An End to Silence and Passivity on Abortion; Bishop Whitaker is First United Methodist Bishop to Speak at United Methodist Task Force on Abortion and Sexuality.

Editor's note. The following is excerpt from a January 24 speech delivered by Bishop Timothy Whitaker, of the United Methodist Church, in Washington, D.C.

...Pope John Paul II has made a powerful Christian witness to God's peaceable purposes in his 1995 encyclical on The Gospel of Life. He warned the world about creating "a culture of death," that is rebellion against "the Gospel of life." ... He stated, "Only when people are open to the fullness of the truth about God, man, and history will the words, 'You shall not kill' shine forth once more as a goal for man in himself and in his relations with others."

In the United Methodist Church often many of us are silent and passive about abortion. ... I suspect that we are silent and passive about abortion because often we allow ideology to trump theology in forming our ethical positions on controversial issues. ... Yet we who are Christians cannot let our ideological or partisan political loyalties constrain our witness to the living God. We need to view abortion as a concern that transcends ideological or partisan loyalties.

I think that our silence and passivity about abortion comes from the difficulty of being a Christian in America. I used to think that being a Christian in America is easy. ... Now I realize that practicing the Christian life in America has its own difficulties. The seductions of American life may seem more subtle, but they are real and dangerous. In America both the culture and the state view persons as autonomous individuals who have private rights to live as they choose.

But we who are Christians have a different anthropology: we view persons as members of a community who are made in the image of the Triune God and who have both rights and responsibilities. Therefore, we cannot endorse a woman's right to abort an unborn child as a morally neutral decision because we understand that the child also has a right to live and the community has a responsibility to care for this child if the mother is unable to rear it. ...

Can there be any doubt that there is silence and passivity about abortion in our Church? How often is a sermon about abortion or an educational forum on abortion offered in our congregations? How many congregations are involved in supporting crisis pregnancy centers in their communities or offering tangible support to women with unwanted pregnancies? What kind of pastoral counsel is being offered behind the closed doors of the ...