bricks in the middle of dinner

So, decriminalisation of abortion has passed the House in NSW. It’s likely to pass the Senate.

What happens next, Christians? What’s our next move?

I suspect that the hierarchies (Anglican, Catholic, ACL) will just push for it to be revoked. Just go with the good old ‘Thou Shalt Not Abort’, picketing people who go to doctors, or hospital wings with YOUR BABY IS A PERSON TOO, and declaring women who have had or are contemplating abortions as irrevocably emotionally scarred (with a jolly good side helping of ‘God Can Never Forgive You For Killing Your Baby, Unless You Live In Constant Guilt In Which Case, He Is Merciful And Kind But You’re Still DirtyBadWrong’).

Is this a setback or an opportunity? And when I say ‘opportunity’ I don’t mean an opportunity to preach The Good News Of Abortion Is A Sin And You Just Have To Not Do It; I mean the opportunity to Love Our Neighbour. Are we willing to Love Our Neighbour – and let our fellow Christians love their neighbours without getting in there and Telling Them The Good News Of Abortion Is A Sin?

Example: A Christian friend on FB posted a thoughtful piece about abortion – about the balance between the life of the woman and the possible life of a child, and how society had failed the woman when she felt abortion was the only option. It would be a vastly insufficient statement for the people who are ‘NO QUESTIONS, NO PERSUASION; SHE WANTS, SHE GETS.’ But it wasn’t a screed for public consumption, it was a conversation between this woman and the people who read her FB. And one of her friends responded in the same style of conversation; personal, pointing out that the laws are not just for Christians but for everyone – that the options should be there.

A Christian aquaintance promptly posted a counter-argument, didactic, with a ‘tone’. Said acquaintance is a lovely Christian woman, but...let’s just say she once accused me of trying to make a baby gay by giving him a quilt that had a patch which featured some pink. The conversation wasn’t lost, exactly, but the effect was rather like a brick dropped into a dinner party.

I imagine that well-meaning Christians across NSW are, this morning, happily dropping bricks into dinner parties and thinking they’re doing the Lord’s work.

I don’t want to drop a brick into conversations; I want to find ways to build, IDK, a pizza oven out of the bricks and then invite people around to see my pizza oven, eat the pizzas from it, see how it’s useful. We don’t have to be brick-at-dinner-party people, we can be make-the-pizza-oven-and-invite-people-over people. Obviously, it’s so much easier to drop a brick into a dinner party than it is to build a pizza oven – snappy comebacks on social media are so satisfying, how we love to spit them out! (Prov 18:8) - but I’m pretty sure that the pizza oven will get more people over for dinner and make better connections.

Yes, that’s a really mixed metaphor, but it also illustrates the point: we need to do less brick-dropping and more pizza-oven-building. (Or, you know, BBQ grill building; the BBQ at the house I grew up in was a brick niche near the patio, with a grate over it, and a gap to shove the wood in and shovel the ashes out.)

That’s hard work – planning and building something that’s not immediate and more difficult, with no promise of the brick actually being appreciated (although the whole pizza oven might be admired). But people are much more likely to appreciate bricks with a role and a purpose and in an appropriate context; and in the same way, people are more likely to comprehend Christianity as something worth investigating when they’re not having Christian values shoved in their face but are seeing it as a new and different paradigm to the current worldview. Which, of course, requires us to be willing to develop a different paradigm. When the comes to abortion, it’s one in which the emotional, physical, and fiscal needs of women contemplating abortions are considered as well as the child. Which is what I feel my friend on FB was trying to highlight at the same time as she spoke about abortions and the sadness that they had to take place.

Implementing such a paradigm will cost Christians time and energy and effort with no guarantee of return and (possibly more important to your average Christian) no option to paint ourselves as the morally righteous cruelly and casually rejected by worldly sinners intent on celebrating their sinfulness.

I guess I consider that to be part of the ‘take up your cross’ bit of following Jesus.