Dear Friends, 

I'd like to offer a pastoral response to the complex issue of the Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade last week. As a church, we’re committed to opening up safe dialogue within our community and I’ll be working with our team to pull together some resources to help us navigate the implications of this in the months and years to come. 

First, I am a pastor. I’m interested, mostly, in the work of God IN YOU. Our church is built around helping people pay deeper attention to the movements of the soul, God’s invitations, and how you might be responding to the work of God within you. Whatever we do in the world is meant to flow from inside of us.

I am not a moral philosopher nor am I trained in theological ethics. However, I have been studying philosophy and theology for 25 years and my views about many complex moral and theological issues have been informed by living in the actual world. 
This issue of abortion is no different. 

I've read the philosophy and the theology regarding abortion. I have read many of the arguments about when life begins and what kinds of laws are meant to serve society and whether or not laws are meant to be “instructive” and, if so, how does that actually work on the ground?  I still think this issue of abortion is quite complex. I'm committed to pastoring and leading in real life with real lives—  which means that I'm taking into account the reality that some of you reading this have had an abortion or know someone who has had an abortion. As I am sure you have observed, Christians in the world are having vastly different reactions to the Supreme Court's decision last week to overturn Roe v. Wade. 

So, to be perfectly clear, I do not feel adequate to say anything definitive about abortion, the role of government, or what role we have as followers of Jesus in helping to shape the broader realities of society in a post-Christian era. I do know that we are meant to be a light unto the world. I think it will take some time to think about what it looks like to embody that, moving forward.

What I can also say is that I am committed to showing up authentically in our community with all the tensions I'm holding. My only pastoral guidance is to encourage you to do the same. And then we can love one another through this. That, I pray, could be our #1 commitment to one another. 

Our commitment to one another within this community is to allow the way we see the world to be informed by the love of God and God's commitment, specifically, to give preference to both the poor and poor in spirit. 

On Sunday, Pastor Hannah Estabrook gave a beautiful and prayerful first response to our community at the opening of our silence during Lectio Divina. Hannah and I met on Friday of last week and talked about how to pastor and lead in this moment. Hannah offered to take lead in crafting a response, and if she hadn't offered, I would have asked her to do so. As a woman who has dedicated her life's work to caring for the most vulnerable women in our city, Hannah is the first person I wanted to hear from when I heard the news of Roe v. Wade. She is also the person I wanted to be the first  to speak to our community about this complex issue. 

One of the things that I love that Hannah highlighted is our commitment at The Abbey to be a community where we pay close attention to the exertion of power over others. We have a commitment in this community to not exert power over one another. We take this directly from the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew ch. 5. In the midst of so much going on, it might feel hard to center a conversation about “power over others” in the midst of the overturning of Roe v. Wade--- but I do think it's really quite relevant. The exertion of power is a dangerous thing to mix with the gospel— whatever one’s gospel-shaped goals might be. 

First, let me say clearly that I am pro-life. I always have been. But, I hold a pretty nuanced view of what this means.


More specifically, my pro-life view means that I believe that everything should be done to safely and compassionately reduce the number of abortions in the world.

I do not believe the actions of the Supreme Court last week accomplishes safely and compassionately reducing abortions. 

It is my personal conviction that many of our abortion laws have grown to be too lenient— even when compared with other developed nations. However, we are far behind in providing social safety nets and access to basic healthcare for everyone. And I believe our leniency in abortion laws are a result of our failures in health care. I believe that Christians should be fighting for the well-being of every person. As followers of Jesus it is required of us to do this at a great cost with our lives, both financially and concretely. I believe that we are failing, as a global church, to create a systems of care that safely and compassionately reduces the number of abortions in the world. 

I think there are a dozen things that should have happened first before any laws addressing abortion rights were re-considered. There are countless ways that prioritizing care for women  could easily have been at the center of efforts to safely and compassionately reduce abortions in the US. 

The moral arc of the universe is long, as Dr. King has said, and it does bend towards justice. But with this issue, bending towards justice in one way has the impact, I think, of bending away from justice in some other ways. 

Last week’s decision will impact the most vulnerable women in our society to a far greater degree than it will impact those who are less vulnerable. And in this sense, in this moment, the arc that bends towards justice may have bent in one direction at the expense of justice in another direction. And this does not sit well with me.

Here are some other things I am holding in tension as I think and pray about what will unfold in the years to come. I could be wrong about some of these things. And, you might disagree with me. But this is where I find myself in the moment after a few days of prayerful reflection and thinking. 

  • Our political system is deeply broken. We cannot hitch ourselves to any political party or movement and continue to have any credibility in this world as Christians. Our commitment is to following Jesus under the guideance of the Holy Spirt as best as we can. This doesn't mean that the church should retreat from the world. We must think about how we can become a prophetic community within our particular social order. This has always been the task of the church: to proclaim good news into the world. But navigating the years ahead will take tremendous courage to not be pulled into one "side" of the political maelstrom. 

 

  • There are some unforeseen consequences that are ahead of us. While many Christians have been working on banning abortion for decades, there are realities close to the ground, in the actual lives of women, that many who have been pushing for overturning Roe v. Wade, are probably not able to see. While some Christians are viewing this as a "win" for a "Christian World-View” --- the brunt of the suffering to come in the wake of destabilizing Roe v. Wade will disproportionally be felt by women of color and communities who are living in generational poverty. Wealthy women who want abortions will travel to wherever the abortions are legal, and those who cannot afford to travel or take off work will bear the weight of this legal change. This does not feel like a bend towards justice. It feels like once again, the poor will disproportionally shoulder the weight of a society that is uninterested in addressing issues of systemic poverty. 

 

  • The Church is always trying to navigate how to show up within the social order. There will always be various degrees of agreements and disagreement about broader social issues. The primary hinge-point on the issue of abortion is “When does life begin?" Even the Catholic Church, which has remained firm in it’s teaching against abortion, has within its own history major theologians who have viewed life as beginning during a moment of “ensoulement” — when a fetus gains a soul. This was believed by Thomas Aquinas to happen around the time of “quickening”— when the mother first felt the baby move (generally around 16-18 weeks). I don’t think that we need to look to the 13th century for our moral theology. The arguments for when a fetus becomes a “person” are endless. And I share this to simply say that while the present day evangelical church in the West has fought hard for the position of life beginning at conception, the church Universal has always had to struggle to understand difficult moral questions within the moment that they live. We are in one of those moments, struggling for clarity and God’s call to us right now. 

 

  • The integrity of the Church will be tested in the upcoming years. There is no doubt that the overturning of Roe v. Wade was a battle fought for 50 years by those whose primary identity is that of following Jesus. The global Church now has an even greater responsibility to radically shape the care of women with an unplanned pregnancy. 


Prayerfully, 


Jared Boyd, Pastor