Testimony: Motivation for Ministry

My name is Jerry Doris. I'm the pastor of Reformation Church of Shelbyville, Kentucky. I first started going down to the

EMW Women's Surgical Center, I think it was in 2006 or 2007, with a local team.

We weren't organized in terms of our churches. It was just a group of men from area churches that were doing evangelism together.

And we started going down there and I was going down there pretty faithfully for a season and honestly just kind of burnt out on it and took a break from that.

Started getting more involved in my local church, doing local church ministry. And I would say

I walked away from it from about 2009 or so until I started pastoring.

And talking with brothers in the church, we were looking at a specific passage in scripture, preaching through Mark and seeing how

Jesus has an affinity for the little ones and just thinking about Him blessing the children.

That word that He uses in that text has the possibility of Him not just blessing children that are coming, but mothers that are pregnant.

And so just thinking through that, Jesus' heart for the lost started me thinking again about the abortion clinic and began talking with Tanner and others and we just as a church committed to go down there.

So that's, I guess that's the long and the short of it, but we've been involved in this as a church now since would have been

January of, was that 2018? No, 2019

I think it was. So yeah, so I had seen End Abortion Now, the website, and had gone to it and looked at it and was just thinking about being part of that network.

And it wasn't until I just came under conviction after expositionally preaching through Matthew that I basically went to the website and signed up and signed our church up and received the materials that we got, just the support.

I took our church through the video series that End Abortion Now offered and that has been really helpful for us.

We started meeting as a team, we started listening to other pleaders, those that are talking and trying to speak with ladies just to hear what are the words that they're using, why would they say it the way they said it, and so that was our entry point into that.

So we're very thankful for End Abortion Now for helping us get started as a church. They sent us materials, they sent us tracks, they sent us things to hand to somebody, signs to hold, and then they equipped us with their video series that they had.

So we're really excited to have received help from End Abortion Now. They've actually sent us video equipment and just all that we've needed to start filming our own interactions.

We have a unique scenario at the EMW Clinic where we are able to speak with women as they come from the parking garage all the way around into the front of the building and then when they go into the building we can speak to them.

So we want to capture that experience because there's a wide variety of interactions that we have with those that are going in, male and female, from hostile to softer moments.

You'll see women that are broken as they go in. They know, they feel the weight of their own conscience bearing witness about what they're doing.

So to film that and to be equipped to do that has been very helpful and we are very appreciative as a church to have