a change of heart - hearts no longer afraid to spend and be spent for the kingdom of God. There must be something which incorporates the different forms of intolerance and directs them toward a grand conclusion which society can live with, a spiritual conviction which can undergird that law. Rescue provides that unifying field which can bind the elements together wherever the cross is the focus of their vision. Only changed hearts will do what it takes to shatter the darkness.

If the darkness is not being shattered then should we be confident that what we call "evangelism" is actually changing hearts?

Rescue incorporates the necessary level of intolerance for each of the other elements of the solution to child killing to be most effective. Each Rescue is a capsule of the entire pro-life movement - compassionate counseling, offering alternatives, creating the basis for a legal challenge to Roe v. Wade in the courts, making a political statement, giving politicians a platform on which to take action, personally involving a cross section of the community, and reviving the church through a deep affirmation of the core of Judeo-Christian Faith in a God who saves, a God who intervenes, a God who Rescues.

The intolerance of Rescue uncovers the child killing conspiracy in our society root and branch. The persecution of Rescuers by every branch of government shows that child killing is not an isolated phenomena, it is not just "permitted", it is enforced by every level of our democratic/republican institutions which have become like gods to us. Rescue reveals the true heart of organizations such as the National Education Association, the Democratic Party (and many Republicans), main Line Denominations, the entire American penal and justice system, not to mention Planned Parenthood and the American Civil Liberties Union. The persecution of Rescuers blandly permitted by the Church shows how much of the Church is hopelessly wed to the treasures of Egypt, hopelessly lusting after Babylonian officers painted on the walls of our temples.

The power of Rescue is the power of the principles of the cross which build on repentance for our toleration of child killing, and a commitment to refuse to tolerate it. When you rescue, God physically intervenes through your life laid down for your neighbor - not just the unborn neighbor, but the abortionist, the police, the judges and fellow Christians who look the other way. When the Church becomes characterized by the light of this kind of love, it will finally shatter the darkness. This should not be surprising, since repentance leading to healing is the keynote of the Church.

It is what Jesus died to establish, rose again to secure and sent his Spirit to empower. In the cross God manifested his utter intolerance of sin, His supreme intolerance of a fallen creation. In Rescue we manifest the same intolerance, the same way, by paying part of the price for bringing healing. How does the Christian "kill" the abortionist, or "destroy" his clinic? By laying down our life for him, when we stand in solidarity with those he would murder, as Christ stood for us 2,000 years ago.

Section III: The Cross and Life

"You will find," says the abortion culture, "that you cannot help but agree with our fundamental premise, which is, `there can never be any difference between the hungers of the flesh, and the will of God.' You watch, we will show you that in reality, you are on our side, despite what you say. Just look at yourself, you will stop rescuing in order to surround yourself with the same comforts of the flesh we surround ourselves with. You call it God's will that your fleshly comforts - or rescue organizations, or churches - might be preserved even if it means that you must permit these little ones to die today. And that is what we say about abortion and preserving the opportunity of the woman to surround herself with equal comforts even if it means her child must die."

The day of the rescue rally is past. It is now time to do what we said we would do at all those rallies - don't expect the cheering to continue when you answer the challenge of Satan to God.

7: The Cross and the Pro-life movement. pg. 29

8: The Cross and the Christian Life. pg. 34

9: The Cross and the Rescue Movement. pg. 40

Chapter 7: The Cross and the Pro-Life Movement

"If I Were Pro-choice, You'd Be Dead!" In November of 1989, realizing the threat Rescue posed to their right to choose, the pro-death factions rallied the largest crowd they had ever had in order to run head to head with our first National Rescue in Washington D.C. Jeff White, Western Regional Director of Operation Rescue, a few others, and I put on our Operation Rescue T-shirts and walked into the crowd. We managed to get within a hundred feet of Molly Yard thundering on about the right to choose to kill when the police threw us out of this historic gathering.

As we were driving away in Jeff's full size pick up truck, he accelerated toward a of mob satisfied feminists crossing the street and slammed on his brakes skreetching to a halt within inches of the crowd scattering them. He stuck his head out the window and bellowed, "If I were pro-choice, you'd be dead now!" This might horrify the delicate pro-lifer, and confirm her suspicion that Rescuers really are out of control, but it is worth seeing in what Jeff did, a fundamental truth about how different we must be from those who advocate the choice to kill as a prime civil right.

We are not pro-choice when it comes to killing people - if we were pro-choice then baby killing doctors would be killed by the dozens. What does it take to get this across, not just to the pro-abortion majority in America, but to the Pro-life majority as well? Whether or not those scattering feminists got Jeff's point, do you?

In the 1950's and '60's abortion was an issue - some argued for it and some against it. But by 1973 it stopped being an issue and became a national fact. Those who believed that killing the unborn was right were free to practice their faith. To the shame of the Church, who believed it murder, we were afraid to practice our faith. Their religion called them to cruelly murder children in order to advance their own ends. Our walk with the living God called for us to protect the defenseless in spite of what it did to advance or hinder our "ends".

We treated our faith as if it were theoretical, while they have treated theirs as worth living by, even worth sacrificing babies for. We have lost our credibility and they have gained credibility turning us into an abortion culture. Those who boldly proclaim what they believe, and then live consistently with it, will tend to gain credibility. They did, we did not.

When the Church finally did begin to get tentatively involved in pro-life activities, we were very careful to make them permit choice. By permitting it, we worshipped in principle the "right" of the state to ordain murder, and the "right" of the mother to kill. Every time there is a pro-life activity carefully announced as, "completely safe and legal," remember who first coined those words - those who want safe sex, and the feminist who demand safe, legal abortion. When the Church makes respectably safe legality in the eyes of a decadent, murdering world its cardinal virtue, it is sliding on a spiritual condom and going forth to a sterilized faith with only the appearance of fruitful vigor.

It is ironic that intervening to save children is in need of lengthy defense among those who believe abortion is murder. And yet the activities which Christians believe "legitimate" are shaped by a philosophical foundation which permits women to choose to kill. The litmus test for whether or not we have made compromise a principle in our pro-life activities is not sitting-in at an abortion clinic. The litmus test is the reaction to Rescue. Wherever Rescue is supported, compromise is only tactical. Where it is not supported, the right to choose has become a way of life, a principle.

How is Rescue the litmus test? Because the other pro-life weapons in order to achieve their objective, must permit the choice to kill. Rescue is the one activity which does not permit choice. Did rescuers dream this test up to condemn non-rescuers? Not at all. Ending choice in the realm of child murder is the goal of all Pro-life efforts.

Though the idea still seems a bit radical, we need to see that it is the political activist, the educator, the crisis-pregnancy center administrator, the preacher, who must justify how they can engage in activities which do not challenge the basic assumption that a woman must be left free kill if she so chooses. Please hear me. People involved in these activities should no more feel guilty than a military doctor should feel guilty because he is not carrying a gun. Tactically some pro-life activities must permit choice, it is the nature of the activity.

But this does not mean that cooperation should become a principle, or that non-rescuers should be afraid of defending and cheering for those who shut down the death camps. We must become legally, intellectually, morally, and physically intolerant of murder regardless of what are part in ending it might be.

This chapter will outline how the different areas of pro-life activity can more effectively reflect the cross as they become a part of a growing intolerance to child murder - as they become a part of Rescue. Each area is vital to an overall solution only as it reflects the pattern of the cross. Remember the fundamental question is not, "Did you do a sit-in?" Rather, it is, "What are you doing to sacrificially protect your neighbor; to honor God; to be like Jesus?"

Political Activism Politics is the half-way house between symbolic and physical intolerance. The political activist tries to get citizens concerned enough about the issue to vote for representatives who will pass laws which physically protect the unborn from murder. They want the law to bring its coercive force against all child killing not just some of it. In the realm of politics, compromise and coalition is the name of the game, but it cannot be the final word for child killing. We cannot write into to the Constitution that it is right to kill some children but not others. The task of the political activist is to work for laws which utterly eradicate child killing by keeping the utterly heinous nature of the crime in focus. Rescue helps keep this goal in focus in two ways:

1. The uncompromising nature of the cross brings back to center stage the fact that child killing is not ultimately conceptual or theoretical, it is killing real, little, innocent children - we will not tolerate it in whole or in part. The politician is helped to resist compromise by being brought back to the reality of what his laws will produce. He will want protection for everyone's life, not just the lives of those who are socially acceptable. Politically this means that the platform which Rescue builds for pro-life issues makes very clear that we will not settle for laws or politicians who tolerate killing anybody's children, even those whose fathers are rapists or incestuous.

2. The cross is a standard which recruits and trains the sort of person who is not predisposed to settle for easy solutions - he is willing to be as intolerant as he has to be for as long as he has to be, to be willing to suffer at least as much rejection as an aborted child, until each child is protected. The political Rescuer's intolerance to compromise will be like new wine in old wine skins. Furthermore, when the law does change, like the Swiss, they will not lay down their weapons, but keep them close at hand to provide the firm roots needed to make the constitutional amendment against child killing stick. He will not confuse his call to stand for the children with the need to be elected at any cost.

The weakness of the political solution without the cross, is that it is vulnerable to sheer manipulation. To be effective, laws must grow out of the broad resolve of the people who are governed. Rescue galvanizes that resolve. It is too easy to come up with a political half-way house or even a politically manipulated victory only to see it die a few years later for lack of public backbone. In a related field, all the pornography laws in the world will never work if you, the citizen, are willing to tolerate it in the drug and video store by continuing to treat these places as good neighbors. The District Attorney will only enforce the laws when he sees that there is sufficient public resolve to back him up.

Child killing only requires a great deal of explanation if you keep hidden the fact that they are killing children. Otherwise, it is the easiest thing in the world to convince not to do, not to support, and physically prevent. The political Rescuer will help keep the intolerance we should have toward child killing at the center of the political/legal agenda, by making obvious who his constituents in the matter. You cannot argue with someone who is crucified. They really do not care about your agenda, or ultimately your vote. They win by being willing to die for this child, and that child, child by child as long as any child is threatened.

Crisis Pregnancy Centers (CPC) CPC's reflect positive intolerance. They provide the alternatives to murder. When the abortion culture confronted the Church with the argument that we did not care what happened to children and their mothers after birth, the Church was stung into action. All over the country CPCs sprang up advertising free pregnancy counseling, medical care, and compassionate homes to shelter any mother who felt that death was the only acceptable solution.

Amazed and threatened by this outflow of compassion, the abortion industry has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in lawsuits, television news exposes, picketed, and even had sit-ins against these centers of Christian love and concern. When abortion advocates speak of "choice", it is only cynical rhetoric designed to manipulate the broader society which might be tempted to feel some compassion toward children, their mothers and those who try to help.

The dark side of this ministry of hope and life is the up-hill struggle it requires to keep their doors open. As with most parts of the pro-life effort, the organized church approves highly of this work but cannot really get involved. It is too... costly. It only helps out a few girls who got into er, ah, "trouble". They give a few baby clothes and permit some bulletin space, but beyond that it is someone else's problem, someone else's ministry.

People do not realize that this is a life and death ministry. I do not know of any pastoral counselors who face the stark reality in each counseling session that if they say the wrong thing, and sometimes no matter what they say, the person they are talking to will go kill someone. Yet that is the daily burden of these volunteers! And what sort of recognition do they get? A few baby clothes and grudging attendance at their yearly banquet to hear some nice stories and give a few dollars.

Rescue brings to awareness the life and death struggle these centers face simply by acting it out in the street. Once bearing a cross characterizes the Church - CPCs will have an audience of people who will become suddenly appreciative of the issues at stake, and willing to give themselves to this ministry. Rescue will do more than raise support and volunteers for these alternative centers, it will bring intolerance back into focus for them again. The wear and tear of running an alternative center tends either to galvanize people to the battle, or wear them down enough to compromise their portion of the fight.

This is why some CPCs will directly support Rescues, and others will publicly denounce Rescue. This is why some CPCs will represent themselves as abortion clinics in order to talk with a woman seeking to kill her child. And it is the same reason others go to great lengths to tell the "truth" and pharisaically denounce pregnancy centers which do not fit their standards of openness - they would rather give a mother information she will use to kill her child than withhold or distort that information in order to get the mother to where she can hear the truth.

Some have even given directions to the death camps to mothers who ask for them after counseling.

Into this, the cross can inject a new level of hope - it is acceptable to be intolerant of child killing. It is worth all the sacrifice to make alternatives to murder accessible to women and their children. These life centers do not have make coexistence with death centers their goal. They, as much as the Rescuer, are working to see murder abolished. Life is not the alternative to murder. Murder is no alternative at all. We must not let the motto: "Pro-life, Pro-family, Pro-choice" describe us.

Demonstrations, Protests and Marches Demonstrations are a symbolic effort to publicize the outrage of legalized killing. Through the eighties there has been a growing visible presence outside of hospitals and abortion mills. The goal of these efforts is to be a symbolic demonstration of the community's intolerance to killing. There is nothing like on-going Rescues to put teeth into a picket. The police presence alone will save lives. The tension mounting in the death camp keeps them from being acceptable jobs in the community. The killing on the inside is reflected in the war-zone atmosphere on the outside.

Ironically, the presence of picketers makes the abortionist much more careful not to do something which would require an ambulance - we actually help make abortion safer for the mother. Rescue gets more people out to marches because Rescue uncompromisingly puts the case for the child first. It makes intolerance reasonable again. People begin to follow courage: "If you can rescue, the least I can do is march." Rescue brings the children back into the focus of our demonstrations.

We do need a reminder here. Remember before Operation Rescue? Being pro-life was in most places like the kiss of death in the Church. Except for an annual march or banquet, people just did not want to know. Then after Operation Rescue suddenly all pro-life groups were experiencing growth and vigor. Because of Rescue, people felt compelled to do something.

Non-rescue groups became as shameless as Rescue groups were condemned for being, when it came to capitalizing on the fear and guilt of people who did not Rescue, in order to get them to support their functions: "Guaranteed safe and legal ways to stop abortion!" they cried, "You can save a baby without arrests, we promise." Repeated every hour over the speaker at the April '90 Right to Life march in Washington D.C. was the promise: "Every dollar donated here goes to saving a baby." And sure enough, people came to march.

As soon as they saw people coming out to their events, suddenly Operation Rescue personnel were banished from them: "Too dangerous! Too offensive! Turns people off! We might get sued!" The head of Right to Life even went so far as to meet with me in January 1990 before their mega-march in April to explain why Rescue would not even be mentioned from the platform. "The fact is," he said, "Right to Life is the only pro-life organization which has any clout, and the pro-choice people know it, and they are just waiting to sue us. They don't care about the other groups.

If we go down then there will be no organization left which can effectively fight abortion."

What this whole mentality misses, is that it is not the legality which brings people out or keeps them away from events, it is the sense of accomplishing something against child killing. As soon as the moral pressure of Christians sacrificing to protect the children is removed, others will stop marching too. The Operation Rescue goose has been killed, and 1990 and '91 will be spent by establishment pro-life groups fighting over the golden egg. You will hear Operation Rescue blamed for scaring people away. But just ask, "Where were they before Operation Rescue." They were scared away for 16 years.

Operation Rescue brought them out for the first time. The failure of nerve on everyone's part - O.R.'s included - beginning in 1989 sent them packing. The lack of a call for sacrifice which measures up to the horror of the issue will keep them away. We will not see change in the nation until we hear another credible call to sacrifice on a level at least as serious as abortion. That call is coming.

The heart-change necessary for such a call to go out, and a response which will overwhelm child killing has begun and it will continue. We will be the Church of God to the pre-born and to their killers. When Christians realize that more than words are needed, they will return in numbers to the death camps, only next time without the overblown rhetoric and media glitz. We will replace that with measured words, lives to back those words, and a cross to back up those lives. Until then it will be the job of the few to prepare by their own sacrifice a way for the hundreds of thousands to follow.

Sidewalk Counseling The last people to offer hope to a mother and her child are the sidewalk counselors. There is a sense of urgency here which makes more public demonstration acceptable, and yet too much demonstration frightens the women away from the counselors. They blend the CPC and the demonstration. Usually these counselors will walk alone from the parking area to the door of the death chamber with the women offering them help, literature, and contacts for post-abortion counseling. The death industry and their defenders in the judiciary are so committed to promoting the right to kill that they impose court injunctions against sidewalk counseling even on public property and parking areas.

The guiding principle for sidewalk counseling is to say whatever will most effectively change a heart in thirty seconds, because usually that is all the time a child has before his mother goes inside the execution chamber. For many children, the arguments of the sidewalk counselor is all that stands between the child in the womb and death. Sidewalk counseling requires stamina. You speak with woman after woman who just walks past. On their own, sidewalk counselors burn out quickly. But, the pattern of the cross has given a fresh vision to sidewalk counselors.

In all of Southern California, for instance, before Operation Rescue there were about 30 side walk counselors. Now groups like Shield of Roses and Knights of Columbus estimate that there are 1,000 there. They see their task as more than saving this or that baby, but as becoming a sacrificial extension of the hope of the Gospel regardless of the result. In addition to trying to save individual children, there is a greater game plan.

They can see how their hours of dedication are working toward the end of child killing itself, how someone sitting in jail becomes a spiritual breaking of the heavenly authorities who stand behind the earthly authorities who have ordained blood sacrifice.

In the coming year, Rescue/sidewalk counselors will step up their pressure on the death camps, but not through media hype. Rather they will be people who so deeply reflect being crucified to themselves, that the world will not know what to do with them. They will lead the battle not only at the door, but they will bring together a broad coalition of intolerant neighbors to these death camps so that they are put under siege every hour they are open. Why? Because it is not a political or social issue, it is life and death.

Rescue opens doors to many other first amendment means of intolerance, like sidewalk counseling, which until now people would not get involved in because they would not see the children. The physical intolerance of Rescue imparts a vision of the children. Our willingness to take up our cross on behalf of others enables us to become a window into the womb. Our imprisonment becomes a large picture of the far greater voluntary imprisonment of the churches in America.

Woman's Litigation Projects Many women with legitimate medical damages can sue the abor-tionists but either feel too guilty, or do not know how. The excellent result of litigation projects is to expose the vicious underworld of child killing and the effect it has on the mother. These law suits bring to the surface hundreds of hurting women who need restitution, even though their child had no case which can bring the abortionist to criminal justice. The presence of the billboards advertising for these women makes public the pain which every victim of abortion knows and the feminists try desperately to cover over: "Damaged by abortion? Medical, Legal, Emotional Help. Call 1-800-2224."

Charles Wysong, the pioneer of this movement, is the picture of intolerance he is a Rescuer. Rescue gave him the platform he needed to make Atlanta one of the strongholds of his operation. Rescue made him successful there for several reasons. Many people who would never have otherwise given him the time of day were stung into action by the siege of Atlanta and supported the litigation project as an alternative to Operation Rescue which they opposed. More positively, as he was initially making inquiries in Atlanta, he came to me because a number of key potential contributors felt that Operation Rescue should be heading this effort up as well. I encouraged those who wanted to sue abortionists through Operation Rescue, to support him directly, and introduced him to other key supporters.

Litigation is a vital part of the overall reversal of the myth that abortion serves any useful purpose in society. And yet, the elegance, and simplicity of getting patients to sue doctors should not make us lose sight of the fact that it does not attack the legitimacy of killing children. It only asks that they be killed in such a way that the mother is not damaged sufficiently to bring suit. If taken on its own, it actually helps the purveyors of death move toward their goal of truly safe abortion - safe for the mother.

Charlie has developed a brilliant strategy to put the abortionist at odds with the medical world. But has often said that to be really effective, it must be part of a larger movement of intolerance toward child killing. He has told me many times that he is most effective in those areas of the country where his tactics are employed by Rescuers. This should not be surprising. No matter what you are doing, if you do it in order escape from the cross to a less costly means of attacking child killing you will simply be less effective.

Charlie is effective precisely because he takes up his cross rather than saying, "Oh look. This is easy and safe."

Rather than cleaning up the industry men like Charles Wysong are butchering it.

Education Education, is the effort which gets the word out to large groups of people before they are directly confronted with the issue. In one sense, all the branches of the pro-life movement are committed to education. But there are groups which are exclusively devoted to this end. The constant temptation of educators is to deflate the charged atmosphere surrounding the "issue of abortion" by presenting their facts in an emotionally neutral manner in order to appeal to the "unimpeded reason" of their hearers. Often, however, in the effort to be neutral, they lose the horror. Then the real lesson learned from a presentation is that dismembering children is bad but worthy of toleration.

The facts do speak for themselves. They do not need to be glamorized by a lot emotionalism. But they can never be depersonalized. As long as the facts are presented in a context which reflects the personal horror they portray, and the obligation to do something to change this horror, then the presentation will be valuable. We must never train people to accept and tolerate the slaughter of the innocent.

The commitment of Rescuers to the children gives the educator both the platform he needs as well as examples he can point to: first to gain a hearing; then to train people in the facts which call for intolerance; and finally to connect them with organizations which are living out different expressions of intolerance. In this way, he becomes a crucial link in the chain that will bind the child killers and their culture back to the bottomless pit.

The problem is, when the cross becomes evident in his presentation he may find that many people do not want to talk to him as much. It will be tempting to gain an audience at any cost. But we are moving into an era in which being human does not guarantee civil rights. There are no cheap facts, any more than there are cheap solutions. If they reject the children, why should the accept you? Better to stand for something and have people afraid to talk to you than stand for nothing and be everybody's advisor.

What it Takes The bottom line of being any part of Christ's body is that if you get involved in that area as an escape from suffering, then you will not do that area much good. If you are trying to be popular, leave pro-life - no, stop trying to do Christian - work of any sort. None of these activities is easy or free of sacrifice. I am not advocating arrest and prison because pro-lifers have it too soft. I advocate abandoning everything to protect the children because God abandoned everything for us and calls us to go and do likewise if we are called his disciples. If you are in any part of the effort to free the world of child killers, and you are embarrassed by some other part of it - whether they are too whimpy or too hard-nosed - you really need to rethink what it is you hope to accomplish.

Every facet of the movement should have as its primary aim, the elimination of the killing. There is no necessary conflict between Rescue and any other pro-life activity, except where that other activity (or activist) is formed and motivated by the principle that the choice to kill is permissible. There is a difference between recognizing the reality that the law is on the side of the killer, and letting that reality dictate what you ought to do. Your goal is to change that reality not live with it. Everything you do should be done with an eye to undermining child killers. Never undermine those who oppose them regardless of how strident or quiet they might seem to you. Remember how Obadiah and Ezekiel worked together in God's economy.

The goal of Rescue never was distinct from the goal of any other part of the movement. Rescue rhetoric is not strident, it is standard pro-life terminology with no apologies. We did not invent the idea that the unborn are human; or that killing an innocent human with premeditation is murder; or that the innocent should be protected. Likewise, Rescues become more effective the more every other part of the body is strengthened. This is why everywhere I have gone in the country I have stressed that Rescue communities must pump volunteers into every other part of the battle.

Every phase of the process which changes the mind and heart of society must be addressed symbolically, persuasively, and physically. The pro-life argument must be matched by pro-life activities which are appropriate to the specific end in mind without abandoning the specific reality which has called us forth: tiny individual children are being killed today. When any other phase of the Church supports and advocates Rescue it is by this connection eliminating the baneful effect of the pro-choice form it must take as long as it is confined to symbolic intolerance.

The comprehensive goal must be the same: make killing the unborn impossible by our presence, unthinkable by our teaching and compassion, and then we might have a chance to make it illegal by our votes in a way which will last.

In all we do we must show forth the love of God at the core of these efforts in two ways: First that we repent of our failure to be intolerant of child murder laws. And second, to turn from our tolerance, and become intolerant of the killing in a way that is consistent with each activity, yet modeled after the example of the cross of the one who was physically intolerant of our sin against Him. He calls us to be similarly intolerant of sin - we die for those whom we oppose, because our goal is their conversion.

Chapter 8: The Cross and the Christian Life

Yo! Rev.! What You Know 'bout Satisfyin' Wimmen? The inmates in Fulton County Jail lived in a world which had no up or down, no right or wrong beyond the motto: "Don't get caught." To them the very idea of marriage or fidelity was impossible, unthinkable, unbearable. How, then, could the simple values of the scripture reach them? If they couldn't understand faithfulness in respect to marriage, is it any surprise that they were so untrustworthy in the rest of their life?

One day, I was writing letters in the common room and the argument raging around me that morning was between which sexual practices would satisfy women the best. As the argument came to a stalemate - so to speak - one of the wags noticed I was there and said, "Yo! Rev.! What you know bout satisfyin' wimmen?" Without looking up, I answered, "Probably more than the rest of you put together, listening to how you all talk so big."

"Whooo Weeeeee!" They began to hoot and holler. "The Rev. dun an' become a expert on sex!" So I kept on writing my letter. Another cackled, "He probably does know more'n you Red!" "It ain't hard to know more'n Red!" "That what Trina tells me anyhow." chimed in three at once. As the clamor died down, they finally had to accept my challenge and ask, "What you mean? I mean, you the Reverend and everything, and you say you know more'n the rest of us?"

"Well, I'll say this, none of you in this room can keep a woman satisfied for 14 years and have her still coming back for more. Anybody has what it takes to keep a woman happy for a day or two, but from the sound of it, you can't keep it up much longer than that. You want the real thing, you just do it for 14 years with the same girl and and you'll find out it takes more than technique to satisfy. Then come back and lets talk about who can satisfy who."

Yo! Church! What You Know 'bout Satisfyin' God? The world is an expert on satisfying its gods and stops from time to time to mock the Church with, "Yo! Church! What you know 'bout satisfyin' God?" But how can the Church answer? Half the Church only has the same shallow faddishness of bless-me fire insurance which lures converts by mimicking the world's way of satisfying its trendy Gods; while the other half has a relationship to God which is like a marriage that died years ago though the outward forms of fidelity remain "for the children's sake".

The Church today is incapable of understanding what any solution to abortion will require, because we are no more capable of committing ourselves to faithful suffering sacrifice for years, than my congregation in Fulton County Jail was capable of understanding faithful commitment in marriage. And so the fruit of such faithfulness seems like a mirage. To those Christians not given to excesses in the expression of their faith, losing everything for Jesus Christ is what they respect only those who are safely dead - preferably for centuries.

For those churches which are making headway in the land of the fad, Christianity has to stay exciting and fun - as if the message of the cross was only for the Early Church. It has almost become a point of dogma that God's Spirit moves in waves: the Latter Rain Movement, then the Charismatic Movement, then the Shepherding Movement, then the Rescue Movement and tomorrow who knows what other movement. But, isn't it time we get beyond designer gods?

God has been faithfully patient for thousands of years working His plan, the climax of which was a cross. He rescued us and calls us to become rescuers with Him having lives which exhibit the same cross. There are no cheap or simple solutions to abortion, certainly no political and educational solutions. This is because abortion itself is not a problem to be solved, but a solution in its own right - a very costly solution as all murder is costly. Think about it: All abortions kill an innocent person for one of two reasons: Either he is an innocent witness to sin who must be silenced, or he is too costly a person to love and care for. Any solution that hopes to replace the abortion solution must be equally costly. Only the cross is costly enough.

It is time to stop deceiving Christians by telling them, "`All' we are asking you to do is write a letter, or come to this picket, or do this `rescue' with us." The children ask considerably more. God who hears them demands considerably more. Creation groans longing for considerably more. God will do considerably more, either with us, or to us. The sum of this book is that Rescue is Christianity and Christianity is Rescue. Yeshua - Joshua - Jesus - Savior - Rescuer. Have no other God's before Me. Love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. Love your Neighbor as yourself.

Have the mind of Christ who became a servant. Be not conformed to this world but be transformed. If you love me you will keep my commandments. Make disciples of all nations and teach them to obey whatsoever I have commanded you. If any man would be my disciple, let him take up his cross and follow me. These things are so common to all Christians that there is no need to foot note them. They are not taken out of context. They are all Rescue passages pure and simple.

They are the core passages for understanding Christian living because Christian living is a commitment to be a Rescuer until God calls us home, not a commitment to surf the faddish waves of His Spirit until the next wave comes in.

What Makes a Sit-in a Rescue? A crucial weakness of Operation Rescue was that we never defined what exactly Rescue was. On the one hand Rescue leaders sensed it was a profound expression of our faith. On the other hand, it was an activist tool to go after abortionists with. So when the popularity failed, it was hard to continue to call for more sit-ins unless there is more to the sit-in than met the eye. What many Christians fail to see is that a sit-in could have far more to do with the heart and soul of our faith than it does with abstract questions of civil disobedience and social tension.

Of all pro-life activities it is the most patterned after the cross. It is not a way-station on the continuum between violence and non-violence. It is not a technique of social protest we borrowed from Gandhi and Thoreau. It is not even the most strenuous or costly thing someone could do. We do it because of everything within our power to do, sitting-in is more like what Christ did on the cross than it is like any other type of activity, whether pro-life, religious, or civil disobedience. Rescue is not civil disobedience, it is godly obedience, first and last.

I am not against blowing up clinics, in the same way that I am not against political action, crisis pregnancy centers, taking an unwed mother into your home, and sidewalk counseling day in and day out. These activities all, in their own way, have as their goal protecting children from the psychopathic, child-molesting, serial, killers whom the law protects. But which one of them fulfills all three aspects of the cross at once? Only sit-ins as they have been modified and developed by Operation Rescue bringing together 15 years of intervention experience in front abortion death chambers with 4,000 years of Biblical experience and church history.

Why Do We Not See Sit-ins in the Bible? The Bible does not have much in it dealing with how to change society through movements of social protest, and sit-ins have been used historically as a means of social protest. But what if sitting-in is not primarily used for protest, but for the defense of life? This is the question which no critic of Rescue has dealt with. What if the sit-in is no longer used as a tool for exposing evil (its traditional use) but instead becomes a tool of protecting those against whom some evil thing is intended? The Bible says a great deal about intervening to protect the innocent. Most of the Biblical interventions were a bit more violent. Yet, I do not think that God is upset if our intervention takes the form of a group of people standing between a killer and his victim, regardless of how often a sit-in has been put to other purposes.

The reason we do not see social protest in the Bible is because the Bible focuses on more direct means of bringing social change. These revolve for the most part around people who personally went about the business of obeying God regardless of the cost, and in time the laws fell into line, or God brought down the government, or they just got killed. Then on the cross, our Lord showed us how to serve, how to be pastors, missionaries, housewives, husbands, workers, children, parents, masters, servants. "This is how you bring social change." says the cross, "Be a Rescuer in every area of life - take up your cross, deny yourself and follow me."

As Rescuers see that stopping their cooperation with child murder is no longer good press, will they turn to other things? To keep from feeling compelled to sit-in, will we cling to the straw man of "the futility of protest," or "the wrongness of marxist tactics of creating social tension."? Or will finally decide that it is worth while for someone to lose his life in the effort to intervene for the helpless, in a way which is harmless (non-revolutionary) and identifies us with them so thoroughly that for the world to destroy them it must destroy us first.

My point is not that the structure of the sit-in itself is required. My point is that giving yourself utterly in this three-fold way is required. So far, I have only seen the sit-in fulfil this form for the children. You see, as I have said again and again, Rescue is not a strategy. It is how we live our lives as Christians. The underground railroad was not a strategy to abolish slavery. It is what the serious Christian did to abolish slavery for this slave, then that slave, and the next slave. They did not look at slavery as an "issue".

They looked at slavery personally: young Tom who was sold away from his wife Anne and small children Tommy Jr., Jenean, and Anne-Marie. They saw slavery as people in bondage, not some vague social evil. Therefore they helped people escape bondage. They knew that ultimately until the warping of the soul which slavery effected in the slave holders was healed, there would be no satisfactory solution. But they did not use this huge vague philosophical/spiritual reality to justify why they would quit. Instead they focused on what they could do: free as many slaves personally as they could.

What kind of a solution was that? What kind of strategy? It was not a strategy at all. If slavery lasted another hundred years their grand-children would have kept on fighting it one freed slave at a time. The underground railroad was not primarily a strategy, it was a way of life - it was Rescue.

For all the talk I've heard about the civil rights movement being similar to Rescue, I have never been able to see many similarities, with one exception. Martin Luther King made a crucial shift in the black civil rights movement which had been getting nowhere for about 100 years. Because of his shift, his Southern Christian Leadership Conference was resented by the more respectable main stream black rights groups like the NAACP. What did he do?

He decided that instead of acting like a second class citizen and begging to be given first class rights, he would act like a first class citizen, assume those rights, and let others prove that he was not human enough to deserve them. He would drink out of the white man's water fountain and use his toilets. He would eat in his restaurants, buy shoes in the front of the store and ride in the front of a bus or not at all. This "disrespectful" approach horrified the establishment civil rights groups even more than the white racists.

But it is hard to argue against his logic even had he failed as so many failed before Him. His logic was simple: If even you are not going to act like a full citizen where your rights are at stake, then why should anyone else think that you deserve to be treated like a full citizen?

In the same way, the Christians who claim the people in the womb are fully their equals, do not treat them as equals, why should anyone else treat them with full equality - especially someone who does not think they are equal? Rescue breaks with begging for the recognition of their right to life. We simply recognize it, act on it, and let the chips fall wherever God has ordained them to fall. We will treat the unborn as first class citizens. This will become the keystone of all other efforts for their enfranchisement and constitutional protection. As a strategy? No! Because it is the Christian way whether they ever gain constitutional protection in our life time or not. The Constitution after all can only protect those whom the people have a will to protect. Ask any Black man. Ask any Japanese American. Ask any unborn American being carried to the abortionist for his final check-up.

This is how sit-ins become Rescue - they are simply an expression of a normal Christian way of life. What else would a Christian do? If they seem limited, or you think something far more drastic or consistent with pro-life rhetoric is called for, then by all means do it. Don't stand around using the excuse that because I am not doing the more drastic thing you cannot do the less drastic. If you can think of a better way to protect a life then do it. I am not arguing for sit-ins as such. I have simply been unable to think of an alternative. I have concluded that if protecting a child by passively keeping his killer away from him seems odd, it is not the Rescue which is out of order, it is the rest of our life. To understand this, see how the cross is the pattern for all of life.

Rescue: the Pattern of Christian Ministry The pattern of the cross, so clearly reflected in Rescue, is seen in every other kind of Christian ministry. The basis of world missions and home missions is that Christians work together to send a missionary over to live with and minister directly to those who need the Gospel - to physically intervene. They become a part of the native's life to whom they minister - they identify with the person to whom they go with the Gospel. They share the risks of disease, losing their families, and in some cases even being killed when they go.

All the spiritual weapons of war will not convert one pygmy if they are not backing up a Christian who is working with pygmies. The person in the field gives the rest of the Church a tangible point to reach through to others who would not otherwise hear or see the Gospel. This is Rescue. The Church banding together to support its members who are the living extensions of Christian love and witness.

Inner-city ministry, or any other home ministry also, shows this pattern. While it is good to take a youth group into the city and work on someone's roof, or street preach, or witness in the bars, the foundation for this is laid by men and women who buy a flat in the ghetto and live with the rats, roaches, and life threatening crime which mark our urban crisis. They put their lives and their children's lives on the line. They are Rescuers. They understand spiritual warfare. They understand the hell men can make on earth where God's standards are not respected.

So they go to where it is the worst, socially speaking, and begin to make a difference just by living by the self-sacrificing standards of the Gospel. It really is Good News. They physically intervene in the lives of those around them, they are harmless to their neighbors, they are not out to build a personal power base or kingdom. They voluntarily suffer the degradation, humiliation, and powerlessness of those to whom they minister. They Rescue.

When I think of an effective pastor, who bears his people's burdens, I think of my brother, a presbyterian minister in Kentucky. He knows their circumstances intimately and he will suffer whatever he must to see them built up in their faith and practice of godliness. No one is too insignificant for him, and no one too great. He is far more than the man you keep around to bless various occasions of state, like the high school football game, or the pot luck supper. In his ministry you can see the cross made plain. He is physically with his flock in good times and bad. He is harmless, not grasping after wealth, prestige, or pulpit power plays. Rather he is always laying down his life for the sheep. This is the pattern of Rescue. The good shepherd is a Rescuer.

Rescue: the Pattern of Marriage Many people will tell you that heavy involvement in Operation Rescue can take a toll on your marriage. While this is generally true of all heavy commitments, not just Rescue, it is also true that marriages today are quite fragile, because we have set a track record in our marriages of being unfaithful and undependable. Not big time, but in all the small petty areas. We do not have biblical marriages. We have good American marriages. We are sexually faithful. We work hard at our career. But you cannot find the cross in many marriages.

When you do, you notice something different about that couple. Operation Rescue was one of the best things which could have happened to Anne and my marriage, because starting years before I had ever heard of Randall Terry, I realized that if Anne and I were ever to be biblically one, I was going to have to die to myself. What I discovered years later is that this is not a unique requirement for marriage, it is the general pattern of the Christian life, it is Rescue.

The principles which prepared me to take leadership in Operation Rescue were hammered out in my marriage years before I ever thought about abortion. In 1981 I was graduating from seminary, looking for my first Church. Anne and I had two children and a marriage which was about as empty as one could be. Not bad, just empty. We had very little in common. I did things to make her feel small and insecure. She did things to make me feel useless. Not big things. Just consistent thoughtless small time selfishness on each of our parts, built up over years and years. Nothing to lead us to a life changing crisis, nothing to apologize for and start afresh.

I realized that both of us had the ideal in mind of the perfect husband and wife. Yet, we were both disappointed, because there seemed to be no way for this perfection to manifest itself. Why were finances always an argument? Why were so many things a struggle? Why didn't she love me the way I loved her? Why couldn't I love her the way she wanted to be loved? Why couldn't we work together instead of picking away at each other -- even in front of people? Why couldn't we agree on how to discipline the kids? Why couldn't we resist making small publicly embarrassing comments so regularly?

The answer that came to us was so simple. It was in Ephesians 5: "Husbands love your wife as Christ loved the Church and gave Himself for her that He might sanctify her and cleans her... that He might present her to Himself a glorious Church." The pattern of the cross in marriage. I was to lay down my life for Anne in a way that makes her glorious. As Proverbs 31 says, "Let her own works praise her in the gate." But how? How could I free her up to shine in all her glory?

I realized I had to become her servant. I had to make her look good. I must decrease but she must increase. Until 1981, I believed that there were no problems that a good long heart to heart talk could not unravel - the education solution to marriage. If nothing else, I figured that I could always just take authority and assume my rightful place as head of the family - the political solution. But unfortunately, my track record of five years of marriage said it all, and it robbed me of all authority in the family. I could not sit down with Anne and say, "I'll be different. I'm really going to make you the most important woman in the world. In time you will trust me because you know that on this earth you are my highest priority." I had to say it with my life - for as many years as I had been telling her the opposite - or not at all.

I began. I picked seven small things I would begin to do to serve her and communicate my love and respect and support to her. These were small ways that I knew I could do consistently - consistency became a higher priority than flashy success. I was sick of big promises and hype. What I did is not that important. What was important is this: I would be utterly consistent; I would never point out what I was doing so she would "know what a great husband I was"; And most important, I figured it took five years to dig this hole (8 if you include our years of dating) and so I would give my plan five years before I even began to look for fruit.

What was the result? Even these puny faltering steps began to bear fruit. As I began to learn how to give my life for Anne, we began to become a family prepared to be able to give its life for Christ. Rescue became my family's way of life long before we ever sat in at an abortion death camp. Rescue at an abortion clinic is no different from rescue in a Christian marriage. Both stem from imitating the principles of the same cross. We went into full time pro-life work with no visible means of support. We have had to sell our home. We have not had a steady place to live since then. We have five children.

I have led over 100 Rescues. I have spent eight months in jail. There is no source of income except for people who decide to send checks to Anne. Because of my lawsuits I cannot earn any money that will not be garnished or seized. We have spent months on the road as a family. Yet all these things strengthened rather than destroyed our marriage. Why? Because we are learning how to die to ourselves. This is the message of the cross. This is Rescue.

In our marriage we try to physically intervene for each other in a way that is needed, not just ways which are convenient to the one intervening. We try to be harmless, repenting of the many ways we try and manipulate each other to build a edge over the other. We try and identify with what the other must be going through rather than put the worst possible construction on what the other says and does in order to justify and nurse our suspicions and resentments. This is the pattern of the cross, this is Rescue.

So many families ran into problems with Operation Rescue did so because they were not prepared to die to themselves. The more that one of the parents got involved with protecting children, the more the other was threatened. Rescue was a strategy it was not the mark of the cross over their way of life and so their marriages were suffering. Their children (like their parents) had not been brought up to take suffering for Jesus Christ for granted, so the kids kept wondering why everyone else seemed to be normal but not Mom and Dad. Mom, or Dad, would play on the children's doubts, and then turn them against the one who was involved in Rescue. Again and again we heard husbands and wives say, "I just can't continue because of my wife (or husband). God has called me to put my family first. I can't afford a divorce."

Of course they needed to stop rescuing. But was the problem rescue? Or was it for too many of these families, that their god was the American Dream and under normal circumstances they would never see the inadequacy of their strange god. But when the cross poked into their lives, the choice between the average good American Life and losing everything for Jesus Christ became intolerable to them.

Yes, divorce would be wrong. But so is the idolatry which had rotted their marriage, making them unable to devote themselves to the kingdom of God, whether in protecting children from murder, or any other task which would require them to lose their life that they might find it. Rescue was blamed for putting stress on the marriage. But Rescue only revealed the cracks which were there held together by the illusion of a regular job and peace at any price.

Having said this, it was all too often true that the husband or wife would flee to the heroic sacrifice of sit-ins in order to avoid family problems - and this is as wrong, as the resulting bitterness of the one who did not get involved as he filled his soul with resentment. To both of these sins, the cross calls out to let their warfare cease with one another and learn how to trust and be trustworthy, to give and to receive. That takes time, but it can begin now. Such a couple should drop out of Rescue, but not to return to their old way of life. Instead they need to address the idolatry in their marriage which made them unfit for God's service in any arena, not just the anti-abortion arena. They must learn to lay down their lives for each other or they will never get back into the battle.

As we did with our marriage, American Christians have spent years digging our society into deep trouble. There are no quick fixes. All we can do reestablish the kind of track record which says, "I love you. God loves you. You can depend on it." Our words have lost their meaning because our society does not see Christians willing to lay down their lives for anything beyond their own peace and prosperity, much less murdered babies. What they see is Christians splitting their churches, destroying their marriages, chasing the same mirages of success the world chases - Religion grown quite comfortable thank-you.

This is all they will see until our lives establish the long term commitment necessary to give the Gospel credibly - not respectability, but credibility. This is true of those parts of our marriage we do not like. It is equally true of grave social evils like abortion, pornography, government education and the judicial and fiscal crisis our country faces. Our solutions will only come as we quietly die to our selfish agendas and live for others by the power of the Spirit - without having the media spotlight what faithful and good Christians we are.

For the children being murdered I know of no strategy for success, only a life-style which strips us down to recognize the crisis we face, the danger we are in, and begins to take hold with courage those things which charity, not self-preservation, dictate. We are always trying to tell Jesus what Peter told him, "No Lord [the cross] is not for you." We tell him this in our marriages, our ministries, and our careers. But Jesus Rescued us from this perspective when He answered Peter, "Get behind me Satan, you are not mindful of the things of God but the things of men." When God rescue our marriage, He made possible our good intention to sacrifice for the unborn.

More than any other argument to our husbands, wives, or children, the Rescue marriage says, "I believe you have the same value I do. Therefore, three days, three months, three years, thirty years, of my life laid down to meet whatever need you have, is worth it to restore us to what God intends." More than any other argument to our society and churche, abortion Rescue says, "I believe you have the same value I do, therefore, three days, three months, three years, or thirty years of my life laid down in jail to protect you is worth it to restore us to what God intends." This is an unanswerable argument. What do you say to a crucified man or woman? He's not arguing with you, he's just setting an example. What can you say to his family who is willing to be crucified with him? What can you say to a church willing to be crucified with Him? They have stopped arguing too.

Rescue and the Church Rescue should be recognized by churches the same way they recognize any other Christian ministry. Each Christian should be encouraged to do his part to personally engage in it to the extent that he has the time and opportunity. Churches should be calling forth people who will devote themselves to protecting children with their lives full time. The elders should examine those who come forward the way they would examine any missionary. If acceptable as a missionary, they should have a public time of presenting them to the congregation, laying on hands, sending them out, and helping raise the necessary financial support.

We must come to grips with the fact that the iron curtain has fallen on portions of our country. It is now illegal to be a public Christian in these sectors. Churches have quietly skirted these zones, or set up alternative structures. Often, Christians explain how godlessness really is the best way in these public areas of life and what goes on there is none of our business. One area where the iron curtain has decisively fallen is around the death camps. It is illegal to be a Christian brother to a child whose murder we could easily postpone, or in many cases prevent.

This makes supporting missionaries difficult, because society will strike back at any support base for the missionary. We used to get lots advice from people on how Operation Rescue should be organized and conduct its business. None of it took account of this reality - it makes havoc of incorporation and board structures. And that is the organizational trick of all Rescue groups - how do you maintain accountability without liability?

Therefore when a church stands with a missionary to these children, it would be wise to direct diaconal funds into his prison account. If he is married, his family can be supported through diaconal funds for the needy to his wife, without the church being liable for the father's ministry. The Church can act wisely with its finances. But if comes to the point where there is no way to avoid the choice of sharing liability, vs standing with those who protect children, then we hang the buildings and budgets, "and joyfully accept the confiscation of your property because you yourselves have better and lasting possessions. So do not throw away your confidence." Having said this, we are a long way from this either/or decision. There are still many avenues open.

There is more that the Church can do. In addition to members Rescuing as they are able, they can make one phone call a day to the mayor, the judge, district attorney, or jailor, and request that these men and women stop keeping Christians from protecting children from murder: "Let my people go that they might serve me!"

In the Church or Not at All It is tempting to turn to a crusade for salvation, But it is better to risk the property of the church than it is to let Rescue become a ministry outside the Church. A crusade will not accomplish what only a church can do. God longs after His people, His body - the Church. It seemed like a good idea at the time for Sarai to give Hagar to Abram to get the job done and fulfill God's promise. But it was not God's way. The Church is always asking God to be fruitful and fulfill His promises through some hired servant, whether Hagar, or Eliazar, never the congregation itself.

One of the common criticism of Rescue groups is that they seemed to lack organization and planning. This was not due to ineptness on our part entirely. If you go back and look at what we preached from 1987 to 1990 you will see a consistent emphasis which held us back. We said with the Song of Deborah, "The leaders led in Israel, and the people followed, Praise the Lord." Our goal was to see churches, not organizations, rise up to defend the children. In the beginning this happened with great success as more pastors were arrested with us than with any other organization in the history of this country. As organizations sprang up, we kept pushing local leaders to put pastors and elders in leadership and minimize the Rescue organization and pray for them to dissolve entirely. The result was organizationally disastrous, but it was the right way to lose.

How can this be? How can we actually prefer to lose with the Church than to win without it? How could anyone truly hoping to win think that the Church would ever overcome its inertia? Campus Crusade, Inter-Varsity, China and Sudan Inland Missions, YWaM, Helemissions, Samaritan's Purse - now these are organizations who know how to get a job done, and you do not see them tying themselves down to churches. How could the Church ever deal with the child killing? We cannot even deal with basic issues of congregational life. And besides, most Churches do not want to be involved. Do we stop everything until they move?

The answer to this is the bottom line of my life. If God does not do it in the Church, He will not do it anywhere. Our goal is to bring the Church along, not by our preaching, but by our example. The number of rescues in a city indicates how prepared the Church is to protect children there. This is true whether the rescuers spend the time between rescues in jail, or at home. When a missionary to the pre-born has to spend months in jail for a single Rescue, he has raised the stakes for all of us. He is no longer the one standing between the killer and the victim. He has joined the victim, now they both need someone who will stand in the gap for them so they can be free to Rescue again. We have no plans to clog the jails and courts. It is moral authority, not physical clout which will turn the tide. Standing on principle we give the Church an opportunity to move.

I do not have any plans for success apart from God changing hearts of stone to hearts of flesh. It does not matter that we are talking about Christians needing a heart transplant. The most famous evangelistic text, "Behold I stand at the door and knock." was not written to unbelievers, but to the Church. To protect the pre-born from the American Church itself, God is prepared to remove our lampstand. The book of Revelation does not present the Church with the option of leaving the door closed as so many evangelists misapply this verse to their unsaved hearers.

No, Jesus Christ is coming through that door whether or not we open it. It is His Church and His door. If we do not open it in a communion of heart felt obedience, then He will blast it in and remove us, as he would waft away an odious stench from His nostrils - for this is what our prayers will become to him, filtered through the bloody screams of the pre-born as they are ushered into His presence.

I pray that the Church will see in the visible bonds of the bars and chains which prevent us from protecting children, the far greater invisible bonds of wilful cooperation which bind them from protecting the pre-born. At least let the Church see in us a picture of what is coming to it if they do not stand today for others. There are three kinds of exorcism in the New Testament. In one the exorcists fail and are either discouraged, or are thrown from the house naked and bleeding because they have no power. In another, the exorcism is a success, but there is nothing to replace the demon and he returns with seven demons worse than he is. And finally, there is the removal of the foul spirit and its replacement with God's Holy Spirit.

I see the current establishment pro-life groups as being the first sort of exorcism. All the best intentions and sincerity but with solutions which will never come close to matching the demonic horror. The second type of exorcism is the popular crusade approach. It seemed good in the middle ages as a way to take the Holy Land for Christ. Crusades certainly streamline your effort and get it away from stodgy church governments. But it does not replace the demon with something that will last. Operation Rescue fell into this kind of trap.

Rescue should put fire back into the cultural imagination of men and inspire them to live by the standards which make civilization possible, but a crusade will only short circuit this process. The Church must be matured to bear the weight of authority God has prepared for it. Therefore, the only solution is what Daniel foresaw: not a crusade, but the expansion of the kingdom of God itself to fill the earth. Those with this vision can only suffer faithfully until God ignites this vision again in the heart of His Church... or simply obliterates us and starts again in another part of the world.

It will not be the first time.

Until the Church takes on its historic role, and full of the Spirit, inspires its sons and daughters to be utterly intolerant of evil, it will never become the civilization creating force God mandated for it to be. It will only be a parasite sucking the blood out of those who have gone before. This is why, in weighing what I will do with my life and influence, such as it is, I can see no more effective plan than living as if these words are true. There is not much more to say. But much more to do. As I write this in June of 1991, I am very skeptical of ever seeing these words published. And if they are published, I am skeptical of them penetrating anyone's heart. That is why I must return to the death camps even of a city like Atlanta, because once there, I am in a place where it makes no difference whether or not you read these words, whether you change your life or not.

The question is not, "Are we being too radical?" The real question is, "are we being faithful enough?" Read the prophets. They speak graphically of Israel's unfaithfulness to God in terms of adultery and excrement smeared on the faces of priests. Isaiah preached in the nude for three years. Ezekiel spent a year lying on his side just to illustrate the coming siege of Jerusalem. Hosea marries a whore. Jesus called the Charles Stanleys and the Bill Gothards of His day - that is the highly respected and astute religious leaders of His day, in a word, the good guys - white washed tombs, blind guides, snakes and vipers, hypocrites. He walked into the middle of the temple and ran everyone out and then he bodily blocked the entrance. Imagine that on Sunday morning. Or better, don't imagine it Sunday morning, go do it on Monday morning at your local death camp.

Imagine Jesus or any of the prophets - real men - upset over the fact that they just were not getting anywhere with their ministry. They all had talent, would we have advised them to read How to Win Jews and Influence Greeks? Would we advise them to change their "Church Growth" strategy? Their ministries were failures. Would to God the American Church would fail in its ministry the ways these men failed - because it has become too hard hitting and offends the world with a cross, not because it whines and begs to be left alone with the freedom to worship and nice buildings to worship in.

Let us never fail because we did not have the courage to hit hard enough with our desperate situation, a situation which will require not years, but generations of sacrificial obedience to dig out of. Our situation requires nothing less than the conversion of our families, businesses, and our politics - in other words, the very conversion of the Church itself to Christianity. Not sit-ins, not activism, not the revival hour, strong preaching and strong singing, but old fashioned, take up your cross and follow me Christianity.

Chapter 9: The Cross and the Rescue Movement

Can We Measure Up? Is it possible for the Rescue movement itself live up to the demands of the cross which it made so offensive in its rhetoric? To live up to those demands in accord with Philippians 2 - to actually be rejected in place of those who are daily led to slaughter - seems impossible. And yet, to fail to come to grips with how we can live up to the demands of the cross, will lead to discouragement and alienation within any movement which cannot bear the weight of its own words.

If you can understand how we have fallen short of what is required to live up to the standard of the cross, then you will understand how the stumbling of the Rescue movement - and the Church through it - is not the result of the failure of individuals, whether leaders, or followers. Rather it is the result of built in problems which no leader, organization, or philosophy, can possibly overcome without transforming the nature of the movement. The Church and the Rescue movement are now in the process of making just this painful transformation.

The Pro-life movement needed to develop a center which would take its description of child murder to its logical conclusion, and so gave birth to Operation Rescue. In the same way, the Rescue movement had to produce that same center in order to fulfill God's call. Without such a center, all of the various parts - including the other unrelated parts of the body of Christ whose primary calling is not to pro-life ministry of any sort - would have no way to focus their particular gift and calling, to bring this holocaust to an end.

This is a simple fact of life: Publicly murdered infants call for more than politics, more than alternatives, more than sermons, more than demonstrations, more than prayer meetings, pamphlets, and books - they do not call for less, they demand all of these things and more. That "more" must be produced or every other part of the movement, and body of Christ, will lack a focus and coordination point capable of bringing this particular evil to an end. That "more" is not just more activity, but rather something which focuses the intolerable nature of child killing to eliminate it. That "more" will be produced.

God has promised to bring this holocaust to an end. It will either be God's gracious judgement in behalf of the children by bringing revolution from within and invasion from without on those who could have protected them but would not; or it will be a cross whereby God's people learn to lead through laying down their lives. But the blood of the children cries out for it. God will answer. This is why it is imperative that the pro-life movement and the Church understand what only the Christian has to give, and then give it.

This then, is the crisis faced by those who know the horror of child murder and have stepped out forward to rescue some of those children. All our words come home to roost. To understand our difficulty think about how Winston Churchill silenced one of his critics. It is how the Church silences rescuers, and how the world silences the Church.

What Is Your Price? One of the matrons of high society in London was berating Sir Winston Churchill for some offense or other in his conduct of the war. He was desperate to get her to leave him alone, she had followed him about all evening until finally he turned to her and asked, "Madam, would you make love to me for a million pounds sterling?" Like you, she gasped at the vulgarity of his question. But wanting to get on with her point, she thought a moment and decided that one million pounds was nothing to turn up her nose at. To appreciate her answer you need to know that by today's standards, that would be about fifty or sixty million dollars. "Well, for a million... But really what has that to do with anything? As I was saying before..."

But he cut her off. "Well, madam, how about for 15 shillings? Are you interested?" "Sir Winston!" she said in great shock, "Just what sort of a woman do you think I am?" Fixing his eye on her he said, "Madam, what you are has already been established. Now the only question is, what is your price?" The world is convinced that Christians are not radically different from anyone else. They believe everyone has a price, regardless of his rhetoric. Therefore, they will teach Rescuers to protect child killers like everyone else if they can only discover what their price is. Is it lawsuits? Is it high fines and jail?

Is it a wife or husband who forces the rescuing half of the marriage to quit from internal strife? Whatever it is, the world has one conviction, and that is that you can be bought, just like them. Whatever Christianity is, they know it does not make you a truly new creature. And this is the horror of our complicity with child killing - even the complicity of the most faithful Rescuer among us - we as representatives of Jesus Christ have lost our credibility.

Richard Cowden-Guido, speaking to Rescuers in Valhalla prison who were serving four and a half months, put a razor edge to the challenge the world gives Rescuers as he encouraged them to persevere. He says that every time they arrest us, each day they hold us in jail, and each day the church permits it, is a hideous evil, not because of what they do to us, but because our government, by holding us, and our churches by permitting it, say that each unborn child has no value.

To enforce that lie it tells us that each child is so worthless that even non-violent attempts to protect him are wrong, illegal, and should be punished. By refusing to honor their no trespass law, more than we honor God's command to love our neighbor, we did not join them in the charade that these children are not worth our suffering for, any more than the human waste matter they join in our sewers is worth protecting. And therefore it is vital to them that they destroy this witness to a God who really can strengthen us to do all things.

The Christian's willingness to suffer, not blindly but specifically because the people in the womb are as human as they, exposes this lie as nothing else can.

This is the great Lie God calls us to stand against. The abortion culture through its courts and police wants to prove all Rescuers hypocrites: "You are happy to grandstand," it says, "Happy to force others to suffer for the unborn, happy to talk about Jesus and the value of the fetus: but you don't really believe it any more than we do, and we will prove it. You have not even been in jail as long as a woman is pregnant, not to say for the 20 and more years of effort it demands after birth.

Now that your little stunts haven't worked, now that you are learning what it means to suffer for these children - or for truth, or the will of God, or all your fine sounding talk - you will discover that you agree with us after all, that these kids, fetuses actually - and we hope you'll be honest enough to use that word when you get out of court or jail - these fetuses are certainly not worth suffering for.

You will find that you cannot help but agree with the fundamental premise of the abortion culture, which is, `there can never be any difference between the hungers of the flesh, and the will of God.' You watch, we will show you that in reality, you are on our side, despite what you say. Just look at yourself, you will stop rescuing in order to surround yourself with the same comforts of the flesh we surround ourselves with. You call it God's will that your fleshly comforts - or Rescue organizations, or churches - be preserved even if it means permitting these little ones to die today.

And that is what we say about abortion and preserving the opportunity of the woman to surround herself with equal comforts to yours, even if it means her child must die."

The more deeply anyone stands against this lie, in any part of the Church, or pro-life movement, the more he will realize how entrenched the American Way is in his own faith, the more he will realize his need to repent and stop judging others. The more he will realize that this calls for daily sacrifice. But, to break away and serve God daily in any arena, must be more than an impulse to activism or altruism. It will cost you your whole life.

And that is why, when we launched Operation Rescue, we launched it by calling for profound commitment, even though at the time the risks were minimal and the work was exciting. Such great sounding words as, "Life, Fortune and Sacred Honor," seemed grandiose, like children playing dress up in their parents clothes - indeed, that is what we were. Those still rescuing today see less and less excitement, and more of what it will cost. But that is not why so few Rescue.

To understand why, requires a deeper look at the contradiction we created in our call to Rescue which made it seem meaningless in the end to us, even as it always seemed overblown to others.

We faced a contradiction at the heart of our movement: we called for ultimate sacrifice - for that is what the children, Scripture and the raw facts of abortion call us to - but only organized safe rescues which would fit the schedule of the Christian not called to devote his full life to this. This might work on the national level - it's a big country and there are many places to hold low cost rescue events - but local leaders soon realized they had no place to hide if they wanted to do it again and again. They either take up a martyr's crown and be crushed by the system, or they retreat and be crushed by their rhetoric. Most Christians had no objection to saving a baby, but realized intuitively the cost, and so stayed away. But where could those who took a stand turn?

What could we do? The rhetoric was sound - they are killing babies; we can stop it, or at least stop cooperating with it; God really does command us to love our neighbor, and do unto him not only as we would have him do unto us, but as we would do unto Christ Himself. But how can the Christian not called to Pro-life martyrdom have a part in this ministry? It is necessary that they all be involved. But how? This rock and hard place trapped more than one leader and crushed him. The call of a sweeping movement, minimized personal risk. But the pre-born gave us no room to back down should the "movement" disintegrate. The cold fact is, very few leaders or followers thought they would actually have to stand alone behind their words.

This is not the first time the Church has had to deal with an issue so great that it seemed to eclipse all other issues, and call into question even our faith itself, and yet so small that it is easy to close our eyes and walk around it as if it did not exist. How can the Church maintain its integrity as a full body of ministry to the world, and yet bring its entire strength to bear on the particular needs of the day? To answer this problem it has historically, produced a core of people to focus the effort each day. It then surrounded that core with spiritual and financial support, and finally, reinforced it with the periodic efforts of the other parts of the body of Christ lending personal a hand from time to time as their primary calling permitted.

Rescuing children from murderers need not be different. But when the part time Rescuer had no center to hold his vision on target - no day to day focusing in the lives of full time Rescuers - a sense of futility set in, and we drifted. Our call to change the world, became drum-beating for a particular activist/political agenda - we lost our prophetic edge. As more than one national pro-life leader has told me, "You may as well have turned to politics in the first place and not wasted everyone's time."

This lack of a center is not Rescue's peculiar problem. It cripples the entire pro-life movement so much so that most Christians called to other parts of the body of Christ see no meaningful way to become involved in any pro-life activity. This is not because there are no ways to be involved. Instead, because these things lack a focused center of action to harness them, a center which is consistent with the nature of legalized child killing, these actions though good, seem meaningless.

They sound like one activist agenda among thousands of others in a hundred arenas - poverty, public education, national debt, the drug crisis, souls going to hell. The harried Christian simply asks pro-lifers, "When you have a meaningful solution, call us. I am not called to sign petitions, do a rescue, picket a clinic, or work in a CPC." In this sense they are absolutely correct, not everyone is called to the same thing.

They stay away because they see no unifying center to the Church's ministry to the pre-born - no way to be meaningfully involved without losing themselves in the endless stream of "more things you can do", and it just is not their calling.

Christians who say this are not condemning Pro-life work, or Operation Rescue. Nor are they cowards and compromisers. Rather, we need to take Operation Rescue (and the pro-life movement, and the Church) for what they are, and what they declare abortion and Christian responsibility to be, and provide the focal point everyone's rhetoric needs to focus the majority of people who will never devote their full time because God has called them to another arena.

Given the condition of the Church prior to Operation Rescue, a step like Operation Rescue had to have built in contradictions in order to make it possible for Christians to take a step closer to the jugular of the child killers and their supporting culture - a step of selfless compassion. It is worth studying in detail how we were able to take this step, how we broke ourselves, and how we can move forward.

Our Lives, Fortunes and Sacred Honor These words launched the Rescue Movement in May of 1988. It is the title of the sermon Randall Terry preached Sunday night, before rising at 5:00 Monday morning to lead 1000 people into the heart of Manhattan to close down an abortion clinic for the day - the first of 4 to be shut down that week while we were there. The rhetoric of Operation Rescue left no room to hide: 1987-1988 - The Leaders Led in Israel and the People Followed. From the song and victory of Deborah, Operation Rescue envisioned God's people led by their pastors going out in simple obedience and before the world knew there was opposition, we would expose the horror of abortion making it a thing of the past. We intended to spur the Church to take on its historic task, not replace the Church. When the Church would not, we had no plan "B" to fall back on, and still lack such a plan.

May 1988 - We commit our Lives, Fortune and Sacred Honor. We must be willing to sacrifice and pledge support to each other to the death. Knowing the fear of stepping out in a venture as bold as this, we said, "Courage is not the absence of fear, it is the willingness to do what is right in spite of our fears."

July - Oct. 1988 - Goliath must Fall. Atlanta's defense of child killing became symbolic of the entire nation's complicity in murder. While 1,200 Christians were arrested and held in jail, over these three months, we declared, "Atlanta will be the pattern which the nation will follow. Either we make it safe for children here, or every city knows that we can be bought if they just make the price high enough. Therefore, Goliath must fall!"

January 1989 - Jabesh-Gilead - no covenant with the enemy. The men of Jabesh Gilead were willing to make a covenant in which they would gouge out their right eye in exchange for protection from the Philistines. This was the message in our return to New York, to defy the $50,000 injunction of Judge Ward. It was winner take all, no half-way win, no covenant with the abortion culture: "We must run to the roar, face the greatest threat, or they will know our price. Better to die than compromise and gouge out our eye."

Aug. - Sept. 1989 - The Lessons from Jeremiah. The terrible crisis of innocent blood facing this country and the inevitable coming judgement requires people willing to sacrifice everything today, and if necessary, rescue where we might be kept in jail indefinitely. "We must be willing to sacrifice to win the war, all we hold dear is at stake."

Oct. 10, 1989 - The October Letter from Atlanta's Jail. Its message so completely brought Operation Rescue to its rational conclusion that it is worth quoting, at some length, our call to stand: "Winning the war for America's soul will not come easily, cheaply, nor quickly... we're going to have to suffer. Some of us may get lengthy jail sentences... lose our jobs... "respectable" ministries... or homes. But if we are willing to pay this price, I believe we can rescue this enslaved... dying nation. I think it's worth it.

Do you? [Our sacrifices will] teach our children that there are things worth fighting and dying for. We will leave them a heritage of commitment to the Lord Jesus Christ and His word. They will learn what is important in this life and what is not, what is temporal and what is eternal.... If we can endure the hardships God is calling us to, rather than run from them, I believe this movement will grow. If we don't, we may die. As a movement we are at a critical time.... Those committed to child killing have fully blossomed. Will we fully blossom in our holy call to lay down our lives for the children?

God help us to do so." The D.C. Project a month later echoed that call: "Now is the time to stand in Atlanta."

Oct. - Thanksgiving 1989 - Bail out now. In the memos within the leadership-group planning a return to Atlanta, we envisioned an ultimate commitment on the part of the national leadership. Lines such as, "This battle is not going to be won quickly, expect to be here into the Summer or Fall of 1990." and, "Tell everyone in leadership that you could be looking at 3 to 8 years of jail from felony charges so they should bail out now if they don't have the heart for it." or, "I don't want our organization to do what it takes to survive only to have God destroy our country a few years later." were commonplace in these letters as we planned the second siege of Atlanta.

Thanksgiving 1989 - January 1990 As the realization began to set in that a return to Atlanta was not going to produce a quick all out climactic battle, the question arose as to whether or not it was worth trying at all in a city which showed no signs of life. Ironically, the discussion on how to proceed in December and January did not disagree over the facts of the national situation.

We all agreed that: It was obvious that groups were beginning to turn in on themselves as they began to experience decline and exhaustion; Rescue had become "old news" for the media; Groups were beginning to get turf conscious and skeptical of how expending energy out of town would help their own efforts; For every local and national leader, the threat of the martyr's crown loomed with no hero status to make it seem glorious; A short battle could not muster the necessary intensity, given the condition of the troops.

Would a long patient battle capture the imagination of the Church, and grow into something winnable? What would save the Rescue Movement? The idea that it was time to develop the core of people who would rescue at any cost, and Atlanta being the proof of that commitment to the word of God and to the children, seemed hopelessly discouraging. Therefore, any attempt to continue in Atlanta could not be associated in any way with the name or concept of Operation Rescue.

You can see the dilemma. Our rhetoric left us no place to hide. We had said, "We will stand in Atlanta with the children of Atlanta at any price!" And now the price was that we would be standing alone. What was played out dramatically at the national level was nothing new, it is faced daily at the local level in every Rescue community which says in effect the same thing we said nationally: "We, the Church, stand with the children of this city at any cost!" Not a bad position to take, but where can a local leader hide after he says those words if he discovers that no one really wants to stand with him?

There was no place to dodge this bullet. We were frustrated. We knew how brave we would be if we could only find enough people to be brave with us. But brave alone? That seemed foolhardy. We brought the movement to the brink of its rhetoric and realized that we did not have what it took to take the ridge. We discovered that most of those 50,000 people who had been arrested over the prior two years were not rescuing children at all, they were rescuing themselves from a profound sense of guilt.

Our focus on God and the children, turned into either an introspective focus on our personal sense of guilt, or a faith in our ability to accomplish something.

The daily effort to physically shut down death camps - that is, rescuing at any cost, overcoming the punishment barrier until they imprison us, kill us, or leave us alone to do what is right - is demanded by all Christian, Pro-life, and Rescue rhetoric: either that, or revolution. But nothing less. What we planned to do in Atlanta might have provided the wholeness and focus to the movement by growing naturally out of the Rescue movement as it sought greater consistency with its commission.

Instead, those who stayed in Atlanta became orphaned stepchildren, seeking reunion with a parent which by abandoning them, had lost not only its focus, but any intention of raising up that focal point elsewhere. All the while, local rescue group leaders wondered where the fire went, and why we couldn't just get on with things. Much as children of the '60's wonder why the Beatles don't play together any more. To succeed, parent and child must come together. But a direction had been set and only God, in His time, could bring the two together again as He is now doing.

Only now, it is not as two organizations, but as two concepts.

The Cross Leaves No Escape Routes Reviewing our battle cries makes clear the dilemma of all Rescue leaders: we had left no escape clauses. This crushed more than one person who signed up to be part of a movement, not be a voice crying in the wilderness. The legal authorities in some cities like Charlotte, NC said, "Do what you want." and would hardly prosecute. Others like Atlanta, Los Angeles and Denver said, "We will crush you." Rescue groups ran the spectrum from "Category Zero", to walking instead of going limp; from traditional Catholic, to wild Pentecostal. Rescue leaders ran from golden tongued charisma, to cold fish; but the overall trend was the same, with few exceptions every group has dwindled and the promise of the great groundswell has died.

To find a solution, or pin the blame, some people look to leaders, others to methods of rescue and recruiting, others to philosophical, spiritual, or theological purity. But I am convinced that neither blame nor solutions lie in these areas. It is much simpler. Everything necessary had already been said - a good bit of it was said 4,000 years ago. We just needed enough foolish people to do to do the foolish things we claimed God told us to do. The day of the rally is over. The day of doing what we rallied to do has arrived - don't expect the applause to continue when you actually answer Satan's challenge to God.

We said we would take up a cross, and in the end, we will. The world, and certain Church leaders, pray that we would not have what it takes - that in the end we would agree that the children are not worth anyone laying down his life every day. As long as there is not the daily presence, we can all stand back and say, "What can anybody really do about abortion. At least we aren't hypocritical guilt mongers like those Rescuers and pro-life activists out there. We support them and CPC's from time to time - I've picketed and some of my best friends have rescued - but they are so harsh." And within the Rescue movement we argue back and forth about how to woo or transform our critics.

But what solution would you suggest: Given: not everyone will drop everything and Rescue daily. Given: that is what our call seems to demand - what else does the public murder of children demand? how can it call for less than our whole life? Dilemma: How can we tone down our description of the crisis and call to sacrifice without misleading our hearers, and yet to go full bore would leave only a few fanatics.

Is there no way around this dilemma? This dilemma keeps us all from just "going on about our Rescue business" until it is resolved. Think about it: We all want a national call - a national leader - to get everyone together to "really do something". But that is intrinsically impossible. What call can you give to take a stand? If the demands of standing are so small that no one's life is seriously disrupted, lots of people come, but, the fruit of the stand will be correspondingly small - abortion goes on as usual the next day, largely unfazed, and people feel like it was all a lot of shouting for nothing.

But if you call for a level of commitment which will actually dent the abortion industry, it will result in a battle so tough that everyone will decline the call except the weirdos who like pain -- and not enough of them show up to dent the industry anyway. Everyone knows we are at a cross roads, but from where to where? Defeat is built-in at every turn. Is it time to just quit? Or is it possible to bring these two things together?

Tell Me Where We Went Wrong, so We Can Retire with Honor. As I worked to launch Operation Rescue, I had often thought of what I would do when it was over, win, lose, or draw. There was no question in my mind. I would seek out a pastorate and raise my children satisfied that I had done the best that could be expected. But as the decline began back in the Summer of 1989 I became trapped by the lack of escape routes. At first I thought it was simply a problem of how we had stated the case for Rescue. Surely, Randall Terry had just gone overboard and overstated the case for protecting people in the womb. A more sober evaluation of the case for Rescue must show that it is only one activist strategy among others. Then God could call me to lead a more balanced life - I could go back to being a good Presbyterian.

So I reviewed what, for two years, we had preached from the Scriptures. So far did I fail to find any loop holes, I concluded that we had not done God's requirement to Rescue justice. Think about it: "If you cannot love your brother whom you have seen, how can you love God whom you have not seen?" We had not even begun to touch all the Scriptures teach and demand in the area of Rescue at a house of legalized murder, quite aside from Rescue as the characteristic of the Christian life. The first three chapters of this book began to form in my heart. I was stuck. Taking up the cross is not optional. Randall Terry was not overboard in his rhetoric. He was if anything, by God's grace, terribly understated, or no one would have taken the first step.

Does it really matter whether or not anyone else in the country thought the children worth dying for? Even if nobody stood with them, would that change the reality that they are worth standing with? My wife was no help in trying to retire from Rescue. She had come to the same conclusions long before me. "But Anne, everyone will think we are kooks. What will it mean for our children?" Her answer was devastatingly simple. "They are our children."

Jesus went to His cross alone. The children are ripped up in their mother's womb alone. At least we have a family which will stand against this together. But, even if you are the only one left who will act like abortion is murder, even if you cannot possibly succeed, does that change where you or at least somebody should be? Anne and I could only conclude that God wanted us to persevere and so we would if He would continue to find support for us. As Anne would often say, "What's the worst thing which could happen? God stops paying our bills, and we have to leave Atlanta and its jails. I can live with that."

But where does that leave the other leaders not to mention the rank and file? Can they retire with honor? Are they compromisers or quitters if they turn to something else? Unless we reshape the whole nature of the Pro-life and Rescue work of the Church, we would be forced to answer these question with a simple "Yes." and in so doing, would mark the end of Rescue as a live option for most people. If we tried to present sit-ins at abortion clinics as a sacramental obligation for Christians, proving their Christianity, then we must conclude that for any who do not, they have left the faith. In short, these are two caricatures of Rescuers which many hold and if they were correct then we will never stir the Church, because we would be calling it to less than the Gospel. They lead to bitterness, division and condemnation.

If you can understand that the true message of Rescue is that laying down your life is the obligation, where you do it is a matter of calling, then you will be free. Those who are not Rescuing at abortion clinics can no less be laying down their lives, they are simply doing it in another arena. The only question we must honestly answer is, "Am I not rescuing at the abortion clinic because I am fleeing the obligation to lay down my life?" This perspective should offer hope, especially leaders, and offer them a way out of the corner they painted themselves into:

1. Maybe God did not call them to risk being martyrs in the child killing arena. If not, though they might lead Rescue groups for a season they will not be able to lead long term, they were raised up like King Saul to create a platform for others to carry the torch.
2. There is no shame in working to support others whom God has raised up to lay down their lives for the children, even if at first you thought that you were going to personally pay any price to Rescue. Such a person is not eating their words, they are simply finding their place in this ministry.

3) God may not have called you to lay down your life for the children daily. But this does not mean he has not called you to lay down your life somewhere daily. You may have been released from an obligation to Rescue at an abortion clinic, but you have not been released from your obligation to continue to Rescue in God's kingdom. We do not have the luxury of choosing between a Rescue at an abortion clinic and living in accord with the god of the American Way. Too many people have followed the fact, "I am not called to Rescue at an abortion clinic." to a false conclusion, "I can live the good life." The army of the Lord is in the field. You may be able to choose which city you will attack, or which part of the army you are in, but you cannot leave the battle to eat grapes with David and Bathsheba in Jerusalem.

Conclusion

The Cross Before Me, the World Behind Me

The Body of Christ "Let goods and kindred go. This mortal life also. The body they may kill, God's truth abideth still. His Kingdom is forever." The day will come when the reality of aborted children burns so deeply into the heart of the Church that tens of thousands will pour out daily into the streets to bring it to an end, and provide real alternatives in every Church and every home. And this will be one of the signs that the revival everyone likes to talk about and pray for is upon us. But until then, what will bridge the gap, move hearts, and make that outpouring possible? We need to take the next step. We need a bridge. But what could it be?

What is needed for the people led to slaughter in the womb, is for Christians to take a step as far beyond Operation Rescue, as Operation Rescue was a step beyond the traditional pro-life movement. As Operation Rescue forced the pro-life world to take another step closer to living Christianity we must take yet another step toward living faith. Only as someone takes this step, will there be a way for all other parts of the body to coordinate their efforts to bring the holocaust to an end. Revival - every part of the body of Christ working together to stand for righteousness regardless of the cost, in every arena - will be the first step. Then massive conversion to a faith which really does mean more than personal peace and prosperity will be the second step.

Standing against abortion is not the keystone to revival because we think our activist agenda is most important. It is the key, because if we will not stand against those next door who rip arms and legs off of little children, God will not give us the strength to stand anywhere, but will harden our hearts to further fit us for destruction. There will be no secular solutions to abortion. This is because abortion is itself the best secular solution to the problem of unwanted pregnancy. It is a solution which makes the whole secular structure of values possible.

To remove abortion, you leave the secular world with no way to implement its new faith in man. Legalized abortion, like secular humanism - men made God - is profoundly religious. It will only be replaced by a religion of equal or greater profundity and power - the cross is our only answer. It remains to be seen which religion American Christianity represents.

Therefore, the only solution to abortion, or any other evil which destroys the very fabric of any possible civilization, is to live according to the tenets of the faith once for all revealed, and do so regardless of personal consequences - regardless of the law. For everyone to do so? Yes. But not everyone will. Do we just excommunicate them (before they can excommunicate us)? No. We raise up in the body of Christ the part that will pay the price, and the rest of the body through backing up its member has a tool which can do the job, and an example which in time it can follow. The missionary to the pre-born is as useless cut off from the body, as a hand severed at the wrist. And without that hand, the body has nothing with which to reach through the iron curtain to take hold of the jugular of the child killing industry.

Missionaries to the Pre-born What if we recast the whole abortion question and ask, "Where is the largest group of people in America who will never be reached by the Gospel?" We would have to answer, "In the wombs of mothers on their way to the abortion clinic." For the Church, the next question must be, "Are they not worthy to have missionaries sent to them? Not their mothers, not their congressmen, or aborting doctors, but to the children themselves - are they not worthy?

How can the 4,500 unreached people who are scheduled for murder today be reached by the Gospel? The same way the Church reaches all unreached people - by sending missionaries into the harvest. The unique call of the Church is to minister the Gospel reaching everyone for whom Christ died, regardless of the cost, or where they live. There are 400 different mission groups in America and yet none of them have chosen to reach this group of people with the Gospel. Each day 4,500 of their number are slaughtered, with no chance to hear and see what the Gospel means in the lives of God's people. These are the children whose mothers reject crisis pregnancy centers, walk past the picketers, are unmoved by sidewalk counseling, and are brought into abortion death chambers - these are the children God calls us to reach out to and protect at any cost to ourselves.

There is no way to reach these needy children without crossing to the other side of the iron curtain of American law which has descended protectively around the abortion industry. The Church's mission to the pre-born reaches through that curtain to rescue those children from certain death. The Church has long supported ministries and missions which reach behind the various iron curtains in our world. In these other iron curtain ministries, we do not limit our outreach to word only otherwise radio ministries would fulfill God's commission. Instead, we send people where it is illegal for them to go, with a message it is illegal to preach, and activities which are illegal to do - ministries such as Eastern European Missions, and Operation Mobilization.

Today in America it is illegal to protect unborn people. When it is illegal to save a child from murder, it is illegal to be a Christian. The weapons of our warfare are no different from the weapons of warfare in any ministry which governments have made illegal - the willingness of the missionary to put himself in the line of fire intended for those he is ministering to, joining them regardless of the cost to Himself. The weapon and power source of all spiritual warfare is the cross: Physically intervene, in a way which is harmless, in a way that brings suffering to yourself rather than the intended victims, or their persecutors. In our case, that person is the helpless child and the cost of standing with him to protect him is beatings by police and pro-abortion thugs, mock trials, imprisonment, and law suits which make it impossible to own any property.

What is a Missionary? Someone who believes that God is calling Him to lay down his life to reach people for whom Christ died. Missionaries are committed: to represent the Church; to a particular field; to people who would not normally hear the Gospel; for their whole life.

Then, what is a Missionary to the Pre-born? Everything any other missionary is, only his field of work requires a unique commitment: to rescue the children in a particular area; whenever he is free of jail; until he is free to Rescue every day; until they finally stop the killing.

This is what more and more Christians are moving toward as the movement redefines the issue in Biblical terms. These children in the womb are people in need of the Gospel. If they are unsaved at the time of the abortion, then they go directly to hell. If they are saved, then their abortion sends them directly to heaven. In either case, the Gospel, to be effective for them, must begin where God began with us - with protecting their lives. For those bound to hell, rescuing them gives them the possibility of hearing the Gospel, in addition to seeing it acted out in the Rescue itself. For the aborted who are bound for heaven, they are the brethren of our Lord, and to reject protecting them is the same as rejecting our Lord Himself according to Matthew 25 - which can call into question our own salvation according to verse 46.

We are finally leaving behind the controversy of Rescue as a strategy - a means of highlighting a social evil by periodically demonstrating our abhorrence of it and the illegitimacy of the laws which protect it. Instead, the Church is raising up those who will express the deepest elements of our faith in simple obedience and stand on them. We will, as a corporate body of Christ, do for the children a small bit of what our Lord did for us, and bear their rejection in their place. We will do this by raising up a core of people who will rescue on a daily basis, or as often as they are not held in prison.

They represent all of us. All Christians are called to bring the Gospel to the gates of hell and bear His reproach as a way of life, not a periodic demonstration of sincere intent. We cannot all do it in every arena in which the Church is called to warfare. Therefore, the rescuing missionary - whether at the abortion clinic, in the business world, raising lots of children, or overseas - becomes the representative of the Church whose dedication and effectiveness in his particular arena, is no more or less great than the dedication of those he represents.

Around them, the rest of the battle and all the other gifts take on meaning, direction, and depth.

I believe that God has given the Church everything necessary to change the world. The Pro-life movement modeled itself after political and social action, education, and soup kitchens. Operation Rescue came a step closer to the Church modeling itself after the camp meeting and the crusade. I believe it is time in the arena of child killing, to turn the Church back to its own historical and biblical roots: Gospel missions.

Released to Rescue The Christian in all of his life is released by God from sin and death in order to Rescue. Throughout the Gospels and letters, we are commanded to take up the cross in our daily lives. The cross was an act of grossly physical intervention making possible the spiritual and physical reality of redemption. The spiritual authority of the Church and of individual Christians will always have a physical dimension - and so do we when we Rescue.

For it to be possible for the cross to be presented to mankind as God's solution to evil, our Lord had to be harmless - and so we are harmless while keeping others from harm. He specifically rejected revolution and political activism as lasting solutions, and instead took all violence to himself in place of His people, because He would settle for nothing less than the heart changing transformation of the world - "ministry", and "leadership", mean imitating our Lord's self-denial if we would play our small part in winning the world.

Finally, the cross is the supreme expression of the incarnation, where God emptied himself and became flesh, ultimately suffering for us outside the camp becoming sin in our place, and calling us to join Him there. The call of salvation is this call to join Him there outside the camp. Philippians 2 makes this the pattern of the Christian Life - we have the mind of Christ and put the business of others (including that of the people in the womb) above our own.

We will not all Rescue in the same arena - but we are all called to find how the cross applies to the arena God has called us to Rescue in, and lay down our lives for others there. In the arena of legalized child murder, I do not know of any other approach which incorporates these three aspects of the cross: physical intervention, harmlessness, and emptying oneself to the status of another and taking on his weaknesses and punishment in the act of protecting him. In an abortion Rescue, Christians gather at an abortion/death camp, they prevent the murder by blocking the doors or being locked into the actual killing chambers. While they are there, no one can be killed. They do not hurt or attack. And when the time comes for punishment, they receive it in place of the children whose lives were spared that day.

But if they are to continue to rescue children in a particular city or state, sooner or later they must be able to overcome whatever punishment the courts - by permission of the local churches - deal out, and then return to rescue again. These fines and long jail sentences are nothing more than the world's re-education program for Christians who dare to return to Rescue. The missionary will overcome them by making his release from jail a release to rescue again. The courts want to know what it takes to re-educate us - to make us learn that we cannot protect children here. What is our price?

This problem is not unique to abortion Rescue, it is the problem of every mission field of the Church: Satan wants the price so high that no one will dedicate his life in any arena. Because not everyone will go, sending missionaries is how the Church pushes beyond this impasse. For the analogy of the body to work, someone must go and the rest of us stand behind him. Regardless of the obstacles faced by the missionary in any field, when he overcomes them, he overcomes them to continue his work of Rescue, not to retire and enjoy the good life. God's people are always released from their trials to Rescue.

If we can apply this to Rescue at the abortion clinics, the full time missionary to the pre-born reaches the children in the name of God's people. By supporting him we join him as we can, no longer burdened by a load of rhetoric we cannot bear. We prepare for the day when every heart shall burn to end this murder in our midst. There has been an ongoing debate within Rescue circles about the best way to rescue. This debate has revolved around how much we should cooperate, or refuse to cooperate, with the legal system.

The purest form of this is the Category Zero rescues developed in Knoxville, Austin, and Dobbs Ferry. But the Missionary principle of being released to rescue cuts through the gordian knot of how to do the "perfect" rescue. The missionary encourages each person to focus on the heart of where we stand in solidarity with the pre-born person: at the door of the death camp keeping his killer away.

Regardless, then, of how one deals with the system - whether after blocking the door he walks away, gets arrested, he pays a fine, takes probation, or goes limp for three years - when he is released, the only question will be, "Has he been re-educated by this legal system in this town to let them kill children? Or will he return to those death camps as soon as it is possible for him to do so, to resume his part in the ministry to the Pre-born?" For the full-time missionary to the pre-born, the return will be very quickly after his release.

For the short-term missionary he may return only as often as his primary calling in the body of Christ permits him. But no longer will we use one part of the Gospel, ministry to justify why another part of that same ministry is off limits to us.

This same principle of consistency over technique applies to those who support the missionary. If someone's part in ending child killing is to amplify the missionary's work by calling courts daily, prayer, and financial support, then they will do that with a zeal, purpose, and faithfulness against all odds, which matches the missionary's. Finally, for those primarily involved in non-rescue Pro-life ministry, or any other sort of ministry in the body of Christ, this same sacrificial call to faithfulness in their arena, and those who primarily support them in that arena, will lead them to do all they can to maintain the Church's uncompromising hostility to the world.

The Cross and the Rescuer The issues of this book must be summarized. Yet the very problem of summarizing is the problem the book was written to resolve: How can we describe the issues faced by all pro-life Christians if the very description offends them? How can we call for a solution if we are found ourselves to fall short? Our problem is very much like trying to explain to your wife - or husband - that you are only unfaithful once a year. "But honey, you are far more important than this other person. I love you the whole rest of the time." Imagine rebuking someone for seeing their prostitute monthly and encouraging them to be pure like you and only visit her once a year?

This is the precarious situation which first the pro-life movement found itself in, and then the Rescue Movement inherited. No wonder they thought we were judgmental back in 1988, and still do today. Our own words found us as guilty as the non-rescuer. Many, when they realized this, quit Rescue altogether. Others just lived with the tension and did the best they could. Others became irrationally bitter, knowing they would have the courage to be consistent with their rhetoric if they could only get enough others to be consistent with them.

Still others sought to do the impossible, to tone down Rescue rhetoric so as to be less offensive. But Rescue rhetoric is nothing less than calling people to take their Pro-life and Christian rhetoric seriously - how could it be toned down? The problem was, as radical as the solution of sitting-in at abortion clinics might sound, we were not even close to as radical as our own words demanded we be. Listen to those words: Rhetoric: "If you call abortion murder, then act like it." Proposed solution: "Even though they murder every day, you only need to `act like it' with a sit-in three to twelve times a year."

A center is needed to hold the whole together and give meaning to it. Who will take that step? The Church is taking that step. But first the inherent weakness in the logic of the Rescue Movement had to work itself out. Accordingly, we have begun to stagger on an inadequate definition of what Rescue is in the first place. Because we preached sacrifice as a way of life - Rescue - but only proposed periodic "sacrifices" - rescue - other Christians believed that we were using the cross to beat the "dead church" over the head with. When the call of the cross penetrated our rescue mania, we were dismayed. We realized that we would have to either get on it, or set it down. The cross is not bludgeon for one hypocrite to swing at another.

Each of us has only one question: "Will I get on that cross or not?" If we answer, "Yes." then it is only a question of which arena we are called to die in. It does no good to criticize others for what they do or fail to do. The question for our Lord in Gethsemane was not, "Will Peter go to the cross with you?" But, "Will you go to the cross for Peter even though he sleeps through your dark night of the soul, flees from you, and denies you?" As Rescue Missionaries take up the full time challenge, and work in the dark leaving organization to others, a wholeness can be restored to the movement. And each can do his part with no sense of shame that we are leaving something undone - the body will become an apt analogy again. As the Lord restored Peter after his denial when he had quit because his life did not match his rhetoric, our Lord comes to each of us who have failed, to restore us.

Around the country, groups are springing up committed to this ideal of rescuing whenever the killing factories are open. These groups will not become instruments of condemnation for the periodic Operation Rescue. Rather they will become a mutual affirmation, of the periodic mass rescue, as the mass rescue becomes an affirmation of their daily sacrifice. This is so important to understand. If Rescue missionaries become obsessed with their own sense of sacrificial importance, they will accomplish nothing.

And if part time and non-rescuers continue to apply solutions which fall short of what their rhetoric demands and yet talk as if the body of Christ is doing all it can, then we will have child killing with us until God removes our lampstand in disgust. Full time Rescuers will only strengthen every other part of the Rescue Movement, Pro-life movement and Church whrn they are united with each other each playing their part in enabling the other to do its part.

The missionaries will fill up what is lacking by providing that core of the Church around which the rest can rally, not in order to condemn but to give their work meaning. The "rest" of the Church represents that overwhelming flood of compassionate intolerance which is rising to destroy child killing and restore the very foundations of Western civilization. Without this flood of light we are all only candles on a glacier.

In those cities where the legal system follows each rescue with months or weeks of jail, these witnesses, these Missionaries to the Pre-born, become the opportunity of every Christian to hold the entire legal system accountable for the murder it protects. In so doing, they will free the missionary to Rescue more often, and finally, every day the doctor is killing, until there is no more killing.

As God moves in the heart of His church, daily phone calls will begin to pour into the courts demanding, "Let my people go that they might serve me!" Courts will be astounded that Christians do not support them. They will argue that if they let these missionaries go they will only go "break the law again!" To which the thousands of Christians will answer, "No. They are not breaking the law, they are protecting children. Free them to continue protecting them." The message of the Church is not, "Free us so that we can go back to living in pursuit of the American Dream." But, "Free us to go back to the death camps until they are gone. This city, this nation, is too small for Christians and child killers to live in the same place."

The next day, week, month, year, decade, will find the same Christians there at the death camp, there in jail, there in court, there on the phones. They will not be going from city to city, but will be eyeball to eyeball with every part of our legal system which keeps them from protecting children. And because a few are unflinchingly eyeball to eyeball, they bring the rest of the church within striking range. There will be no talk of "soft targets" vs "hard targets." All baby killers will be seen as God's target, and we will take them out by laying down our lives for them. We will stop running to the roar, or from the roar. Every child killer in time will have hoards of Christians dogging every step, and blocking every step which takes him closer to a killing center.

As missionaries take an attitude toward abortion which forces it to become a "me or you" issue, the rest of those against abortion will reflect that same implacable determination to rid the land - not fight abortion, but to rid the land of it. These missionaries will become the cutting edge of the Church's historic intolerance to the murder of the innocent. They will represent the Church as they give the world the four historic options the Church of Jesus Christ has always offered a hostile world: 1) put us in jail forever; 2) kill us; 3) leave us alone to live like Christ; 4) flee your perversion, be converted, and join us. Will the Church turn because we have finally converted it to activism? No. Rather we have finally found a biblical vehicle to express the unity of the Body of Christ and His crucified love in its intolerance on behalf of His little ones.

Four Conclusions

1. No solution to abortion that is not distinctly Christian will be a lasting solution. This is because abortion itself is one of the costliest solutions to any problem imaginable, in essence, we murder the innocent witness to our sin, or the child who would cost too much to love and care for. Any solution which actually successfully replaces the solution of abortion must of necessity be equally costly. Only the cross evidenced in the lives of God's people will provide such a solution. All solutions await revival.

2) Operation Rescue as a concept and as a movement was headed in the right direction, but still held too many presuppositions of the world - presuppositions held by most Christians themselves I would hasten to add - and lacked foundation in people willing to pay the price of their convictions. The major worldly presupposition was that a crusade would accomplish God's will. Therefore it was child's play for Satan turn the energy of protecting children into political or social activism - to trade a Rescue Crusade for a political illusion. Satan continues to offer God's people the kingdoms of this world.

God's counter offer is a cross and His Kingdom founded in heart-felt loving obedience at any cost. Only out of the standards of righteousness and sacrifice of the cross, can politics become Christian, redemptive, and fruitful. All too easily the world proved that we were not willing to sacrifice to save a life.

If they can prove this, then they are correct to suspect that our political solutions will be little more than forcing others through law to carry burdens we do not lift a little finger to carry ourselves: we ask the young mother to sacrifice for us either her child through abortion, or her life by bearing the unwanted child. The cross has a more perfect way - love laying down its life for another whether at the abortion clinic or opening up your own home.

1. The nature of legalized abortion in America is such that it presents the Church with a fresh version of a very old problem - today it has been made illegal to act like Christ. When it is illegal to physically protect another human being from murder, it is illegal to act like Christ. Will we act like the world and protect child murder, or will we act like Christ and protect children? I do not believe that we will see an end to child killing until enough people do for the children what Christ did for us - make it a personal matter of life or death to protect.

We are gathering those people together, one missionary, one supporter, at a time, who can say to the child killer: "It's you or us, from now 'til the day either you quit killing or we die. We want to live at least as consistently with our beliefs as the abortionist does, and commit at least as much of our lives to standing with the people in the womb as he commits to standing against them." Through its representatives, the churches will be able to say to Satan at his clinics in their cities what the Gospel says to Satan in the world, "This place is too small for killers and Christians to live in the same place."

4) There will be no lasting solution at law, or in alternatives and education, until enough people treat the pre-born as their human equals. When we begin to treat them as true equals to ourselves we will find that there is a tremendous price to be paid. Only by paying that price, will we purchase the necessary respect for the pre-born to have their inalienable right to life respected by the rest of the world. In so doing, we will begin to realize how much value our Father puts on His image bearers - enough to cause Him to take up a cross and call us to the same level of sacrifice with Him outside the gate. When we join Him, "being made conformable to His death," then true change - from the heart - of men and societies can take place, that is to say, we will, "know the power of His resurrection."

These missionaries will not replace Operation Rescue any more than Operation Rescue could replace the Pro-life movement, or the Pro-life movement could replace the Church. They are each an expression and focusing of God's command to become intolerant of evil by loving and serving God only, and loving our neighbor as ourself. In short, to let the Church be the Church.

In the next several years, you will see Christians converging on one city, not to battle that city, not to make a great media splash, but to become a part of the churches there, and in the name of the Lord of the Church, make child killing impossible by their presence, unthinkable by their teaching and personal example, and finally illegal by default. From that example, the Church in each city around the country will take courage, because God will begin to move in His people. And the reality of abortion in all of its intolerable horror will spread. God's people will reclaim their heritage.

We will show, city by city that the time has come for the child killers to leave town and kill somewhere else. This will not be the heroic effort of a few isolated fanatics, but will represent a focus of effort from the entire Church as each part of the body coordinates its work around the center of missionaries who refuse to stop protecting children regardless of the cost - refusing to stop even to organize others. Be prepared to take your place when this window opens.