Have You Not Read S3:E22 - Interview with John Michener (Part 1)

Welcome to Have You Not Read, a podcast seeking to answer questions from the text of scripture for the honor of Christ and the edification of the saints. Before we dig into our topic, we humbly ask you to rate, review, and share the podcast.

Thank you.

I'm Dylan Hamilton, and with me are.

Michael Durham.

John Mishner.

Chris Kiesler.

And we'll have Michael start us off today with introducing our guest.

The Abolition of Abortion as a Christian Duty

All right, we've got John Mishner with us. We are very privileged to have you. Brother, we are glad to be speaking with you about the critical issue, I think, of our time, the abolition of abortion, not only in our city, in our community, in our state, in our nation, and the whole world.

We wanna see this great crime, this great sin, this great heinous act before the face of God to be put down and to be taken away. As much as we can, we've gotta be on guard and fighting against it. John, you've been in the fight for a long time, and I have been personally encouraged by your ministry, some of the things that you've done in partnership with us, and you have been somebody who's informed us of the key critical issues, helping us to be more involved.

So, John, how did you get involved? I mean, what did God do in your life, and what were the influences in your life that got you started on this track?

Interesting question. The first time someone really posed this question to me was probably seven, eight years ago, and it took me by surprise, because I hadn't ever formulated an answer to that. You know, you see a young person, and you always say, eh, what grade are you in?

What's your favorite class? You know, there's these standard questions, but no one had come along beside me in 10 years and said, what's your story? How did you go down this path? And that was the first time I started thinking about it, and then I realized it's the butterfly effect.

This led to this, led to this, led to this, and so it's always a question of where do you start the story? So there I was, fresh out of the womb, and one thing led to another, and here I am today. So it's always a struggle to figure out where to start the story, but before I start the story, I just want to mention a couple of things about Sunnyside and the ministry here.

First thing I would mention is this studio is great. I'm sitting in here with one, two, three, four, like a half a dozen men, all of whom have nice beards. We have coffee on the table. This is a very manly place to be, and I feel so at home here, so thanks for having me.

Also speaking of Sunnyside, big shout out to my dear friends Starley Bullard and Andrew Hudson. If you guys are listening, love you guys very much, and thank you for the years of wisdom and support that you've shared with me.

Okay, so back to how the heck did I get started on all this? There's a couple of things, right? God is always, as they say, drawing, calling, leading, pushing, shoving, opening windows and doors, airing out the dirty laundry.

God's at work in his spirit, and it is for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear, and I don't know if it's because of the way I'm wired or God made me or what, but I've always been the kind of person that when something new comes into my life, I go, what's this all about?

And if I find out that something is true beyond reasonable doubt, I then ask, well, if that's true, how do I change my life and my work to conform with this new thing that I've just learned? Is there anything that I've been doing or thinking that is opposed to what the truth is?

And I guess that's been a blessing in my life, but it's also a curse. It's a flip side of the same coin because other people like to follow the path of least resistance, and I tend to follow the path of truth, and truth goes usually like uphill and over rocks and into people's faces, and they get mad, and what are you gonna do?

Well, I just keep trying to live according to the truth. Now, I was born into what I like to call a Christian snow globe. Everything was perfect. I had Christian parents. I had a loving father. Both of them stayed married for all of my life, and everything was so cool and so great growing up, I didn't really know any sinners.

We had one token sinner in our church, like the alcoholic, right? So he was always the object lesson from the pulpit, and we were all glad we weren't him, and we loved him, and he was our brother. I hope you can hear out there on the microphone the tongue in my cheek, right?

But you have to reach a certain level of maturity and get out and have some experiences to get that mirror up in front of you to realize, oh my gosh, there but for the grace of God go I. And actually, we are all sinners.

So of course, I eventually grew up and ran face into sin and had to make the faith real for myself and all of that. So part of what God was doing working in me was temperament, right? When something is true, I have to change my life, and so if I'm faced with an abortion genocide, that's something we have to do something about.

These are innocent human beings being killed. So that always was playing in the back of my psyche and in my subconscious, but still, just because we know something intellectually, like, oh, I'm a sinner, it doesn't mean that it's bearing down on us with the force that makes us have to go do something radical in our lives.

So besides my own temperament, I think God had to bring other experiences into my life to wake me up and say, it's time for you to do more. Also, while I'm talking about my temperament, I was very dissatisfied for many years with the work that I was doing.

I can't handle just staring at a computer and crunching numbers in an Excel spreadsheet, right? I needed something that felt more meaningful in my life, and I could intellectually create meaning in what I was doing.

If you're a mortgage officer or something like that, you can say, hey, I'm helping people have a home for their children. They're providing comfort and support and protection for their family by doing this, but still, it was too far removed emotionally for me to keep doing that and not go mad.

So I was looking to actually figure out what can I do with my life that's more meaningful? And all the relatives used to always say, yeah, John, when you grow up, you're going to be a preacher or a lawyer or something like that.

I didn't know what they were talking about, but what they were talking about were my God-given skills, right? So I have a temperament that wants to do something meaningful, do something more. I'm not afraid of being radical because I care about the truth more than I care about being comfortable.

And it turns out I'm really good at making arguments. I'm really good at logical syllogisms and things like that. So I went on living my life for like 30 years, and then all of a sudden, it was time to pull my head out and grow up and do something with these God-given skills.

Reclaiming Oklahoma for Christ and the Abortion Fight

So some things started to happen, right? I ran into Paul Blair. He's this

That's good. He didn't run into you because that would be

Yeah, he'll tell us why. That's good.

A former Chicago Bear, and he's a big man. He looks like it.

He's the size of a bear.

Yeah, yeah, he is. So I'm glad you ran into him and he did not run into you.

Well, actually he did run into me because, well, here's what happened. He had started this little organization called Reclaiming Oklahoma for Christ. And he was looking at the ministry of Dr. D. James Kennedy, which was called Reclaiming America for Christ.

And it was about getting Christians out of the pew and involved in the political arena and making a difference in government and politics. That was the idea. And Paul went, that's a great idea. And we need to do that in Oklahoma.

So he was doing that in Oklahoma and he was looking for a place to have conferences and things like that. And at the time I was on staff at Oklahoma Christian University in North Oklahoma City. And that campus is located right between I -235 and I -35.

And it is like the crossroads for anyone in the metro area. And I was able to pull some strings and allow them to use our giant auditorium there. So they had great parking, had a great place, and I was the facilitator.

Well, so Paul brings all these great nationally known speakers to town and they're talking about everything from homosexuality and abortion and all the liberal agenda and right versus left. And we got to get out of our seats and get involved in politics.

Because if you're not involved in politics, it leaves a vacuum that Satan just fills up with all kinds of credit people. And now they're ruling over you and everybody's weeping. What does the scripture say?

When the wicked are in power, we just mourn.

Like the wicked don't have to be in power if we'd all get involved.

Right.

Well, anyway, so I'm sitting there helping Paul with this conference. And then of course, a few years later, Dr. Kennedy dies and he, Paul Blair, gets to take over reclaiming America for Christ. But that's another story for another day.

In the meantime, though, I'm sitting there and I'm watching this guy on stage here in this conference talk about abortion. And he's comparing it to the historical civil rights movement of the 1960s. And at that time, you had Dr. Martin Luther King and others were involved in trying to create tension and stress in the American population over civil rights.

And they did that by getting just a little bit radical. They were trying to push that Overton window. Like you're used to people complaining about something this way. Well, we're going to kick it up one step further.

We're going to do sit-ins. We're going to do marches. We're going to show people what racism looks like. We're going to make them seriously uncomfortable with it. And so this presentation was saying, we need to do the same thing with abortion.

We have to get in your face. We have to show people what abortion is and make them highly uncomfortable with it. And I'm going, yeah, I've been saying I'm pro-life all my life and so have hundreds of millions of Christians for decades have been saying I'm pro-life and abortion is wrong and we should stop it.

But does that stop it? No, calling yourself pro-life, saying you're against it, you know, and waving a balloon or would go into life chain or doing 40 days for life, just doing your little symbolic things once a year hasn't changed anything.

And I'm going, we got to get radical. And here I am, you know, if this is true, what am I going to do? I got to do something different. So I immediately started, you know, praying and looking for like, what is the thing?

What is the thing I'm going to do? And I ran into these folks at Justice for All and they were building these 18 foot tall exhibits showing the graphic victims of abortion on college campuses. And it was really in your face.

And I went, that's for me. Well, I didn't, I didn't say that's for me. I went, that's interesting. And I tried to ignore it.

Sure.

But then again, I guess, Holy Spirit, I had a really good friend that I hadn't seen in a long time out in Arizona and I wanted to go visit him. And it happened to coincide with when they were going to be at the University of Arizona.

So I got to go see my friend and I went, oh, by the way, there's these radicals over here trying to make a big stink about abortion on this campus. It's got like 70 ,000 students on it. Like it's its own freaking state of young skulls full of mush.

Like we should go see this. So I get out there at eight o 'clock in the morning. They've already raised the exhibit. They put it up at like 6 a .m. So no student's gonna miss it. And I'm out there just walking around.

And I'm telling you in about an hour, hour and a half, I had talked to a dozen students just by standing by these pictures. I'm like, hey, what do you think about abortion? And it's like every student I talked to had some sort of personal experience with abortion.

Amazing.

I paid for one, you know, my girlfriend had one. I asked her to have one. No, I had one. Or yeah, my friend's thinking about it. It's like, I didn't talk to a single student that didn't have personal experience with abortion.

Back to the mall.

And again, I just finished, I've been living in this snow globe. I didn't know any sinners. And now I'm surrounded by all these people who have been involved in murdering innocent human beings.

I was crushed.

I mean, I'm crying my eyes out. I'm sitting under a palm tree in the middle of winter with a t-shirt on.

Arizona's great, by the way.

But I'm just crying for like 30 minutes. I'm like, God, I don't know what you're trying to show me. What is this all about? But it wasn't, you know, a couple of years later, somebody came to me and said, you know, there's all these people working full-time in the abortion industry.

Nurses, doctors, Planned Parenthood, marketing campaigns. Everyone's involved in this massive industry to the tune of billions of dollars. Who's working full-time to stop it?

And I went, dang.

That just hit me, you know, right in the chest. And I thought if there was a way I could do this full-time,.

I would do it.

And then God just opened the door, just paved the way. And that just happened. It happened. You know, at the same time, my wife was encouraging me to get out from behind the computer and do something meaningful with my life.

If it hadn't been for her, I mean, I think every one of us in this room could attest to the fact that the working of the spirit is primarily through our wives, right? I mean, that's what happened.

It's not good for the man to be alone.

All right.

He who finds a wife finds a good thing and obtains favor from the Lord indeed.

But more than that, she was willing to step in and put our money where her mouth was. I mean, she was like, I'll go back to work so that you can do this. Whatever it takes, you've got to do something higher.

You have a higher calling. We're going to find a way to do it. So I mean, okay, forget waiting till the end of the session. Thanksgiving, my wife lighting that fire under me and not just encouraging, but enabling it to happen.

That was huge. That was huge. So I started traveling with that exhibit and it's just day after day, it's raise the exhibit and then do personal evangelism all day talking to students. You start with abortion, that leads to the value of human life and the author of life and why we care.

And then you share the gospel. And it was an incredible time of ministry year after year after year.

Why Graphic Abortion Exhibits and Campus Confrontation Work

That's amazing. It's interesting to hear how it was that the exhibit that captured your attention became what you began to travel with and to participate in. And the fact that you talked to a dozen young folks right out of the box, that all of them are impacted by this issue.

It's not something that people want the light to be shined upon. It's not something that people want to be brought out into the open. Because when it is, as you have pointed out, lots of people get real uncomfortable real fast.

But we know that sin thrives in the darkness and that's why we need to have it brought out into the light. So y 'all have any questions about his origin story here?

You mentioned Arizona, was it Tempe, ASU or was it somewhere else?

The first time I was really in this deep and that I had this really emotional, spirit-filled experience was down south at the University of Arizona. Arizona State is up in Tempe. University of Arizona is down in Tucson.

They're both massive. I mean, it's hard to wrap your head around. Arizona State is receiving students from all over California who went to get away from their parents. And it's receiving students from all up and down the Eastern Seaboard who are fleeing the nasty weather and their parents.

And so it is a liberal Mecca of like 80 to 90 ,000 students. And then God knows how many tens of thousands of support staff. And they're all just completely full of mush.

Yeah, and I mean, they're pretty famous for their discipleship in unbelief, aren't they?

Yeah.

Yeah, they have like Dawkins's, like one of Dawkins's friends that is a professor there. Like one of his textbooks is like an intro to philosophy book all the way across most public universities in the land.

Yeah, so a year later, I was volunteering again and I was at Arizona State. So I was talking to students two days in a row from seven in the morning until 6 p .m. So I'm having dozens upon dozens of conversations.

And what I learned that day is that they teach pro-abortion apologetics in dozens of courses every semester. Now you would expect them to teach something like that in say, oh, feminist studies or in the medical classes or whatever, but they're teaching it in biology.

They're teaching it in math and computer science. They're teaching it in philosophy. They're teaching it in history. In just random classes, you're like, why are they teaching pro-choice arguments in these classes?

Well, it's because of all the professors there and they have this agenda. And it doesn't matter to them what they're there to teach. They teach whatever the heck they want to. And when you show up on campus trying to defend the pre-born, every professor goes into full on, okay, I've got to disciple my disciples to get out there and crush this.

Because you're not on any neutral ground.

No.

There is no neutral ground. If you were at a Christian university, a Bible college or something like that, they're going to be talking about the gospel. They're gonna be talking about the body and blood of Jesus Christ in all sorts of classes that wouldn't necessarily have anything to do with the gospel.

Well, it's not surprising to find at these institutions which are religious, that they're talking about their sacrament.

Exactly right.

So. Exactly right.

And I would say that child sacrifice and the practice of homosexuality are the twin pillars of idolatry. That's how we practice idolatry historically. And it's the same today.

It's true.

If you look in the stories of the Kings, when both Israel and Judah left their moral underpinnings and were worshiping all the strange idols, it specifically says there in scripture that they were doing detestable sex acts to the gods as well as sacrificing their children.

So those are the two things. And we dress it up and try and pretend like it's something different today, but it's no different than it's ever been.

Right, idolatry is always accompanied by injustice and immorality. In the Old Testament, the three I's, the root of it, of course, is idolatry. But the manifestations that there's idolatry is that you see massive injustice and massive immorality.

And you know that the root of idolatry is there. And that's why it was so important to take down the high places.

How to Train Christians for Pro-Life Campus Ministry

So we're talking about your background. You seem to thrive in these situations where you enter campuses and you get to engage with these people who have engaged in this practice. What specific skills, for anyone out there listening who may be dissatisfied with work, with just crunching numbers, once meaning out of what they're doing, what specific skills that you had were the things that were directly applicable in these scenarios that you find yourself in?

Well, I'd say a couple of things about this. Don't just quit your job and say, I'm gonna go become a full-time pro-life minister or abolitionist. Okay, because I've been doing this for going on 20 years now.

And I've met many people who had that idea. Like they come out for one event and they're like, this is amazing. And so they're on an emotional mountaintop high for that day. And it's like a hit, you know, an addict gets a hit.

Well, Christians get hits too off of these spiritual experiences and they think they're gonna be able to create this day in and day out. And they're like, oh, I'm gonna quit my job and I'm gonna be a full-time minister.

Oh my gosh, do not make this decision till after you've read my book. But it's not for everybody, right? Having said that though, there is something that everyone can be doing. Like whatever your skills are, there's always something you can do.

And what I like to do is come along beside people and just start with the basics, right? Let's just start with apologetics. Can you defend your pre-born neighbor intellectually? First of all, can you be a good listener?

Can you start an evangelistic conversation? Can you get from abortion to the gospel? Can you get from the gospel back to abortion? And can you just navigate basic conversations? And if that's something that scares you, well, let me just come alongside you with an experienced mentor.

Let's do some role playing. Let me give you some talking points. Let's practice it together. Now, why don't we go out to the local campus together, maybe do some surveys and see if you can actually do it for reals.

Okay, great.

You could do it.

I proved to you that you can speak up for your pre-born neighbor. What's next? Now you're going to go home and you're going to talk to your brother and sister and your aunt and your uncle and your nieces and your nephews.

And you're going to do it with the people with whom you have influence. If you pass that test, then now you might try doing it with more strangers on a more regular volunteer basis. And then in that process, you're going to discover if this is the kind of thing that can become a career path for you, right?

You know, a guy wants to play tennis, so he picks up a tennis racket. You hit the sweet spot one time and hit a great stroke. Does that mean you're going to be a great tennis player and you should do it full time?

No, you got to go practice and play the circuit first. And maybe you will, maybe you won't, but that'll be made plain to you as you're willing to go practice and try out and go up against a stiffer and stiffer competition.

I think it's the same thing.

Why Campus Debates Need Humility and Personal Conversation

Yeah, there's a lot there to think about.

Yeah, for sure.

You know, I've heard a complaint running around with some of these, this form of video that often gets attention of conservative commentators going on to college campuses talking to young folks. And these kids, as you say, their heads full of mush, make fools of themselves time and time and time again.

And I've heard a complaint about this and an argument against it. And this is going to be a little bit of a pitch down, big, fat, slow pitch down the middle for you. But the argument against this is, well, these are young people who haven't, you know, got their full education yet, and they're not able to match wits with somebody who's on a mature thinking level.

And it's not right or fair for these conservative talking heads to go in to these college campuses and embarrass these kids over and over again.

Yeah.

What would you say to that?

So I've watched these guys in action personally for years. Every time I step onto a campus, there's either one there at the same time or was just there yesterday or is coming tomorrow. You know, so I've seen them up close and personal.

One thing that's very important to do is not just paint with a broad brush because some of them are very well-intentioned and they're very nice guys. I met one at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia, and he was just out there waving his Bible around and talking about hellfire and sinning and quoting from the King James Bible.

And I mean, he was preaching up a storm. And I'm looking at my watch and I count off about 60 seconds and I watch about 75 students just walk right by him. They won't make eye contact. They're trying not to listen to him.

And it's all because of the way he's communicating himself. Now, if you listen to the words that he's using, he didn't say anything false. Everything he said was true and it had relevance and importance to these students, but they could not hear it because of the way he was communicating it.

Now, I sat down with this guy when he finally took a breath and needed a break. And I said, hey, I'd like you to look over here across the student center. And you see that little group of people over there talking?

I want you to notice that two of the people in that group of seven are missionaries who are with me and the other ones are students who are having dialogue with him. See that little group over there? There's one of our volunteers over there.

See that free speech board over there that all the students are writing on? Notice how on each side there's multiple conversations going on. Wouldn't you like to be involved in personal conversations with the students on this campus here and sharing the gospel with them?

And he's like, yeah, that'd be great if I could get them to talk to me. I said, but see, you could get them to talk to you if you were willing to consider a different strategy. So for the rest of that day and the rest of the next day, he put down his street corner method of preaching and he just joined us in randomly talking personably in a relaxed way like we're doing here over coffee and microphones about the things that are true and not true in the world.

So yeah, I've seen the videos. I love watching the videos. They're fun, they're entertaining and all that kind of stuff. But the question I always ask is, well, how many times did he have to go through this rigmarole?

How many hundreds of students did he completely offend and alienate and how many people watching what he was doing thought he was a total jerk so that he could then boil it down into the 15 to 20 hit piece wonders that he's gonna put out there for publicity to sell his books and his CDs and get people to send in money to him.

And it's his dog and pony show. And we all like the dog and pony show, but how effective are you really being?

The Right Way to Engage Students Without Manipulation

Okay, so let's drill down. Obviously the kind of gotcha videos that it's like this isn't how it goes every single time, but it looks like it is. But drilling down, what do you think about the argument that the folks who have this mindset, let's say it's about abortion, or let's say it's about any kind of conservative topic that's traditionally put in that category.

And they come into a college campus and let's say they're not necessarily being rude or anything like that, but they're engaging in conversations with these young people. And these young people, because they have not thought about their arguments carefully, they have not tested their arguments, they're not good with logic, so on and so forth, and they're just plain wrong, put it all together.

And they're just getting bested by these other people who are prepared. The argument against this is, what are you doing manipulating these people, these young people who haven't had opportunity to more fully develop their mental capacities?

Well, I think if someone wants to come along and criticize, okay, well, criticize all you want, but let's look at individual conversations and judge them on the actual conversation itself. So what we're talking about is guys who come at this as some sort of verbal pugilism, right?

It's almost like they're in debate mode. That one little pretend Jewish guy is like just wants to debate everybody and just crush them with his rhetoric and everything. But what it really comes down to is attitude.

Do you really love these people? Is this a, the tendency, I think, is to view those who don't agree with us as the enemy, to be defeated. And like every time I go out to do anything in an evangelistic vein, I'm very careful to check myself.

And as I'm praying to God, I ask him to remind me that this is not just like a fellow human being, biologically and metaphysically. No, this is a child of God, part of his creation. Now, not child as in an heir.

No, you're not an heir. You're a child that right now is in a pig pen that needs to get out of the pig pen and come home and be reconciled with your heavenly father. But there is a father in heaven who loves this pervert or lost person who's murdered a child or whatever their issue is, but he's calling them home.

And we are the hands and feet to go encourage them to get out of the pig pen and come home because the father loves them. But if your attitude is, I'm just going to go get ya and make you look stupid for wallowing around in the muck, that's the real problem.

So if we come along people and try to expose that the ideas that they have are weak and faulty and flawed, I think you can do that with a spirit of humility and respect and not a spirit of I'm going to get you and make you look stupid.

Yeah, I heard an apologist one time say, be gentle with them. You're shooting holes in their plane and you want them to land safely.

Yeah, exactly right.

It's an odd thing, but these people are believing lies. You don't want them to believe lies. You have to show them that from the scriptures, from the truth of God, you want them to crash land in a very effective way because you're caring about them.

If you shove a camera in their face and go, well, have you ever told a lie? And are you a dadgum liar? And dumb liars all go to hell. I mean, you could come alongside of and still use the Socratic method and ask questions, but not have this obnoxious attitude and language and have a spotlight on them to embarrass them.

I mean, people have come along beside me my whole life and said, John, maybe you have this all wrong. Have you ever looked at it like this before? Okay, well, if we're doing that in a private, interpersonal way in the security of I'm not judging you and I'm not gonna put you on YouTube, then it's much easier to actually consider.

Right.

It's never easy to hear, I'm wrong, I'm a bad person, et cetera. But we make it almost impossible to hear that message sometimes, I think, with our approach and our attitude.

It seems like when people think about spiritual warfare, okay, we're gonna go and we're gonna talk to these people and you talked about them being the enemy and I've gotta destroy them. But when the Bible talks about spiritual warfare, it's talking about the tearing down of strongholds and then it defines the strongholds as every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God.

And so these people have strongholds that you're actively trying to tear down while you're speaking with them.

I don't wanna tear you down.

Right. And that's their defenses.

Let's look at this idea together and see if it's sound.

Right.

Would one of the answers to this question be, since we're talking about methods or strategy is what you called it, thinking about what the opposite strategy would be of what they usually get in class.

They're already, we're walking out of classes where professors will use their bully pulpit to beat them down into submission to the opposite view. And if they get out of class and they see just another person using the same methodology from the opposite side, they just go, what's the significance here?

But if it's something different, better, if it's the correct way to approach these kids, they see and feel that.

I mean, does a kid sitting in a class getting it from the professor feel like the professor loves him? Or is he just a number and one of a hundred in the class? But then he walks out on the sidewalk and meets someone like us who says, I'd be interested in hearing what your professor said today about abortion.

And did you get a chance to challenge him or ask him questions or see if what he was presenting actually holds up to scrutiny? And you want to try on a different point of view. Hey, I didn't want to wake up this morning and say,.

I want to be lied to. I want to believe it.

I want to believe false things today. I mean, intuitively people are interested in the truth. And if you show that you care about them as well as the truth, then I think they're going to be willing to enter into a conversation with you.

Resources for Pro-Life Apologetics and Worldview Training

Well, we appreciate your backstory, how it is that you got involved and to hear the wealth of experience that you've had in engaging with students on college campuses. And I've seen you work with high school and college age students in helping them to develop these very skills that you've been talking about.