Reverend John Ensor could not have known that in one night, the trajectory of his life would change, eventually taking him to the far corners of the world to share the pro-life message to people hungry for the Gospel.
It was during an informal church service that women and men came forward to tell of how their lives had been horribly impacted by abortion. A Baptist minister at a church in inner-city Boston in the late 1980s, Ensor was unaware of the pervasiveness of abortion in his community and was “thunderstruck” to learn that nearly 30% of his congregants had abortions.
Ensor told Live Action News, “I recall a lady who began crying and lamenting for forgiveness for her abortion revealing that she had carried this terrible burden for so many years. Her testimony opened the floodgates, and one by one, others sorrowfully shared their tragic stories. I cried tears of regret at so much suffering. Marriages, relationships had been devastated under my watch.”
He was particularly troubled when a woman disclosed that she had three abortions to pursue her career aspirations. She told of how she had been deceived into believing she could not excel if burdened with a child. Ensor was shattered to discover the wife of a well-loved and well-respected elder in his church had aborted their child prior to their walk with Christ, but he was also grateful for their courage to speak of their experience.
“We all have things in our past we’re ashamed of and are hiding,” Ensor said. “But as a pastor, my job is to help my people to know the will of God. Abortion was never part of my personal life; it was more of an academic subject. My eyes were blinded until the reality of that night, and I realized I had let my congregants down. It was the ‘Day God Lanced a Boil,’ and I vowed to do better.”
Opening pregnancy resource centers to meet a growing crisis
Amid this growing crisis, which Ensor believed resulted from the sexual revolution in the 1980s, he helped to open the first pregnancy resource center in Boston in 1992. Ensor and his church members began serving as sidewalk counselors in front of Planned Parenthood and attended “sit-ins,” all organized at the time by Operation Rescue.
Ensor said, “We were a force of about 300-400 in front of Planned Parenthood. Some of us spent a few days in jail for our activism, but we had a mission: to reach women in crisis at the beginning, that was key.”
Partnering with other Boston area church leaders, Ensor helped to open six more ultrasound facilities while six abortion facilities were shuttered.
His newfound purpose in the pro-life movement steered him to write “Answering the Call: Saving Innocent Lives One Woman at a Time” for Focus on the Family to support those who counseled couples facing unplanned pregnancies. He later authored “Stand for Life” with Scott Klusendorf and “Pregnancy Crisis Intervention.”
“It was my goal to help other pastors lead on the subject of abortion,” Ensor said. “I started encountering other pro-life leaders across the country and soon realized our movement was primarily white and suburban women. It was imperative that we reach minority communities where abortions were occurring at an alarming rate.”
Serving on the board of directors for Heartbeat International in 2006, Ensor sought to launch an urban initiative by partnering with African American and Hispanic leaders to open pregnancy support facilities in minority communities for pregnancy crisis intervention. By determining where abortion facilities were concentrated, Miami was identified as having the most urgent need.
Ensor said, “Since these centers were opened 15 years ago, we’ve rescued 55,000 babies from abortions. From the first day, we’d have six to nine appointments daily. These numbers were larger than in Boston.”
An international pro-life movement is born
Yet Ensor was just getting started. Four years later, his initiative became global when he traveled to visit his daughter in China who was part of a Beijing-based prayer team that had been crying out for God to break the grip of abortion there. He ended up training pastors and assisting them with developing their own culturally based model to rescue babies. Just two years later, Ensor founded PassionLife Ministries to support international efforts at eradicating abortion.
“We mapped out which countries were performing the most abortions and concentrated our efforts there,” Ensor said. “We started in China and are now a worldwide movement training pastors in 27 countries and in 18 languages in Biblical pro-life ethics and providing the tools so their churches can create pro-life models based on their country’s cultural norms.”
For example, in Cuba, door-to-door house calls are common. There, doctors use hand-held technology to perform ultrasounds.
Ensor likens his global pro-life ministry to an “underground railroad of our time.” He is especially focused on Latin American countries where pro-life laws are under attack. In Colombia this past spring, the Supreme Court eliminated abortion regulations.
Ensor said, “Latin American countries have been pressured to change pro-life laws. We are training a staggering number of people in Columbia this year to plant pregnancy support centers as a result.”
The four tenets of Ensor’s pro-life outreach include: treasuring human life, rejecting abortion, experiencing God’s forgiveness, and committing to rescuing the innocent by helping mothers in crisis.
“This is what it looks like to be a pastor,” Ensor said. “Churches overseas are more willing to suffer in the name of Christ and to uphold life than in the United States. When you consider that 97% of abortions are performed worldwide, there’s still a lot of work to be done.”
The “utter silence” of the clergy in the United States is concerning to Ensor. By sharing his story, he hoped to prompt other spiritual leaders to “look under the hood” and examine their own hearts. Ensor noted that since Roe has been overturned, more pastors seem reluctant to speak out against abortion.
Ensor said, “If you look away from what’s happening, you are guilty of shedding innocent blood, because you’re not speaking Biblical truths. I’m inspired every time I travel overseas and see the willingness of people in China and other countries to suffer for righteousness. We need to be fearless in fighting evil with God’s Truth. That’s the only way we’ll make lasting changes.”
