Member Spotlight: Michael and Barb Spencer, Project LifeVoice

Michael Spencer tries to help Bible-based churches plainly call out the evils of abortion as part of proclaiming the Gospel.

The co-founder of Project LifeVoice speaks to pastors’ groups, congregations, and other gatherings about the need for Christian leaders and laity to clearly lay out pro-life facts. He also leads pro-life apologetics workshops across the country and serves as the keynote speaker at pregnancy center banquets.

“Churches need to give voice to the voiceless,” says Michael, author of the book Humanly Speaking: The Evil of Abortion, the Silence of the Church, and the Grace of God. “That means to speak up for the full biological humanity and the full personhood of the unborn child, to speak of them as our preborn neighbors, to treat them as our preborn neighbors, to speak out against this scourge on our land that we call abortion, and to defend and protect the most defenseless among us.”

Ministry at home

Michael’s pro-life ministry starts in his Ohio home.

His wife, Barb, is “very involved in this ministry.” While she is unable to travel much with Michael due to the need to care for their daughter, Katerine (pronounced “Catherine”), She does “all of our bookkeeping, mailings, and social media.”

Katerine, 23, was born in Guatemala with cerebral palsy. The couple adopted her when she was 8.

“She is unable to walk and has almost no practical use of her left hand,” Michael says. “Her right hand is better but lacks fine motor skills. Mentally, she functions at about a 4-year-old level. She is delightful in personality and kind in temperament.”

“Preborn neighbors”

Through Project LifeVoice, Michael hopes to “equip and inspire pro-life ambassadors to speak compellingly and to act sacrificially on behalf of the most vulnerable, most abandoned, and the most oppressed among us, and those are our preborn neighbors who are targeted by elective abortion.”

“I help Christians in general and pastors specifically see their response to abortion as a Gospel issue, as a ‘loving your neighbor as yourself’ issue,” he says.

One of the ways he does this is through his Life Defenders Apologetics Workshop, which aims to “equip pro-life ambassadors to communicate the pro-life message confidently and graciously.” The workshop focuses on the questions “What are the preborn?” and “What makes humans valuable?” It is mainly hosted by pregnancy centers, Right to Life affiliates, churches, Christian schools, and homeschool associations.

Michael also teaches participants how to respond to logical fallacies used in pro-abortion rhetoric “graciously and compellingly.”

The good news is that he is seeing more churches waking up to the abortion issue.

“I speak at a lot of pastors’ lunches and breakfasts every year,” Michael says. “I’ve noticed in just the last year that I’m getting more of those opportunities, and I’m getting bigger audiences at these events. It’s not because I’m anybody. I’m sensing there’s a bit of an awakening on the part of some churches.”

The need for teaching

Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the U.S. Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe vs. Wade in June 2022, has only served to heighten the need for pro-life teaching from the pulpit, Michael says.

“Since the Dobbs decision, really all of hell has been convulsing,” he says. “Many of our opponents have become even more desperate in their crusade to dehumanize the unborn child and to discredit and to malign the pro-life movement and pregnancy care centers.”

The recent midterm election results saw ballot initiatives in five states go against protection of the unborn. That, Michael says, also shows that many Americans “really either don’t care about the abortion issue or do support abortion.”

“The challenge for us now is not to become lazy as a Christian community,” Michael says. “The battle is far from over, and I think the cost of speaking up has increased exponentially. It’s more important now than ever to know how to articulate the pro-life position.”

Pastoral care

Articulation of the pro-life position is what Michael tries to teach pastors and others to do. He first felt the draw to this mission as a pastor in Ohio. He had pastored churches for over 23 years before being invited to join the Georgia-based Life Training Institute (LTI) staff.

“I loved being a pastor,” Michael says. “I wasn’t looking to make a career change, but I had felt very strongly about this issue.”

Michael had served at LTI for eight years when he felt the call to focus more specifically on reaching pastors and churches.

“The doors were opening more and more for me to work with churches and pastors,” he says. “I left with the intention of really wanting to focus primarily on reaching the Church, equipping pastors and Christians in general to give voice to the voiceless.”

He started Project LifeVoice with a pastor from Michigan in 2019. However, that person has stepped away from LifeVoice to focus on personal health issues.

Lack of discussion

Michael believes there are three primary reasons that abortion isn’t discussed from pulpits more often.

• Fear: “Many pastors fear offending church members or being perceived as political.”
• Ignorance: Michael calls it “a failure on the part of some shepherds to know children from their own flocks are being killed by abortion, and to realize how intimately, personally, and deeply abortion is wounding or has wounded people in their own church.”
• Apathy: “Tragically, some shepherds don’t care about their flocks. Jesus had a name for them: He called them hirelings. A pastor in this day and age has no excuse to be silent on abortion. There’s just too much information about what abortion does to children.”

Wise voting

Declaring abortion a sin from the pulpit is only the beginning, Michael says. “We need to know how to equip congregations to make the case for life,” he says.

One way to do that is to train them how to vote.

“I know that’s a really, really unpopular thing to say,” Michael says. “It’s interesting to me, though, that as shepherds we accept the responsibility to teach our people how to do many things: manage their money, raise their children, how to treat their spouse, how to behave sexually. For some reason, though, it’s sort of in the psyche of the church in America that we don’t touch the voting issue. That’s a huge mistake, and it’s doing a huge disservice to the unborn.

“To be clear, I don’t think pastors should be telling their people who to vote for, but I do think they should be training their people to know how to think Biblically when they go into the voting booth. It’s not that we’re single-issue voters, but where a candidate stands on the dismembering, decapitating, and disemboweling of little boys and girls tells me a lot about where that candidate stands on other issues.

“I think thoughtful Christians give greater weight to greater moral issues when we go into the voting booth, but this is not being said in most churches.”

Giving voice to the voiceless

Although most evangelical and Catholic churches are at least pro-life “in name,” Michael says, “few of these churches are willing to actually give voice to the voiceless and to equip their congregations to know how to engage people on this often very divisive subject.”

“I have a particular burden because of my pastoral background for the Church concerning this issue,” he says.

Abortion, Michael says, “is clearly a lethal threat to children, even to children within our own churches.”

“The local church is duty-bound by several passages of Scripture, for instance, Proverbs 31:8, to speak up for those who have no voice,” he says. “And Proverbs 24:11 commands us to rescue those being led away to slaughter.

“When churches are comfortable with their own silence or inaction concerning the least of these, I think a church should be made uncomfortable.”

Hesitance by pastors

Some pastors are hesitant to speak strongly on life issues.

“Conventional thinking is if I speak out against abortion, I’m going to turn people off from the Gospel, but nobody ever says that about other evils,” Michael says. “Nobody ever says, ‘If I preach against stealing, I’m going to turn thieves away from the Gospel,’ or ‘If I preach about adultery, I’m going to turn adulterers away from the Gospel.’ It’s the opposite. If we speak the truth in love, as Paul commanded, then speaking the truth about abortion doesn’t turn people off. It draws them in. They realize ‘I need a Savior, and there is forgiveness waiting for me.’”

Prayer requests

• That God will continue to open doors for Michael’s training.
• That God will use Michael’s efforts to awaken the church to the plight of the unborn and their young mothers.
• For strength for Barb as she cares for their daughter alone when Mike travels.