National Life Chain Sunday 2010 to Bring Prayer to U.S. and Canadian Sidewalks in 1500 Cities on October 3

See www.LifeChain.net for Time and Locations


The annual Life Chain, a pro-life prayer and witness event, will take place this year in cities across the United States and Canada on Sunday October 3.

Life Chain involves an hour of silent prayer and public witness and will take place from 2 to 3 p.m. It is a peaceful, prayerful public witness on sidewalks along major streets in towns and cities, in which participants pray for our nation and for an end to abortion. Participants hold signs reading "Abortion Kills Children," "Abortion Hurts Women," "Jesus Forgives and Heals" and "Adoption: The Loving Option" before passers-by and motorists.

Above all else, National Life Chain Sunday 2010 urges the corporate church across the U.S., Canada, and beyond to end its abandonment of preborn humanity. Toward that urgency, Life Chain asks clergy to please lead their people, young and old, to their local sidewalks on Sunday afternoon, October 3, to earnestly seek God's intervention. The church's détente with child killing must end. Pulpit and pew must contend for mercy and justice. Wrote Yehuda Bauer of the Jewish Holocaust: "Thou shalt not be a victim; thou shalt not be a perpetrator; but, above all, thou shalt not be a bystander."

Much as Nazism relied on church apathy to enable cruelty, Supreme Court jurists in 1973 saw in America a church given notably to self-interest, materialism, and an unmistakable aversion to children. They foresaw complaint without care, fret without fight, and loss of integrity without shame. Following Roe v. Wade, church structures grew in size, elegance, and comfort as deaths of mutilated preborn Americans rose to the tens of millions. Then, in 1992, the Court revisited child aversion and reconfirmed Roe with words that speak volumes about church and culture. Wrote the Court in Planned Parenthood v. Casey: "...the abortion decision is of the same character as the decision to use contraception [and] for two decades...people have organized intimate relationships [and relied] on the availability of abortion in the event contraception should fail."

Valued and vitally needed pastors in the Western nations, the traditional seat of Christendom, where are your voices and battle readiness? Oh, that bold watchmen would emerge and mold a deliverance plan for those who cannot speak. Have our youngest fellow citizens lost their intrinsic worth? Do they no longer bleed? Or anguish helplessly when brutal instruments dismember their fragile bodies? With the many shepherds on duty, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, must the lambs have no safe haven? And for how long must lay pro-life leaders strive vainly for a breakthrough that only the pulpit can achieve? God has surely warned us (Psalm 82:3-4; Prov. 24:10-12; Isa. 58:6-7; Jer. 5:28 and 6:14; Amos 5:21-22; Matt. 25:35; James 1:27), that our eyes might see and ears hear. But we have not heeded during four decades of mounting bloodguilt and dishonor.

Into his 1900-year history of pro-life, George Grant wrote of the Abortion Holocaust: "It seems that during much of the twentieth century, the memory of the church was erased. Its books, its culture, and its history were all but destroyed in the mad rush toward modernity. The community of faith forgot what it was and what it should have been. The result was that, despite the heroic efforts of a remnant of dissenters, the needy, the innocent, and the helpless lost their one sure advocate.... The only urgency that drove much of the church during this dark period in history was its own satisfaction." German theologian Helmut Thielicke wrote of worship and worshippers in his homeland during the Nazi era: "The church had overlooked its greatest danger, namely that in gaining the whole world it might lose its own soul."

A literal holocaust in America? How could it be? In Western nations, no failure exceeds pulpit omission of why God instituted marriage and family. Few Christians hear that vital sermon today, due to clerical complacency and fear of the shunned c-word contraception. Scripture tells us that God created earth that He might create man for relationship and worship. Freed of fornication through sacred marriage, man was to procreate and "fill the earth," thus providing God His eternal worshippers, in vast number. But we the church befell a seductive scheme. Aided over several decades by birth preventives that the church affirmed with silence, the spirit of child aversion and its allies groomed the path for legal abortion, the homosexual movement, cohabitation and divorce, illegitimacy and STD epidemics, each an arch-enemy of holy matrimony. Today, biblical marriage of man and woman is despised in many U.S. courts and struggles for survival. Warns Job 9:24: "When a land has been given into the hands of the wicked, God blindfolds its judges." The best defender of biblical marriage is found in devout love and security for God's future worshippers -- precious preborn children and their progeny. To forsake them is perilous, for when God "avenges blood," Psalm 9:12 affirms, "He does not forget the cry of the afflicted."