Many people who sit in our pews on a Sunday morning have quietly wondered the same thing: if abortion is as common as we say, and if it truly offends the heart of God, then why does my pastor never really talk about it? The silence is conspicuous, and it leaves people drawing their own conclusions. Some assume it must be an unforgivable sin, too dark to be named aloud. Others conclude the opposite—that God must not hold a very strong opinion about it, or He would have made sure it was addressed from the front of the church. Neither conclusion is true, and both are the fruit of a silence that has gone on far too long.
This is a question we have worked on for more than thirty-five years. There are some genuinely wonderful pastors who have found their voice on this issue and are leading their people well. But the vast majority have not. For most, the beginning and the end of their leadership on abortion is a single sentence: “I’m pro-life.” Beyond that, they are more than happy to let the matter rest. It is a frustrating pattern, and it is worth asking honestly why it persists—and what leaders can do about it.
The first thing to notice is that this is largely an American problem, and perhaps a Western one. It is not a problem in Latin America, in Africa, or throughout much of India and China. When pastors in those places are given the opportunity to see what the Bible says about the sacredness of human life, there is no hesitation on their part to speak. The reluctance we are describing belongs, for the most part, to our own culture. That fact alone should prompt some self-examination.
The Politicization of a Moral Issue
The most common reason pastors give for their silence is the politicization of abortion. The subject has become so weighted down with partisan meaning that many leaders feel it simply does not belong in the church. There is real truth in that concern. When Innocent Blood was published—a book that is at heart a biblical and theological examination of what Scripture means when it commands us not to shed innocent blood—it was striking how many Christian radio interviewers wanted to steer the conversation immediately toward Washington, the Supreme Court, and the next election. There is not a word about politics in the book. Babies who die do not much care whether it was a conservative or a liberal under whose policies they perished. Yet politics has become the reflex, the default setting for the entire conversation.
The way forward is to help pastors see that abortion is first and foremost a moral issue, and that this is precisely why it must be addressed. Consider the evil of slavery. Slavery was first a moral issue—a question of human rights, of human dignity, of what it means to be created in the image of God. It became a political issue only because a nation declared an ideal and then compromised it, and it took a hundred years and a civil war to bring the policy into line with the principle. The seed, “all men are created equal,” was moral before it was ever political. Marriage is the same. One can argue politically about what marriage means, but it did not begin there. It began as a revelation of how God created us as husband and wife and what marriage was designed to be. The political battle is downstream. Our job as pastors is to start upstream, with what the Bible says.
That upstream place ought to be the comfortable place for a pastor. You do not have to speak about abortion in political terms at all. You can speak about its moral implications, and that is the sweet spot—it is exactly what pastors are called to do. The calling can be stated simply: our job is to bring the will of God to the people of God, using the Word of God, and to call them to live it out by the strength that God supplies. We should do that with all the zeal we can muster.
The Discomfort of Human Sexuality
A second reason for the silence is that abortion is bound up with human sexuality, and sexual sin carries shame. It is the kind of thing people want to hide, and so a great deal of secrecy surrounds it. Bringing it into the light can feel jarring for a congregation. This is why so many pastors are just as silent on premarital sex or cohabitation as they are on abortion. When was the last time a pastor, or even a home-group leader, spoke openly about the sin of living together before marriage? Anything touching human sexuality touches something most of us carry guilt around, because it is such a powerful force in our lives—and so we grow more and more silent, uncomfortable with speaking about the moral directives and the just judgments of the Lord.
The culture has only made this harder. Cohabitation before marriage is now treated as a given. In some places the systems themselves assume it. A young couple applying to marry in Britain, for instance, may be asked to prove their relationship is genuine and not merely a route to a green card—and the accepted forms of proof include a child already born to them or a shared address where they are living together and paying bills. A couple who has neither finds the process difficult. The arrangement all but requires people to move in together first. The whole structure is built around the expectation that couples will live together before marriage.
“Everyone Already Knows”
A third excuse is that everyone already knows abortion is wrong, so there is no need to raise it. Some pastors rest their entire approach on this, content to say “we’re a pro-life church” and leave it there. But assuming the conclusion is not our job. Our job is to ask what God has revealed that He wants His people to know, and then to be faithful in teaching everything the Bible teaches. Years ago, while preaching through a passage about fleeing sexual immorality, an older member said, “You don’t need to preach on that in our church.” The honest answer was that a preacher of the Word does not really have that choice; when the subject comes up naturally in the text, you cannot simply skip it. You may not feel you need it, but there are people who do.
The best pastors embrace this. One faithful preacher, working through a lectionary passage that included difficult words about submission, announced that most preachers would prefer to hover over the easier first half of the text. Instead, he said, he would spend the entire sermon on the harder second half—and he warned the congregation plainly that they might not like what he had to say. It is not a pastor’s job to teach only the intuitive, easy parts of Scripture. It is his job to take the whole counsel of God, especially the portions people find hard to understand or hard to accept, and to speak to them with clarity. That is how a pastor helps people.
What this requires, particularly in America, is courage—the courage to be countercultural, and the humility to say that this is what God in His wisdom has declared to be most important. If God addresses the sanctity of human life, we must address it. If He reveals the beauty of human sexuality, we must speak of it. And if we hesitate because we fear wounding those who have abortion in their past, we should remember that it is not our place to decide that this particular evil is beyond the reach of God’s deliverance. He can free a person from this shame and guilt as surely as from any other sin. Once we see that, the excuses begin to fall away.
Silence Is an Insult to the Gospel
Consider what silence actually does. A woman once sat in the back of a service where abortion was being addressed and thought it reckless and irresponsible even to raise the subject. She wanted to get up and leave, but something made her stay. By the end she was in tears, finding repentance and forgiveness for her own abortion, which she had never dealt with. She had been, quietly, an ardent defender of abortion—because she could not bring herself to imagine God being angry with her over it. That day set her free.
This is the pattern everywhere, and it is not only pastors who need to hear it. Teachers, classroom leaders, and home-group leaders are in the same position. Many stay silent because they do not want to hurt people’s feelings, but it is the silence that leaves the guilt and shame festering. Silence keeps whispering to people that they are disqualified from serving God because of a secret in their past. To bring the sin into the open—to call it confession—is to liberate. People are set free, and they are given a testimony. Our silence, then, is an insult to the power of the gospel to liberate. And here is the great mercy: if you preach the inhumanity of abortion as the intentional killing of an innocent human being, you also get to preach the cross, where the most holy and perfect human being who ever lived suffered unjustly, and His innocent blood was shed to wash away the guilt of shedding innocent blood. Bring the two together, and let the gospel be true.
Pro-Choice Christians and the Reasoning of Scripture
Some object that God never even mentions abortion in the Bible, and that a compassionate God must therefore allow it. This is where many pro-choice Christians come from: their pastors never address the issue, and they reason that God must be at least as compassionate as they are. But the Bible does not use the word lynching either, nor genocide. There are many things Scripture does not name with a modern term while teaching us clearly how to reason about them. It affirms that human life is more valuable than anything else God has created, and it commands us not to shed innocent blood. What we call the act, and how it is carried out, does not change the moral reasoning. There should be no such thing as a pro-choice Christian, any more than there is such a thing as Christian pornography.
Part of the silence, sadly, comes from leaders who have abortion in their own background and have never come to terms with it. After more than fifty years, abortion has touched almost all of us. Even faithful pastors have wrestled to find their footing here; some, like John Piper, were silent on the issue for the first several years of their ministry before it finally, almost of its own accord, demanded a response.
Sorting Out the Priorities
Scripture gives us principles for sorting this out. First, the closer you are to a crisis, the more responsible you are—love your neighbor as yourself. Second, the more critically a human being’s life is in danger of being unjustly taken, the more moral urgency the situation demands. The Good Samaritan came upon a man whose life was slipping away, and proximity created obligation. There are chronic issues that rightly need our ongoing attention, but there are also preeminent moral issues—the shedding of innocent blood chief among them—that rise above the rest. When innocent people are being intentionally killed, you are not weighing one issue among equals. We grieve over failing schools, but we do not respond to them the way we respond to a gunman attacking a kindergarten, because the intentional killing of the innocent raises everything to another level.
Abortion is not simply one cause among other worthy causes like caring for the poor, welcoming refugees, or honoring our elders. It is morally preeminent because of the intentional shedding of innocent blood. Scripture itself makes this kind of distinction. In Ezekiel, the Lord confronts His people: was your immorality not enough, that you even took My children and burned them to death in sacrifice? God acknowledges the common temptation of sexual sin, and then points to child sacrifice as an evil on an entirely different level, demanding a different response.
What Leaders Can Do
So the encouragement to every leader—pastor, elder, deacon, or home-group leader—is this. Clear your mind of the politics for a moment. If abortion is in your own past, treat it as you would every other sin: begin with confession. Then start with the Bible and begin to teach your people what it says.
For those who want to nudge a leader forward without condemning or cornering them, the path is straightforward. Pray first. Then gather a few people in your congregation, pray together, and perhaps take your pastor out to lunch. And use the resources that exist for teaching the Bible well on this subject. PassionLife’s Four Questions training manual, available to download for free, is only ten pages, built like a catechism. It is not politics; it is simply the Bible, unfolding the subject logically and morally, one question at a time. Start with what God says in His Word, bring that to your people, and watch the life-saving, life-changing things that begin to unfold in your midst.
To God be the glory.
This article is adapted from the episode transcript.