The greatest need for mothers with an unwanted pregnancy in not a temporal mind change, but a fundamental heart change that heeds the hope of the Gospel. Choosing life for moms should start with choosing eternal life, through the power of the Holy Spirit, and then choosing to keep the precious child in their womb.     

In this podcast, Scott Brown and Jason Dohm, joined by special guest Brian Ottinger and Anthony Mathenia, discuss the work of Love Life, a pro-life outreach ministry that exists to unite and mobilize the church and create a culture of love and life that will result in the end to the abortion and orphan crisis. Love Life hosts regular prayer walks outside abortion clinics across the US, and their House of Refuge Network directs moms to find a church in their area that will not only encourage them to choose life for their baby, but be discipled into the family of God. 

Check out Love Life Ministries or watch their Legalize Life series by Bradley Pierce.

Welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. Church and Family Life exists to proclaim the sufficiency of Scripture. And Jason, we're here today to talk about the scourge upon our world, the abortion movement that continues to rage in various ways, and We want to talk about how churches can mobilize themselves to be involved in proclaiming the truth of the scriptures, to proclaim the gospel, and to rescue the perishing. We need to talk about it, and we need to do things about it. And that's why we have these guys here, because they do that, right?

So we have Brian Ottinger here from Convergence Church in Charlotte from the great state of North Carolina, and Anthony Mathenia, Christ Church in Radford, Virginia. Both of these guys have worked for years in this area. One of the interesting things about our churches, and actually the churches that are in the Church and Family Life Network, there are about 600 of them, so many of them are the only churches that are out at the abortion clinics weekly. And I don't know why that is. I think maybe one time you said it's because they love families.

Darrell Bock They're baby lovers. Jay Smith They love babies, and so they want to be involved in that. But it really is an interesting phenomenon that Maybe it has to do with a high view of Scripture, and maybe it does have to do with a high view of life. But anyway, these two guys have been laboring for a long time. Brian Odinger works with Love Life, which is a ministry that helps to mobilize local churches.

And so, we want to hear from Brian, and then also how Anthony has worked through this over the years, and how he's working with Love Life, and just encourage us to be a part of that kind of effort. So, Brian, tell us about Love Life. Yeah, thank you guys for the opportunity. I've been a partner of what formerly was the national conference family integrated church network since our inception have benefited from y'all's work and been blessed by just, you know, your thoughtful provocation of the family and the emphasis on that. And so I just want to say thank you brothers from the onset.

Um, Love Life is a ministry that exists to unite and mobilize the church to create a culture of love and life that will result in the end to the abortion and orphan crisis. And so all of that to say we are trying to equip churches to work together to become a safe place for moms and dads who find themselves and unexpected and even unwanted pregnancies to run to instead of run from. The way that Love Life does that is by creating a really a pattern, a process for churches and pastors that don't have to like reinvent the wheel, so to speak. So, uh, what I love about, you know, the particular network we're in is that. You know, Most of the churches, like you said, are already doing something.

Pastor Anthony is a great example. When we started expanding Roanoke, his church was one of the, it was like low-hanging fruit. Hey, will you partner with us? For him, it was like, why wouldn't I partner? And so we want to go out to the churches that are already doing something to create that network.

We have a current strategy called the House of Refuge Network, where we're trying to get 1000 churches across America to basically become house or refuge churches in their city. Um, and we actually put these churches on an interactive map. So if a mom's looking for an abortion provider, we have some search engine optimizers that will redirect her to this website. And she can find your church and come to your church and come learn how She can not only choose life for a baby, but be discipled into the family of God. And so, yes, we wanna go after the churches like ours, but we really also wanna go after the churches who have historically done nothing.

And we found that in this work, there's a lot of pastors, There's a lot of churches that are pro life in word and but not necessarily. Indeed, and so we want to take these churches from just being pro life to be proactively standing for life. Whether that's you know, Abortion Center ministry outside of the abortion center offering the hope of the gospel and the help of the church or post abortive counseling or raising them up to become foster care or adoptive parents or really to raise up disciples who help disciple these moms so there's a variety of things we do. Hopefully you can share our link, lovelife.org, with everyone who's watching. But another interesting thing I'll share – Hey, just – hey, Brian, just one second.

I want to go back – I want to go back to how I first heard of Love Life. It was through Jason. He was telling me about an event that you guys organized. Jason, why don't you tell us about that event? Jason Yeah, so for the last two years, the church where I'm serving has participated in a prayer walk on a Saturday.

Love Life organizes it, and it's really well organized, I really appreciated how kind of professionally it's handled from start to finish. But what it ends up being is a great first exposure for people who haven't been outside the clinic before. So if you haven't been outside the clinic before, there's some trepidation that comes with that. You really don't know what you're in for. This is a non-threatening way to go, to pray, to hear what Love Life has to say about the current circumstances that we find ourselves in this country without some of the more confrontational things that you would find at the curb of the clinic if you just go and appeal to women.

And so it really is a prayer walk. You go, you're outside the clinic, you're praying there, you're hearing there, you're singing there, and it's a fantastic first exposure for people who were sort of scared to go there, but wanted an opportunity to see what it's like. So Jason, our churches have done a lot of appealing, you know, trying to counsel people, but Love Life has a really interesting strategy. Could you tell us about how they organize those events, so actually to kind of contain extremism and things like that. Yeah, they ask your church to sponsor a prayer walk Saturday and for your church to come out in force and they actually ask you, knowing that some people are used to going to the abortion clinic and reaching out to women.

They ask you for the weeks that you're out there with them not to do that. They really want to be a presence there. Believe me, if you go in force, your presence there is definitely felt. But they've got their own people who they've trained appealing to women while you're out there, but they ask you not to appeal. You're there to be present, to pray, to sing, to experience the warfare that is actually happening at abortion clinics.

Anthony, talk to us about your, I'd like you to talk not just about love life, but just how you've engaged this whole matter, And then tell us about Love Life. Three of my kids were adopted and a couple of them through crisis pregnancy centers. So the idea of doing pro-life work was close to my heart already, but I didn't have a lot of experience. I had good friends who had spent time on sidewalks and ministering in that way, doing rescue type work. But I had never done it until a few years ago and began reaching out to pastors in Roanoke to see who was involved and who wasn't and how to get involved.

And one thing led to another, we ended up being able to obtain property right next door to one of the abortion clinics, which we use now for a hub for those who are ministering there. Actually Love Life has full access to it. They have an office set up there, working out of there as well. But for us, it was just attempting to get the people of the church to realize that there needed to be a voice there. There needed to be an ongoing voice being heard for the voiceless, for the preborn.

And so we began doing that, encouraging others to go and it caught on. And we're a few years out now when we did our prayer walk that Jason was just talking about with Love Life this past spring. We probably had 75 or 80 from our church out on the sidewalk that day and they're gracious with us. We have people there every weekend from the church and on whatever day that they're doing the surgical abortions, we have folks there. And so they're the ones doing the calling out even while the Love Life prayer walks are happening next door or across the street.

It's folks from our church that are there and doing the calling out that they're praying for. And so we appreciate the ongoing prayer support and partnership with love life. One of the benefits of love life is just, they just encourage churches to be involved and encourage, and they set up an atmosphere like what Jason was talking about to where folks can come they can pray and they can see the need and see the benefit and if they see babies saved most people who see a baby saved don't not come back. Right. Brian, what are your thoughts on all this?

What else would you like to say? Yeah, so it's, our founder, he was an entrepreneur. He's a businessman and his father was a pastor. So he just operates from a standard of excellence, trying to give God glory in the process. And I really appreciated that as a pastor who came out there my first time, I was blown away actually at the level of excellence, which you guys just talked about, the encouragement that was to me and to my congregation.

But yeah, to go back to what Jason said, we actually have a code of conduct that we ask people to agree to. We don't try to discourage people from doing sidewalk outreach, but sometimes you guys know if you go outside the abortion centers, it can be a place of just mass confusion. There's people yelling over top of each other. Some people over here saying thing different groups. And so God really used our founder who's a very organized man to help bring order to this ministry.

And by God's grace we have now expanded into over 20 cities and we've seen 5, 000 babies saved as a result since 2016. And it's really through that structure which God can operate. The Bible is structured in such a way that the family flourishes in such a way with order. And so that's one thing that the prayer walks really helped be a mechanism to disciple the church, that things can be done properly, orderly, and with excellence. Something I've appreciated very much about Love Life is that there has never been any sense in which a robust preaching of the gospel is an obstacle to saving babies.

A lot of times when you're talking about pro-life ministries, they would never articulate it this way, but preaching of the Gospel gets treated as something that might keep a baby from being saved, and so they're very reluctant to do it. Certainly don't prioritize it. Love life is very different, in my experience, in that category. Very bold with the Gospel, understanding that there are the lives of babies at stake, but also the souls of mothers at stake, too, and that really we need to be addressing both of those things. Are we there to see babies saved?

Absolutely. Do their mothers have eternal souls? Absolutely. And so not only are they not discouraging a bold proclamation of the gospel, they're engaging in it. Yeah, and that pregnant woman's greatest problem isn't the abortion, is that she has an eternal soul.

And hopefully in her conversion, she'll come to her senses. So Brian, please let your team know how thankful we are and how much easier that makes for us to wholeheartedly support what you're doing. I will definitely do that. Yeah, I think what we're seeing with organizations like Love Life that continue to pop up and be an encouragement to local churches is getting away from the traditional pro-life movement with the emphasis of the gospel. I think that's one of the primary things that's missing from the pro-life movement and moving more in the direction of abolition and completely abolishing abortion And Love Life promotes that and is all for that.

And I'm encouraged on with the number of fronts that we see movement on throughout the country right now with regard to abolishing abortion. So Brian, can you tell us a little bit about what Love Life is on the precipice of in terms of supporting legislation? Yeah, so just from the onset I want to share that we haven't always really been that engaged legislatively. Primarily, we were just a mobilizing, activating organism for the church. There was a lot of people not doing anything.

And so, but there was a lot of us behind the scenes that you know, in our mission statement alone, it says we want to see an end to abortion, not abortions. And so we've developed a relationship, and I've had a good relationship with Bradley Pierce, who you guys are very friendly with. And so we brought Bradley Pierce in in January. It's taken us a long time. We have a huge thing called Life Ride going on right now.

But we finally edited and parsed down the videos in bite-sized formats where Bradley is going to be teaching a thing we call legalized life, which is really about the constitutional, the logical, and the biblical approach that every human being, regardless of the stage of their development, is created an image of God and is of equal value and of equal protection. And so we're releasing this. You can also find that on our site, lovelife.org, slash, legalized life. And it's really a simple way that people can get involved, primarily becoming not just voters, but educated voters, and then engaging their legislators. And then if God calls them to, and they feel led by God to do this, to engage, to become a legislator, which is a very difficult thing to do, because one of the religions of the left is.

Politics and it's very well funded, so it's hard for guys like us in essence to know what to do, and especially didn't have funding to do it. But we have partnerships with, you know, Jeff Durban, Dennis, Sir, Farti, Zach, Lauten, Slogger, those guys out in action for life that are really helping kind of do the heavy lift. And so we're just trying to give people a framework in which they can learn from and then point them to the subject matter experts such as Bradley Pierce, but that's going to become available real soon. It's actually available now. And by the time this podcast comes out, it'll be fully available.

That's great. I've been a friend of Bradley for over 20 years. And he thinks biblically. He understands the law. He's a very sharp attorney.

So let's give a link to those sessions. I highly recommend anything Bradley would do and hopefully people can start seeing those quickly. So yeah, thank you so much for doing that with Bradley. So brothers, there's a big misconception that the Supreme Court striking down Roe versus Wade was some sort of a finish line. Actually, it's exactly the opposite.

It's the starting line. Most pro-life legislation that was passed prior to that point was struck down and rendered irrelevant because the Supreme Court was viewing everything through the precedent of Roe versus Wade. Now that that's out of the way, you can actually begin to do things legislatively that would be effective. And to the point that Brian was making earlier, what we need to be shooting for is the end of abortion, not the end of abortions, where we just try to minimize them incrementally over time is now is the time really to go for personhood legislation, meaning that the human being inside the womb is afforded all of the protections that a person outside of the womb is. Really nothing short of that should be our target.

Any final thoughts you guys have for this? We're here to encourage churches to get involved with Love Life and any other helpful ways. Yeah, I'll just share real quick again, just going back to my earlier statement about the House of Refuge Initiative. A lot of people don't know, but I think it's the largest abortion center, the most active is actually in Charlotte, North Carolina. Prior to Roe versus Wade being overturned, they were doing 40 to 50 abortions a day on a busy day, and they don't do any sort of other STD checks or anything.

It's only an abortion mill. And since Roe versus Wade was overturned, we now have seen that number double. So it's 80 to 100 a day, 80 to 100 babies who are creating the image of God, who are being slaughtered. And many of these children are from states like Tennessee and Georgia, people driving from West Virginia, right? Uh, this, this money-making clinic in Charlotte, uh, does very well with marketing.

And so they they're marketing to all these surrounding states. And so what happens is by God's grace, we have sidewalk counselors out there every day of the week. We're seeing record numbers of babies being saved. But our goal, again, isn't just to save babies, but to make disciples. So we want to point these moms back to churches, healthy churches, that are biblically ordered, Christ exalting, Even the family integrated church for me is the, the prime candidate for churches.

I want to point them to. And so we don't, we don't currently have a huge network, uh, in the family integrated network. So I'd love to see family integrated network come on board with love life and be those churches that we can send those moms to, because here's the thing, Scott, I'll tell you this we've seen moms choose life. And then a year later, come back to the abortion center. So what they don't need is a temporal mind change.

They need a heart change. And that only comes through the preaching of the gospel and being invited into the family of God and discipled into the ways of Jesus. So that would be my biggest hope and plea, is that anyone who's watching this, whether you're involved the slightest way, or even like a church like Pastor Anthony's, we'll just join our network so we can start sending mobs to your church for the purpose of discipleship and kingdom advancement. Yes, indeed. That would be really wonderful.

Anthony, any final thoughts? I would say amen to what Brian has said. Be involved in the work of saving babies and saving souls at the abortion clinics, either going out there, praying for those who go, supporting them in some fashion. But it is an expectation and an obligation for us as Christians in our culture to be fighting for the sake of the Kingdom at the abortion clinics. So here's an appeal for parents to make this part of their parenting.

What do I mean by that? The curb at the clinic is a war zone. There's lots of sign language, the one finger salute. There are a lot of new words that homeschoolers aren't learning in their homeschool curriculum. Actually, parents are trying to make their homes into a little slice of heaven, and amen to that.

But your kids can grow up in that context thinking that the world is like that, which is no service to them and no service to the world. We actually live in a war zone, and we need them to be in the war zone at our elbows, not after they leave our homes, but while they're in our homes so that we can explain exactly what's happening. Not everybody loves God. Not everybody loves the Bible. People need to be rescued.

People need to be saved. This is the perfect place to sort of introduce our children into the war, because it is the reality that we're living in, and it's a great way to introduce your kids to it while they're there at your elbow, and they can hear you appeal with the gospel to people who desperately need it. Yes, sir, yeah, amen. Well, thank you, brother, so much for joining us. And I pray God really prospers the ministry in Radford and also, Brian, across the United States growing your network of churches and I really really pray that happens and maybe maybe this podcast will inform a few other people about it so thank you thank you so much really appreciate you thank you it's so it's so God has put the church in the world to proclaim the truth and to cry out for the defenseless and actually to cry out for innocent blood.

And these brothers are so engaged in that, and I'm so thankful. But thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast, and I hope to see you next time. Thanks for listening to the Church and Family Life podcast. We have thousands of resources on our website, announcements of conferences coming up. Hope you can join us.

Go to churchandfamilylife.com. See you next Monday for our next broadcast of the Church and Family Life podcast.