Aug. 13, 2015 Show with Chelsen Vicari on her book “Distortion: How the New Christian Left is Twisting the Gospel and Damaging the Faith” & Latayne C. Scott on “Abortion: You Never Know Whose Life is Taken Every Time”

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Introducing the Guests and the Day's Topics

Now here's our host. Well, good afternoon Cumberland Valley, Pennsylvania, and the rest of humanity living on the planet earth who are listening via live streaming. This is Chris Arnson, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron, wishing you all a happy Wednesday.

I'm August, 2015, and I am very excited about today's program. We're going to have two dynamic Christian women, each on for one hour, and they are going to be addressing some very vital topics. To start off the two-hour broadcast today, for the first hour, we have Chelson Vicari, who is our guest to discuss her new book, Distortion, How the New Christian Left is Twisting the Gospel and Damaging the Faith.

And then following our interview with Chelson, starting at 5 p .m. Eastern time, we're having my old friend Latine C. Scott. She is going to be discussing abortion and why you never know whose life is taken every time an abortion occurs.

And Latine C. Scott is no stranger to the Iron Sharpens Iron audience from years past, when we had the original Iron Sharpens Iron between 2006 and 2011. And she is a former Mormon who, by the grace of Jesus Christ, converted to Christianity, and she has been serving him very well ever since as an author and speaker and teacher.

And I'm very delighted to have Latine return to the Iron Sharpens Iron program. But let me, for the first time, introduce our guest, Chelson Vicari, and it is my honor and privilege to introduce her to the Iron Sharpens Iron program.

She serves as the Institute of Religion and Democracy's Evangelical Program Director, and as I said earlier, she has written a book, Distortion, How the New Christian Left is Twisting the Gospel and Damaging the Faith.

And according to Todd Starnes, a host on Fox News and commentary author, God Bless America, that's L-E-S-S, he says, at a time when religious liberty is increasingly coming under attack, the church needs prophetic voices like Chelson Vicari's.

And I welcome you for the very first time to Iron Sharpens Iron, Chelson Vicari.

Hello, Chris. Hello, Iron Sharpens Iron listeners. It is a pleasure to be here. I'm really excited.

About our hour-long discussion today. Yes, so am I, and I'm sure many of our listeners are as well. In fact, I have to give a shout-out to a very dear friend of mine, Pastor Ron Glass, who is the pastor of Wading River Baptist Church in eastern Suffolk County, Long Island, not very far from the Hamptons.

And Pastor Ron Glass is the one that eagerly and enthusiastically urged me to interview Chelson today and introduced me to her book that we are addressing today. And for those of you who are living in eastern Suffolk County, Long Island, or you're going to visit there, or you have friends or family or loved ones that you'd like to refer to this church because they live nearby, Wading River Baptist Church's website is wrbc .us, wrbc for wadingriverbaptistchurch .us.

And you can hear more about or learn more about Pastor Ron Glass's own radio show that he hosts called the River of Life broadcast that broadcasts out in eastern Suffolk County and worldwide over the internet.

So that's wrbc .us. But first of all, Chelson Vicari, before we even go into your book or into the organization that you are involved in there in Washington, D .C., tell us something about your own background.

Yeah, so I was born to two very young sinners who had a very tumultuous marriage early on. And they were headed for destruction. I mean, personally, their marriage. So they wandered into a local church just desperately seeking help for themselves and for their marriage.

And that's where they found Christ. I was about eight years old and so raised in an Assembly of God church ever since. And then now I attend a Baptist church actually in the D .C. area. So I just prefer to say I'm evangelical.

Generally, I'm evangelical. I've seen it all, experienced it all, tried it all.

I don't know if it's Capitol Hill Baptist Church that you are a part of, but I happen to be familiar with that one.

It's not, but you know, if I lived closer to Capitol Hill Baptist, I would definitely go there. Lots of friends that go there. But I also have been to Triumph, D .C., and also another Baptist church in Falls Church where I live, and that's the church I attend now.

Great. Well, tell us something about the Institute on Religion and Democracy. What is your responsibility as the evangelical program director?

Yeah, so it's the IRD for short, and we have a very unique role within the conservative Christian movement, which is what drew me from Concerned Women for America, where I worked for three years prior, right out of grad school, to IRD.

I was so focused on what was happening on Capitol Hill and with legislation and really wanting to advocate biblical principles there, and that's absolutely necessary. But then I learned that there was an organization that was focused on the root of the problem, which we know that sin is a major issue that is causing the issues we have at the local, state, and federal level, right?

It goes a bit back to sin. And then I learned that there are churches who are actually advocating these particular sins, are at least staying silent on sin, and that's a huge root of the problem. So what IRD does is it monitors the church, and it reports on cultural issues that affect the church, and we seek to reform those churches who capitulate to culture and who are actually staying silent on sins, or in some cases advocating for sins like abortion or same-sex marriage.

So that is what I do. So I particularly am the director of the evangelical program, so I monitor the new Christian left. So many of your listeners have probably heard of the religious left, but that's largely mainline denomination leaders who compromised Orthodox or traditional Christian teaching.

But now we have a lot of younger evangelicals or evangelical leaders, or really just mainline young leaders dressed up as evangelicals or feeding this repackaged version of Christianity to evangelicals.

So that's what I monitor. So I work very hard to empower young evangelicals not to remain silent on abortion or the harvesting of unborn baby parts or radical feminism or the deterioration of family or whatever it is, the attack on religious liberty.

I try and be a voice educating my fellow evangelicals out there on what Scripture actually says, how social science affirms that teaching, and why we actually have to have a strong social.

Witness. Well I want to, I'm sure I'll repeat it throughout the broadcast, but I want to make sure that I get it done right now. If I happen to forget, the website for the organization that Chelson is a program director for is theird .org.

So that should be simple enough for you to remember, but jot it down because I'm sure you're going to want to visit that website often. That's the Institute on Religion and Democracy. You just mentioned a term that might be foreign to some of our listeners, the new Christian left.

People very often in conservative evangelical circles or fundamentalist circles would say that that's oxymoronic, that those two words, Christian and left, are in polar opposition to one another. But if you could give a definition of what you mean by the new Christian left and how it may be different from the old mainline Christian left that started out with the higher criticism movement in Germany and so forth in the 19th century and just continued to steamroller through denominations one by one.

In the earlier part of the 20th century. Right, so in many cases the Christian left is really just a liberal movement cloaked in Christianity, one where for most cases God's supremacy can be diminished or inconsistencies in scripture are painted, or truth, and this one's the one that we deal with mostly or see mostly, is that truth is made relative.

You have listeners who may have heard of red-letter Christians, Christians who no longer look to the Old Testament or even the Pauline text. They specifically just look at literally the red text of Jesus, and those are the only scripture verses that they apply to themselves.

So when I'm talking about the Christian left, there can be two different kinds. The most common is cafeteria-style Christians on the left, and they're the ones who tend to treat scripture like the Shoney's buffet line, walking down it, picking and choosing which scripture verses to apply to their lives, which ones not to.

So they'll often apply scripture verses that don't put them at odds with popular culture today, and that's what we saw with the mainline leaders on the religious left. Or we have, on the other hand, we have the couch potatoes Christians on the left, and they're the ones who, yes, they see injustices, but they stay silent and encourage others to do so as well.

But most common, most popular, and when I'm talking about the Christian left, I'm really talking about the cafeteria-style Christians on the left, or who lean left politically. So again, they will exclude mentions of sin or hell or transformation from their sermons or lectures on Sunday School or blogs or whatever their platform is.

And you'll hear them using liberal political buzzwords like tolerance and coexist and political correctness, and they portray this very hippie-like portrait of Jesus, right? And so they don't, again, they don't focus on sin per se, or let's use same-sex marriage as an example.

Many on the Christian left advocate for same-sex marriage as a union that can be blessed by God. Instead of saying, you know, Genesis chapter 2, Jesus, the Pauline text, they actually do show that God's model for marriage is between one man and one woman.

So we're seeing, basically, boiled down for an easy definition, I usually say that the Christian left is a very liberal political ideology, draped in Christian.

Tone. Yes, that's how liberalism has always made a lot of headway in the United States from its inception. And would you include in that group of the new Christian left, even the more hardcore leftists and liberals like the so-called evangelical homosexual movement, being led predominantly in the spotlight right now by Matthew Vines and others, and the Metropolitan Church movement, where they will have a worship service that may, in many respects, appear identical to your typical evangelical worship service or charismatic worship service, but in fact they are teaching people that homosexuality, at the very least monogamous homosexuality, is acceptable to God and should not be opposed in any way, shape, or form.

Would you include that in that camp of the new Christian left? I would absolutely include.

Matthew Vines in the Christian left. Sometimes you'll hear me say evangelical left, and that is because they themselves will define themselves as evangelicals. But again, that's often done not because they are on street corners trying to evangelize and spread the gospel.

It's done largely because there is a huge audience, when you're talking about evangelicals, especially young evangelicals, that's a big audience that is very receptive to their political ideology.

Yeah, I was very shocked recently when I... I'm not going to mention the name of the university because they don't have somebody here to represent them and defend themselves, but I was shocked not long ago to see an advertisement for a very well-known university known for evangelical Christianity that was having a symposium or conference on the church's response to homosexuality, which is obviously not a bad thing in and of itself, but the way that it was being conducted, they even included a woman minister who was advocating that homosexuality in and of itself was not a sin, and I saw a video recently on YouTube promoting this woman's church, who was one of the teachers at this symposium, and one member after another was identifying themselves as gay and Christian.

But we can continue on to that specific area of our discussion a little later about the homosexual community, which is a phrase that I despise. I don't believe there is a homosexual community. That there are people involved in homosexual activities.

They're not in a community as if they're an ethnic group or nationality. But your book, Distortion, it provides an interesting look at evangelical Christianity through the eyes of a millennial, and for those of you listening who know that I'm having our eschatology week next week, I'm not referring to anything in regard to the millennium prophesied in the scriptures.

A millennial is someone, as many or most of you know, who came to adulthood around the year 2000, at the dawn of the new century, and in your introduction, you say that American grown-ups, America's grown-ups, who have the ability to influence and pray for young Christians, must not declare defeat and give up on us.

Instead, they must start understanding and confronting the false partisan teachings influencing the next generation of evangelicals and take back America's Christian culture. What are the false and partisan teachings to which you're referring?

I know you already mentioned some, but do you have any more that you'd like to address?

Yeah, well, when I wrote that, I was thinking of a lot of the, quote, grown-ups in the church, who I know you look around and you think, okay, something is wrong with the younger evangelicals in this church, or in my town, or what have you, and you think, why is their worldview so off when it comes to traditional Christian teaching that has been agreed upon over millennia?

What is going on? So I wrote Distortion, and I wrote that particular headline because, not because I'm some wonderful religion analyst, but because I actually bought into distorted Christian teaching when I was in college, and so that's why I wanted to write Distortion.

It was because I wanted to give readers or radio listeners a glimpse into the world of what does it look like to be a millennial evangelical right now, and it can be a bit tough. It's very confusing. So, well, first off, to start, I don't want to put all the blame on the Christian left itself.

So when I say, look, grown-ups, don't give up on us millennials, I mean that because I do think there are a lot of pastors and lay leaders who have given up on discipleship of younger Christians, or maybe discipleship wasn't done very well, and we focused more, and I say this humbly and respectfully, but I do think in many evangelical churches, we focused more on evangelizing at our coffee and donut time before service than we did actually tackling tough issues that young people, that adults in the church actually deal with, like abortion.

How do we deal with a post-abortive woman? How do we deal with someone struggling with same-sex attraction? What are we doing? And we ignored those issues in our Sunday school lessons and our youth group, we just didn't talk about them.

So what happened was that allowed the Christian left and their ideologies and agendas to come in and fill a void. So when we're confused about what Scripture says about same-sex marriage, and I will say that's because a lot of young Christians don't actually pick up their Bible and read what it says, then they're listening to the opinions and interpretations of the Christian left, and they're buying in and saying, well, you know, I really feel bad if I have to tell my friend who says they're gay that I believe marriage is between one man and one woman.

They're going to get offended, it's going to hurt their feelings, they're going to call me uncompassionate. The worst word in the world for a millennial to hear or be called is uncompassionate. So when the Christian left comes along and says, oh, you know that actually to be compassionate like Jesus is to affirm same-sex relationships and marriage, you buy in.

And I don't say that in a condemnation type of way. I say it because I, again, bought into it. I'll never forget when I was in college, coming back from a family vacation, Chris, and my parents were in the car, and I had been going to this new campus ministry while I was in college, and it wasn't overtly Christian left by any means, but there were particular leaders who were.

And so I had friends who were gay in this Christian ministry. I loved them very much. And because we weren't talking about sexual sin of any kind, and I'm not just talking about same-sex marriage, I'm talking about premarital sex or pornography or what have you, I just began to say or to believe those Christian writers that I was reading, oh, you know, you can be gay and you can be a Christian and there's nothing sinful about same-sex relationships.

So I was fighting and yelling at my parents and telling them they were old-fashioned and outdated and bigoted and hateful, and all those words that I had heard churned over and over again. I was studying political science, so I'd heard those terms used politically, but now I was hearing them in the Church, and so it sounded right, it made me feel enlightened and progressive, so I bought in.

And so that's what's happening with younger evangelicals, and that's what I try and expose and explore, not just, again, with the same-sex issue. I talk about the topic of Israel, I talk about the topic of religious liberty, Christian persecution, radical feminism.

There are a lot of social justice, what does the social justice movement look like and mean? And there are some things that are going wrong even within that phrasing, so I do delve into what's going on, I say, behind the hip Church appearance.

Yeah, that's a great description. I'm going to give our email address if you are a listener and you'd like to ask Chelsen a question about her book and about our topic, Distortion, How the New Christian Left is Twisting the Gospel and Damaging the Faith.

The email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com, C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com. And please give your first name, at least, and, in fact, I've got a surprise for you. If you're one of the first four listeners who send in a question that is good enough to be read on air, that is relevant to the topic, you're going to receive a free copy of Chelsen's book, Distortion, How the New Christian Left is Twisting the Gospel and Damaging the Faith.

So if you'd like to get a copy and you have a question that is relevant to the topic, and that is a good question, and it's read on air, you'll get a free copy. So include your mailing address, and I'm sorry we have to restrict this free offer to our United States listeners.

We love to hear from you in Canada and in Europe and other places overseas, South Africa and other places that we've received listener emails from, and we urge you to please continue, today even, to send in your questions, no matter where you live in the world, but we can only give the free books to the United States listeners due to a sponsor who ships them out and cannot be overwhelmed with rapidly mounting overseas shipping charges.

Youth Ministry, Cheap Grace, and the Loss of Discipleship

You know, you brought up an issue that I don't know what your personal view on this is, but there is a thing called the youth group movement that has been popular for a number of decades and very often will isolate the teenage Christians or teenage members or the children of members in the congregations into their own church atmosphere where their music is more lively and they do fun things, recreational activities, and of course I'm not against any of that, and I know that there is debate in the body of Christ about whether these youth group activities should be conducted almost as a separate entity, like a separate church, but the fact is that very often in these youth group outreaches and so on, you will have a person that is not much older than the youth that are going to these activities, and it seems when I have been exposed to some of them, and please I'm not broad-brushing, I know that there's probably many that are absolutely wonderful, when I've been exposed to some of them, it seems the main message that they are declaring is you can be cool and be a Christian.

Go out and tell your friends in high school and in your neighborhood that being a Christian is cool, you can be a Christian and go bowling and play softball and go square dancing and all these different things, and you can listen to modern music and be cool and be a Christian, and therefore, of course when I just mentioned square dancing, I just aged myself, there's probably nothing cool about square dancing, but you know what I mean, they don't have to live like they're in a monastery, which of course that is true as well, but do you see a danger in some of the way that the youth group movement is handling.

The education of our youth? You know, as far as should we have youth groups separate or not, I really don't have a dog in that particular fight. I see the benefits of both sides of the argument, I see good and bad.

I would say what bothers me more is the leadership put over the youth, right, so we don't, again, it goes back to the discipleship issue. I don't see discipleship happening in youth groups. What I see is, and what I experienced, and I will say that when I was in high school, I loved my youth group, but I'll be honest, I went because we had pizza, we had games beforehand, I got to talk to friends, I heard a very squishy sermon that was very, it made me feel good about myself, it didn't really challenge me at all, and then afterwards we had more pizza and punch and I left.

So I think that formula is becoming archaic and it's ineffective. I will say that. I do not, so I do not advocate for the pizza party, let's attract as many youth as we can to just get them here in the church, you know, like the old switch and bait, just get them here and then we'll share Jesus with them and they'll become a Christian.

I didn't, I don't see that being effective. What I do see effective are leaders who are serious about sharing the gospel with youth enough that they're willing to be consistent and take millennials or high school students under their wing and show them what it means to be a Christian, to live out the example, to talk about the hard stuff.

They go to the students, they don't lure them in with pizza, you know what I mean? So I do think our formula needs to change a bit. You mentioned, you know, there's just questionable teaching. Yeah, that's my biggest concern.

I see a lot of cheap grace when it comes to, it was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, he used that phrase, by the way, cheap grace in Sunday school. So we'll talk about God's love and grace and mercy and all that, which is wonderful, it's certainly important, but there is two sides to the coin, right?

We have God's love and mercy and grace because there is sin in the world and brokenness, and we need our lives transformed and saved by Christ. But I don't hear us talking about the negative side of the coin.

So I'm not sure that young evangelicals fully understand the totality of the gospel, what it means to die to ourself, to lay down our own desires to follow Christ, what it means to be persecuted in the name of Christ, to know that like Christ Himself said, that like me, they're going to hate you, and what it actually looks like to live in the world, but not of the world.

Or to do like what in Ephesians 4 .15 Paul says, to speak the truth in love. So I see a lot of, well, let's talk about love, let's be loving, but I don't hear much about truth. And there is a way to balance that I've had to learn myself, that I've struggled and wrestled with, and you see that towards the end of distortion, me working through this idea of speaking the truth in love, that it doesn't look like lying to my friends about their sin, because that's not showing them love.

So I think that youth groups need to focus in on the curriculums that they're using, maybe reconsider them, maybe reconsider that the strategy they're using to try and share the gospel, because they don't think the pizza parties are working.

We're going to go to a break right now. If you have a question for Chelsen Vacari, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com. Chrisarnson at gmail .com. We already have a couple of listeners who have sent in questions that we'll get to after the break.

Chrisarnson at gmail .com. Don't go away, we'll be right back with Chelsen Vacari and the discussion on her book, Distortion, How the New Christian Left is Twisting the Gospel and Damaging the Faith. Don't go away.

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And if you've just tuned us in, our guest today is Chelson Vicari. And we are discussing her book, Distortion, How the New Christian Left is Twisting the Gospel and Damaging the Faith. And before I move on with that interview, I just want to announce that Chelson's boss, Mark Tooley, who is the president of IRD, the Institute for Religion and Democracy, or the Institute on Religion and Democracy, he is going to be discussing taking back the United Methodist Church, a denomination, as most of you may know, has been overrun with liberalism.

And yet Mark Tooley and others are hanging in there in the denomination, seeking, by God's grace, to transform it. And he is going to be talking about that book, Taking Back the United Methodist Church.

That's Mark Tooley, who also for eight years worked for the CIA. And I'm not speaking about the Culinary Institute of America. I'm talking about for the Central Intelligence Agency. So it should be a fascinating interview tomorrow.

And the week after, as I was mentioning, we have Eschatology Week, actually for six days, from the 17th of August to the 24th of August. We're going to have different representatives of all of the major end times views or last days views.

Every day, there will be a different representative defending his position on eschatology. So I know that should be fascinating to many of you. And I want to welcome to Iron Sharpens Iron, our newest sponsor, Providence Baptist Church in Norfolk, Massachusetts.

Pastor Mark Lukens has been a loyal listener of Iron Sharpens Iron since back in the earlier days between 2006 and 2011. And when he learned that we were relaunched and on the air again, he rallied support from his church to provide monthly sponsorship for this program for a year.

And we want to thank those folks from the bottom of our hearts for their sponsorship. ProvidenceBaptistChurchMA .org is their website. ProvidenceBaptistChurchMA, for Massachusetts, dot o-r-g. Once again, I want to let you know about our email address if you have a question.

It is chrisarnson at gmail dot com. Chrisarnson at gmail dot com. And before I move on to the listener questions, Chelson, you begin your book by saying this, peek behind the curtain of some hip or progressive evangelical churches, pass the savvy technology in secular music, and you will find more than just a contemporary worship service.

You'll find faith leaders encouraging young evangelicals to trade in their Christian convictions for a gospel filled with compromise. They're slowly attempting to give evangelicalism an update, and the change is not for the good.

You also say that the sad truth is that the ideological gulf between America's evangelical grown-ups and their kids, aka the millennials, seem to be widening too. Can you explain this in more detail?

What is the gospel filled with compromise, which is the ideological gulf that you mentioned, and why should older church members be.

Very concerned about this? Absolutely. So the Christian West theology usually looks like this. It looks like accepting same-sex behavior and lifestyle, questioning scripture's authority, so sometimes even denying that some parts of it were inspired by the Holy Spirit.

Others will say that liberating women from their supposed place of oppression in the church and home needs to be the focus of our sermons, or expanding the federal nanny state welfare programs is a tenet of Christianity, or thwarting climate change, or gun control.

These are all theological issues. Well, that's not core to the gospel, and many of those, especially when we're talking about abortion or same-sex marriage, that's very clear-cut in scripture, right and wrong.

It's black and white, and some are saying, no, there are gray areas, and we have to explore those gray areas. And the reason why I say this is bad, and why the older generation should be concerned, is because we know where this progressive, liberal version of Christianity gets us.

It gets us declined, actually, in our church numbers. So while many people are compromising scripture, especially pastors and lay leaders, because they think it will bring in people to the churches and fill the pews, it doesn't, which I know is very surprising, because it surprised me.

So you think, oh, I'm going to tell the world that my Bible Belt Evangelical Church now says the Holy Spirit told me that same-sex marriage is a union blessed by God, so I expect to see my congregation grow.

Well, the reality is, churches that are doing that actually see a decline. So last summer, I did a study on churches in Washington, D .C., which ones are growing, and which ones are on the decline? The churches that are dying, as a denomination, are those mainline, liberal denominations that have a very progressive version of Christianity that they are teaching.

I mean, they're the churches that have the rainbow banner flags outside, saying we affirm, you know, basically we affirm every lifestyle. Not just that we welcome, because I will say, every church should be welcoming to sinners.

That's where sinners should be wandering in, like my parents, off the street into churches, but not affirming. And so anyway, those churches have maybe 30, 50 people on a given Sunday. The Orthodox, conservative, traditional churches that are supposedly so outdated, those are the churches, though, that are growing, that are spilling over with young people, too, young families.

They're doing something right, and I truly believe it's because God is blessing the faithful, and he's not blessing those who are not being faithful. I was just going to say that it's because, you know, people, they'll go maybe for, you'll see a short spurt of attendance, maybe, if you've made this polarizing statement, going against traditional Christianity, but if you can, if truth is relative, even when it comes to Christianity, why are you going to stay going to this church?

You're not. You're not. You want discipleship. You want accountability. I mean, our souls crave this, right? So to go to a church where anything goes, well, you're not going to get up on Sunday morning and to go and just feel good about yourself continually.

You're going to sleep in and go.

To brunch. That's how it works. Yeah, I'm assuming that's why the mainline liberal churches are dying numerically, because why go to church if none of this really matters? If the God that you're allegedly worshipping may or may not even exist, and all these things that the Christians of old have viewed as sinful are really okay, you know, what do we need to repent for?

What do we need to ask forgiveness for? Who are we worshipping? And I could just see that this is a ridiculous blueprint to imitate the churches if they've already seen it's a proven disaster, just like Marxism becoming more and more popular here in the United States amongst politicians.

Of course, they never call it that, but where this has been failed, this has been a failed way to govern a people all over the world, a proven failed way to operate a country, and yet we have, you know, people in our own nation here imitating that.

Exactly. So if the self can determine truth for itself, well, people are selfish innately, so they're going to live according to how they want, and you're right. There's no reason to go and think about repentance and be contemplative about your actions or corporate prayer.

No,.

There's no reason for it anymore. Yeah, the higher that a theology raises man in his goodness and righteousness, and the lower that theology makes God, he is not a God worthy of worship, nor do people feel a urgent need or desire to worship him or her, as the case may be with liberalism.

So it's just a ridiculous blueprint to be following. We do have a question from Bruce in Farmingville, New York. If a pastor of an evangelical church is pro-choice or pro homosexual, what should neighboring pastors who are holding steadfast to scripture do in their response to these unbiblical actions of their neighboring colleagues?

Sure, well, I would follow.

Scripture's instructions and say that it would be helpful if those pastors went, if you're a pastor, or you are a pastor, go to this particular pro-choice pastor, talk with him, ask him where he gets his theology from, and of course be prepared, like Paul says, to show where there is distorted teaching.

And if that doesn't work, then I would say, I would personally want to talk to the pastor, because this is a critical issue. If we are not willing to stand up for the most vulnerable among us, the unborn, then how is our pastor going to teach us to stand up for other injustices out there?

I don't see how that will work. So I really encourage, if you're a lay leader or a pastor, to go to this particular pastor, set up a meeting, talk with him, of course be ready to to use apologetics to show where he's gotten things wrong in a graceful way, right?

Speak the truth and love to him. And maybe you have friends in that particular congregation. Ask them if they know that their pastor is pro-choice, and ask them to bring this up. I mean, this is a congregation, and he's implosing the entire congregation.