2 min. to read.
Here’s the next installment of my series over at the Oregonian/OregonLive site. Here at www.MarcAlanSchelske.com, I write about spiritual growth from the perspective of a follower of Jesus for folks already committed to personal growth. At OregonLive I write to people in the wider community, addressing how my faith perspective intersects questions and issues that are very much in the current consciousness.
This is the 4th post in a series about ways I believe the church has stepped away from the path of Jesus. Some of this is a bit more political than what I write here, perhaps even more controversial, but it represents important conversations I’m having with people inside and outside the church.
Here’s an excerpt of this post.
…I was a pastor. That meant I was against abortion. I am also an adopted kid, born to a young woman who didn’t expect to get pregnant and had no support for raising a child. I felt I had a personal stake in the conversation. My birth mother could have chosen abortion. The issue seemed stark and clear. Abortion was taking a life. People who supported abortion, the women who had abortions, well, they were wrong. End of discussion.
But that wasn’t the end. Over the years of pastoring, I got an inside view of the lives of real people in their darkest places. Witnessing the real stories of these people shook my certainty. I began to see that the topic of abortion was deeply interwoven with a wide variety of issues I had never considered.