Preach the Gospel or Speak Out Against Abortion? Either/Or?

Scott Klusendorf from his must-read book, The Case for Life:

Pastors sometimes ask, “Won’t addressing abortion distract the church from the gospel?” This is a legitimate concern. Our preaching must always direct sinful human beings to the righteousness that God alone provides. The good news is that we can use the topic of abortion to point people to the very gospel they so desperately need. 

At the same time, we should remember that God’s gospel is addressed to a particular audience, human beings. But our attempts to communicate that gospel suffer when the very definition of what it means to be human is up for grabs. Indeed, it’s hard to preach that man is a sinner, that man needs to repent, and that man can be saved only through Christ when nobody knows what a man is anymore. 

Teaching Christians to engage the ideas that determine culture is not a distraction from the gospel. Rather, it removes roadblocks to it. In hundreds of hours of conversation, I’ve found that abortion is an excellent bridge to discussing worldviews and the gospel. It brings up nearly every issue that matters to Christians such as: What is a human? What’s wrong with us? Have we sinned? Where did we come from? Does God care? These questions are critically important because, as J. Gresham Machen points out, false ideas are at the root of unbelief:

It is true that the decisive thing is the regenerative power of God. That can overcome all lack of preparation, and the absence of that makes even the best preparation useless. But as a matter of fact God usually exerts that power in connection with certain prior conditions of the human mind, and it should be ours to create, so far as we can, with the help of God, those favorable conditions for the reception of the gospel. 

False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet succeed only in winning a straggler here and there, if we permit the whole collective thought of the nation or of the world to be controlled by ideas which, by the resistless force of logic, prevent Christianity from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion. 

Under such circumstances, what God desires us to do is to destroy the obstacle at its root. . . . What is today a matter of academic speculation begins tomorrow to move armies and pull down empires. In that second stage, it has gone too far to be combated; the time to stop it was when it was still a matter of impassionate debate. 

So as Christians we should try to mould the thought of the world in such a way as to make the acceptance of Christianity something more than a logical absurdity. . . . What more pressing duty than for those who have received the mighty experience of regeneration, who, therefore, do not, like the world, neglect that whole series of vitally relevant facts which is embraced in Christian experience—what more pressing duty than for these men to make themselves masters of the thought of the world in order to make it an instrument of truth instead of error?

In short, it’s not either/or: We can preach the gospel and confront false ideas, including the one that says humans have no intrinsic value.