Home Christian News Pastor Matt Chandler: The Church’s Post-Roe Moment Is Bigger Than Legislation

Pastor Matt Chandler: The Church’s Post-Roe Moment Is Bigger Than Legislation

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Pastor Matt Chandler preaches on June 26, 2022. Screenshot from YouTube / @The Village Church - Flower Mound

In a June 26 sermon titled “A Sober Celebration of Life,” Pastor Matt Chandler challenged Christians to “step up” and push back darkness in a “brutally difficult” world. Chandler, pastor of The Village Church in Flower Mound, Texas, gave that call to action two days after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

Chandler, who heads the church-planting organization Acts 29, prefaced the message by saying he celebrated Roe’s reversal but “did so with a great deal of sobriety.” He tells congregants, “Before you wave those pom-poms, you’d better understand what’s at stake and the moment that we’re in.” The pastor warns, “This had better not be about legislation; this better be bigger than that for us as the church.”

Matt Chandler: ‘Tweeting or Posturing’ Won’t Help

Referring to passages from Matthew 5, Chandler urges congregants to be salt and light, speaking compassionately to abortion supporters instead of vilifying them. “If you give into the compulsion to vilify the other,” he says, “you will harden your heart to the ways Jesus wants to use you to stop the decay and to push back the darkness.”

By putting your “whole self” into the kingdom of God, Chandler says, Christians can mourn over our brokenness and the world’s brokenness—and then receive God’s comfort. The pastor admits our world is filled with “a kind of hopelessness that will rot a soul out,” pointing to the example of a young pregnant woman who drank bleach to try to self-abort. “How hopeless do you have to be to do that?” he asks.

Christians can’t “care for the most marginalized [people by] tweeting or posturing,” Chandler tells listeners. Neither can we quickly or easily fix the problem of abortion by “throwing diapers at it.” But “we’re far more powerful than we think we are,” he says. “As [abortion] was given back to the states, it was also given back to the church.”

Chandler warns that this can’t be merely “a moment of adrenaline” for the church but must be a sustained effort. “You grow in mercy by having your mercy tested,” he says.

God’s Grace Extends to Abortion, Says Matt Chandler

To anyone who has had an abortion, funded one, or been involved somehow, Chandler shares words of mercy and forgiveness. “You have not out-sinned the grace of God,” he says. “You don’t have to carry that” guilt. At The Village Church, he adds, people won’t be “disparaged or hated” for their “backstory.”

Chandler emphasizes that his church has long been active in pro-life ministries, with groups for pregnancy support as well as post-abortion support. During his sermon, he yielded the floor for several minutes to Andrea Brakner, who works with the church’s Young Lives group to assist teen moms and dads.