Presbyterians Pro-Life

Notice to PPL Supporters
From Don Elliott, PPL President
Posted December 1, 2002

November 21, 2002

We Christians are approaching another beginning in experiencing the season of Advent. We also are approaching another beginning of a new year and the opportunities it affords us for advancing the kingdom of our Lord. Both are times of celebration of the life we have in Jesus Christ.

Christians in every time and place have known that Jesus’s birth, the culmination of the Advent season, was not the moment of his incarnation. From the Church’s earliest days, we have confessed in the Apostles’ Creed that our Lord came to us,

...conceived by the Holy Ghost in the womb of the Virgin Mary....

Scottish theologian Thomas Torrance writes that Jesus’s conception made him a brother to all embryos, already alive and already active as Son of God. John the Baptist leaped for joy at the presence of the mother of his Lord, aware of Jesus’s presence very early in her pregnancy (Luke 1:42,44).

Therefore, as we celebrate the coming of our Lord this year, let us remember that his incarnation began long before his birth. We in PPL have prepared a bulletin insert for Sanctity of Human Life Sunday on January 26 in the New Year. The insert celebrates the very beginning of Jesus’s life. We have it available for your use whenever you want to emphasize the value of human life from the very beginning.

This New Year is bursting with opportunities for ministries that uphold the value of each human life. We are hopeful that your church is already considering sending up an overture to reverse the stand taken by our General Assembly last summer that approved the abortion of babies late in pregnancy—babies who could live if they were delivered. There is no support for that position in Scripture or in our Confessions. We hope you will join us in appealing to the General Assembly to correct that action and affirm the Church’s position of wanting to protect both mother and baby late in pregnancy. We have an overture draft available for your consideration. It’s not too late to act. The postmark deadline for this overture to reach the Stated Clerk’s office is April 9.

We also want this General Assembly to hear from physicians that the best resolution to a problem late in pregnancy is delivery of the baby, which brings a quick resolution for the mother’s problem and offers the child an opportunity to live. The petition comes from three physicians urging their fellow physicians to join them in opposing late term abortions. Please encourage the Presbyterian physicians you know to read and sign the petition and return it to us. It’s on our website, or we’ll be happy to rush a copy to you. We’ll see that commissioners to the General Assembly in Denver receive the petition with all the names.

The ministry of PPL is not only to encourage the denomination to return to its biblical and confessional roots in upholding the value of human life at all stages. Our ministry also encourages churches and church members in their own pastoral ministries in the areas related to life.

• Encouraging the youth of our church to make decisions for sexual purity
• Helping women in crisis pregnancies to seek the help and fellowship of the church
• Helping women find healing and restoration from the church when they have made abortion decisions
• Giving examples of sermons preached by Presbyterians on the life issues to show how to approach the subject biblically, spiritually, and pastorally
• Encouraging churches to support adoption
• Teaching our churches the relationship between Christian faith and the critical issues of life and death in our culture

We are a unique renewal organization in the Presbyterian Church (USA) that gives voice to the biblical position of the Christian Church throughout history--and offers resources to congregations to communicate that message of life through preaching, teaching, and pastoral care ministries.

Our work has not diminished over the years. In fact, it has become more acute with the changes in the culture around us and the continual capitulation of the church to the cultural norms. We began as a simple ministry aimed at restoring the historical moral message of the church about abortion. But the cultural demands increasingly have pressed us into areas that include infanticide, euthanasia, assisted suicide, and the ethical issues around the plethora of reproductive technologies such as stem cell research, in vitro fertilization, and cloning.

We are the only organization in the Presbyterian Church tackling these issues within the framework of the witness of Scripture and the historic teaching of the Church universal. We now reach more than 30,000 Presbyterians with our newsletter and many more through our website. It is clear that PPL’s ministry has grown by leaps and bounds.

The PPL board, at its recent meeting, recognized our need to expand this ministry. The board made a decision to call an associate executive director. Terry Schlossberg, the first person we called as our executive director, came to serve PPL in 1987. We are well past the point that her efforts alone can support life-giving ministry in a denomination of this size.

We are hopeful that you will want to support the expansion of this ministry and see an increasing impact on our denomination in the new year. We are in the search process for an associate director at the moment and we solicit your recommendations for the person we should call. We also solicit your financial support for the person who will assume important responsibilities for carrying out the mission of PPL.

Please help us realize this hope for the Presbyterian Church (USA). Please give generously this year in anticipation of what the Lord will do in our denomination in reviving faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, and in his ability to meet every need and to forgive every sin--including the needs associated with crisis pregnancies and the sins associated with taking of innocent lives.

We count you as our partners in this critical ministry to preserve human lives made in God’s image and we look to you expectantly for your support. Join us in celebrating life in this period of Advent and the New Year; send up the overture that will help to preserve human lives and restore the integrity of the Gospel as it is represented by the Presbyterian Church (USA); pray for this ministry. And please support us generously as one of your own mission enterprises.

May God look with favor on our efforts together to hold up the value of each human life.

PPL is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization of members of the Presbyterian Church (USA). A financial statement is available upon written request from the Virginia State Division of Consumer Affairs or from PPL.

Clicks to some of the PPL resources addressed in letter: