My original plan was to divide our ministry between Sunday worship with the attendant congregational programs—nursery, children’s church, youth group, Sunday school classes—and public policy and pro-life advocacy. Our focus was on young adults; I imagined mobilizing thousands of twenty- and thirty-something White House, congressional, and Supreme Court staffers, not to mention those who worked at federal agencies, to channel political influence with a strong moral and religious focus.
We would engage these young professionals and they would, in turn, invite their closest friends to “Andrew Parties,” named after the disciple who brought his brother to Jesus, where they would hear the Gospel preached. Thereby a community of conscientious Christians who learned what it meant to be disciples of Jesus would be created. They would return to work and live out their witness to him by bringing Christian moral teaching to bear in their work in government, even speaking to their colleagues about the transformational experience of having Christ in their lives. Our model was a kind of utopian “trickle-up” theory: having gained a critical number of these members, our influence would move higher and higher up within the government, until we got to the top, my ultimate target—members of Congress, U.S. senators, cabinet secretaries, Supreme Court justices—even presidents.
I thought that if I evangelized the ungodly men and women whose decisions and actions so negatively impacted American life and culture, the proponents of abortion and the gay agenda would reject those pursuits and embrace values that would restore the moral core to our American civilization. I believed if we changed their hearts, we could change their minds and eventually their policies. I envisioned leading these reprobates to Christ in droves and seeing individual spiritual changes reflected in the way they thought, behaved, and, ultimately, governed. To get all this done, I wanted to put together a missionary body, poised to take on the big issues of the day while aggressively advancing a Christian witness to top government policy makers.
But the reality was I had no idea what Washington was like. I was shocked to discover that it was not, in fact, a godforsaken place. White evangelicals attended the Capitol Hill Baptist Church, a long-standing, theologically sound congregation. I missed it in my surveys of the Washington religious landscape, because Baptists existed in a different sphere than the Pentecostal-charismatics I kept company with in those days. Baptists don’t practice speaking in tongues or believe in modern-day prophecy or miracles, and as was the case with this congregation, they often do not engage in the political debate. There were also vibrant African-American churches of every size and denomination, with rich histories, some dating back to the 1700s, and they were ubiquitous throughout the city. Of course, they were virtually all Democratic leaning in their political orientation, which made them, lamentably in my view, allies with our enemies. There were also myriad Catholic and Protestant congregations to choose from, all with committed parishioners, and they were a mix of conservative and liberal, but mostly the latter. So, realizing we had these faith communities to compete with, I thought of forming instead a residential community of Christian workers—something like a Protestant version of a monastery or convent. Eventually I realized the notion of taking the city by religious storm by creating a Christian community—and other fanciful ideas as well—all were technically impossible, and I became resigned to simply being a parson for a little while.
Every day, I returned home and complained to Cheryl about how difficult this was proving to be and wondering if I had made a mistake. My best option, I thought, would be to pursue the conventional model for “doing church.” I searched for an existing congregation that would rent us their sanctuary for Sunday-afternoon services and found one at Capitol Hill United Methodist. By now we were a wide-ranging and diverse team made up of a public school teacher, a devoted homeschool mom, a law school student, the director for a U.S. Marine training program, a lawyer working for a U.S. senator, an inspector for the Environmental Protection Agency, and a forensic accountant for the FBI. Together we implemented a nursery, a children’s church, a Sunday school, and even a youth department. On the outside, National Community Church was in every way a “normal” church, but inside we were defined by certain core convictions that set us apart from other congregations. The sanctity of life was our nonnegotiable guiding principle.
At this stage of my ministry I still harbored an inner conflict. The pastoral side of me just wanted to care for souls, but my political ambitions were quickly gaining control over my way of seeing the world. The measurement of a Christian, in my mind, was no longer Jesus and his timeless Sermon on the Mount, but fealty to a party, its platform, and its personalities. More than proclaiming the gospel, I wanted to keep our pro-life, pro-family message on the front pages.
In two short years, President Clinton had accomplished a great deal in attacking our pro-life movement, culminating in the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, which he signed in May 1994. The law was designed to make it impossible for us to exercise the time-honored and constitutionally protected right of protest by strictly limiting our access to clinics. This law eliminated any gray zone that might have existed and effectively criminalized what we had been doing for years. And it worked. Over time, FACE would all but put Operation Rescue out of business. It still existed—Randall was still demonstrating—but the wind had gone out of its sails, its previous adherents had found more mainstream ways to advocate for life, and donations had dried up. There was a shell of an organization, however, one that never fully disappeared.
We were all forced to devise new tactics in our pro-life advocacy, and I, for one, found that to be a relief. I had matured and looked back on all the arrests and the court confrontations with some pride—we had succeeded in bringing the subject of abortion into the mainstream conversation—but I harbored some regret for the toll that it had taken on Cheryl and our family. We were beginning a new life, and with it came the need to come up with new approaches to address this existential crisis in our country.
Increasingly, I thought about the families of aborted children, often seen as only bit players in a much bigger drama. There was at least a father to every mother, and sometimes siblings to the unborn children. On January 22, 1995, the twenty-second anniversary of Roe v. Wade, my new church held the first National Memorial for the Preborn and Their Mothers and Fathers. We invited guests to acknowledge the value and dignity of every human life, and to grieve if they had been touched by the loss of abortion. To attract the media, we included a tiny casket containing the remains of an aborted child. We also invited members of Congress. We knew most would not appear, but all we needed was one or two. We thought that by putting the casket in the same room with sitting members of Congress we would be guaranteed coverage in the major papers. And we were right: radio, TV, and print media swarmed our event. We deemed it a great success, but on Monday morning I received a call from Dick Stetler, the pastor of the church we were renting space from. His voice was strained. His church leadership demanded we restrain our pro-life activities and keep a very low profile. I said no. A few days later we were told we could no longer use the facilities.
I had to find a new home for our fledgling congregation. We soon settled in a decrepit elementary school right on the border of a dangerous neighborhood in Southeast Washington, D.C. It was a neglected and desolate place, but at the front of each classroom, near the chalkboards, were prominent white-and-blue signs that read “Thou Shalt Not Kill.” To see the Sixth Commandment, the most succinct summation of the reasons for our Operation Rescue work, in every class of a public elementary school in a sketchy part of the city was a sign to me that this was God’s place for us.
As National Community Church settled into its new space, something was stirring inside of me. I looked back with longing to the halcyon days of Operation Rescue, when we demonstrated and faced arrest, to my long walk to Mexico and the deep satisfaction I received from my mission work in the putrid dumps. I had felt this before, way back in Webster, when the staid and worthy demands of parish life left me restless. This time, though, there was another mission field much closer that beckoned. Needy souls were gathered inside the Capitol Building, where the power to change our country resided. If ever we were going to stem the tide of abortion blood, if we were ever going to hold back the runaway train of immorality in the culture—if we were ever going to acknowledge God as we should, and needed to—it was going to be because those who operated the levers of power acted to do it. My little flock was precious but powerless. I would exchange it for members of Congress.