{"id":923,"date":"2020-08-26T10:04:41","date_gmt":"2020-08-26T15:04:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dandc.com\/?p=923"},"modified":"2020-08-26T10:04:41","modified_gmt":"2020-08-26T15:04:41","slug":"pastors-need-to-step-up-and-preach-against-abortion-quit-saying-its-too-political","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.dandc.com\/?p=923","title":{"rendered":"Pastors Need to Step Up and Preach Against Abortion, Quit Saying It\u2019s \u201cToo Political\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

via LifeNews.com<\/a> August 21, 2020 at 10:35AM<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

<\/span>An Open Letter to the Pastors of the United States<\/strong><\/p>\n

August 20, 2020<\/p>\n

Dear Pastors,<\/p>\n

I write to you as a fellow preacher of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. This Gospel makes clear moral demands on individuals and on governments alike. The duty of preaching the Gospel involves not only the urgent exhortation to personal holiness and salvation, but the equally urgent exhortation to govern justly. Those responsible for the common good are obliged to protect the fundamental rights of the citizens and their freedom to live out their Faith in the way that they \u2013 and not the government \u2013 see fit.<\/p>\n

Anyone who has been paying attention over the last six decades has seen an organized and persistent effort to limit the Gospel to the private arena of our hearts and within the four walls of our Churches.<\/p>\n

Prayer and Bible reading have been banished from our schools. People of faith have had to fight in court to display religious symbols in public and to conduct their businesses and ministries in accordance with their moral convictions. The right to even talk about our faith has been attacked on campuses and in the media.<\/p>\n

And as the courts have increasingly upheld religious freedom, haters of religion have now taken to the streets to show their contempt for our beliefs by destroying its symbols.<\/p>\n

Moreover, the legal protection afforded to our most fundamental good, life itself, and to God\u2019s creation of marriage and the family, has been obliterated by amoral legislators and activist judges. Some 62 million children have been killed in the name of \u201cfreedom.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet our Founding Fathers, anticipating the extent to which human nature can fall into error and sin, have provided for us a system of self-governance that can overcome and correct even these drastic departures from the laws of nature and of nature\u2019s God.<\/p>\n

Our nation is preparing to engage in two months of voting from September 4th<\/sup>, when the first absentee balloting begins, through Election Day, November 3. In this time, some 100,000 electoral races will be decided at every level of state and federal government.<\/p>\n

SUPPORT LIFENEWS! If you like this pro-life article, please help LifeNews.com with a donation<\/a>!<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

We therefore have a choice.<\/p>\n

And the choice we have is as relevant to what kind of church we will be as it is to what kind of nation we will be.<\/p>\n

On the one hand, we can adopt a mentality that says that we have neither the duty nor the possibility of changing the course of public policy in our nation. This mindset takes various forms and utilizes various excuses.<\/p>\n

Some maintain we cannot really know the difference between what\u2019s good for the nation and what isn\u2019t, or that morality is up to each church or individual to decide.<\/p>\n

Some maintain that churches and pastors are to stay far away from any engagement in politics or public policy, and simply preach a Gospel that pertains only to individual, interior spiritual life.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, we have the choice to engage the battle, taking on the same mindset that led pastors to preach the large body of political sermons of our nation\u2019s Founding Era, giving spiritual and moral energy and guidance to the very creation of our country.<\/p>\n

We can commit ourselves to the same spiritual imperative that led believers to fight slavery and that led their descendants to move from the Churches into the streets to battle segregation.<\/p>\n

We can be convinced of the words Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. preached on the night before he was assassinated:<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m always happy to see a relevant ministry. It\u2019s alright to talk about \u2018long white robes over yonder,\u2019 in all of its symbolism. But ultimately people want some suits and dresses and shoes to wear down here. It\u2019s alright to talk about \u2018streets flowing with milk and honey,\u2019 but God has commanded us to be concerned about the slums down here, and his children who can\u2019t eat three square meals a day. It\u2019s alright to talk about the new Jerusalem, but one day, God\u2019s preacher must talk about the new New York, the new Atlanta, the new Philadelphia, the new Los Angeles, the new Memphis, Tennessee. This is what we have to do.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

We can understand that equipping the People of God to elect the right candidates is not a political<\/strong> task but a pastoral<\/strong> task, because we are enabling them to carry out the Great Commission, teaching all nations to carry out everything our Lord has commanded.<\/p>\n

This is our choice, as we enter Elections 2020.<\/p>\n

Our Lord told us we need to be attentive to the signs of the times. The problem is not that the Church is becoming too political, but that our politics have become too pagan.<\/p>\n

The political divide in our nation is no longer between two major parties that \u201chave the same goals but different ideas of how to get there.\u201d That was once true, but is no longer.<\/p>\n

They have different<\/em><\/strong> goals, different views of America, totally divergent views of morality, and completely incompatible views of religion and the Church.<\/p>\n

The Democrat Party has not only departed from the Republican Party in matters of policy. The differences are matters of principle.\u00a0 <\/em><\/strong>The Democrat Party has abandoned the principle of the God-given right to life and the liberty our Founders embraced to practice their Faith in their public life. Moreover, they have made their intentions clear to write into the laws and into the Courts a worldview completely devoid of those principles.<\/p>\n

This is not the kind of divide we can \u201crise above,\u201d nor the kind of battle from which we can exempt ourselves or our congregations.<\/p>\n

This is a test for us. Either we recognize this problem, and like good shepherds, warn our people, or we retreat into a \u2018neutrality\u2019 so absolute that it no longer allows us to see, much less neutralize, threats to the very survival of our nation and our ministries.<\/p>\n

When a political party embraces the destruction of innocent life and the suppression of the freedom of the Church, it can no longer be treated in a neutral way by the Church. That Party becomes an existential threat to the nation to which we pledge our allegiance and to the Kingdom to which we have pledged our souls.<\/p>\n

We are, moreover, at a moment when our President, Donald Trump, his Administration, and the Republican Party at every level, have achieved record-breaking accomplishments<\/a> to protect our religious freedom from oppressive mandates at home and persecution abroad. The President has defended our freedom to preach in the pulpits, and the freedom of our children to pray in school and speak up on their campus for the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The over 200 federal judges he has put in place, moreover, are men and women likewise committed to religious freedom.<\/p>\n

Dear pastors, at the founding of our nation, Pastor John Peter Gabriel Muhlenberg declared in his sermon on January 21, 1776, <\/strong>\u201cIn the language of the Holy Writ, there is a time for all things. There is a time to preach and a time to fight. And now is the time to fight.\u201d<\/em> He then threw off his clerical robes to reveal the uniform of an officer in the Continental Army. As one account relates, \u201cDrums began to roll, men kissed their wives, and they walked down the aisle to enlist. The next day, Pastor Muhlenberg<\/strong> led 300 men of his church and surrounding churches to join General Washington\u2019s Continental Army.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nearly two centuries later, Catholic Bishop Clemens von Galen (d.<\/strong> 1946), preached fearlessly against the Nazi regime and its oppression of human life and religious freedom. He was not afraid to name and fight the political threat that was right before his eyes.<\/p>\n

It is not that these men abandoned their pastoral mission in order to become political. It is, rather, that they saw the demands that their pastoral mission placed on them in the circumstances of their time, and courageously rose to the occasion.<\/p>\n

That is the choice, and the opportunity, you and I have before us right now.<\/p>\n

The choice for our nation is not simply about which political party will have power, but about which kind of America we will be \u2013 one marked by moral chaos, the Culture of Death, socialism and religious oppression, or one based on the freedom and principles our Founders made clear.<\/p>\n

And the choice for our churches is whether we will retreat in silence and cowardice out of fear of being \u2018too political,\u2019 and hence become irrelevant to the world around us, or respond clearly and courageously to this moment of unprecedented conflict, and lead the People of God to protect their rights, their freedom, their Church and their beloved country.<\/p>\n

Sincerely,<\/p>\n

Fr. Frank Pavone
\nNational Director, Priests for Life<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

via LifeNews.com August 21, 2020 at 10:35AM An Open Letter to the Pastors of the United States August 20, 2020 Dear Pastors, I write to you as a fellow preacher of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. This Gospel makes clear moral demands on individuals and on governments alike. The duty of preaching the Gospel involves […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_blocks_custom_css":"","_kad_blocks_head_custom_js":"","_kad_blocks_body_custom_js":"","_kad_blocks_footer_custom_js":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[11],"tags":[46,45],"class_list":["post-923","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-feedly","tag-ifttt","has-post-thumbnail","fallback-thumbnail"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"taxonomy_info":{"category":[{"value":11,"label":"News"}],"post_tag":[{"value":46,"label":"Feedly"},{"value":45,"label":"IFTTT"}]},"featured_image_src_large":false,"author_info":{"display_name":"Darren","author_link":"http:\/\/www.dandc.com\/?author=1"},"comment_info":0,"category_info":[{"term_id":11,"name":"News","slug":"news","term_group":0,"term_taxonomy_id":11,"taxonomy":"category","description":"","parent":0,"count":88,"filter":"raw","cat_ID":11,"category_count":88,"category_description":"","cat_name":"News","category_nicename":"news","category_parent":0}],"tag_info":[{"term_id":46,"name":"Feedly","slug":"feedly","term_group":0,"term_taxonomy_id":46,"taxonomy":"post_tag","description":"","parent":0,"count":68,"filter":"raw"},{"term_id":45,"name":"IFTTT","slug":"ifttt","term_group":0,"term_taxonomy_id":45,"taxonomy":"post_tag","description":"","parent":0,"count":68,"filter":"raw"}],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7GQ5E-eT","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":649,"url":"http:\/\/www.dandc.com\/?p=649","url_meta":{"origin":923,"position":0},"title":"WALSH: To All Pastors Afraid Of Condemning Abortion: Find A New Job. 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