Six Requests to Shepherds

The watchman, and what he is answerable for

Part Seven turns to church leaders and grounds its appeal not on what is required but on “what is fitting for a man who watches over souls”.

Paul could say at the end of his work, “I am innocent of the blood of all, for I did not shrink from declaring to you the whole counsel of God” (Acts 20:26–27) — and he could say it only because he had held nothing back. The watchman of Ezekiel 3:18–19 is not answerable for the result; he is answerable to sound the alarm. If watchmen stay silent, “that silence is not neutral before God.”

The letter is careful to add why it says this: not to load a leader with fear, but “to honour the weight of your calling, and to promise you that God holds up the shepherd who walks faithfully through hard things.” Teachers “will incur a stricter judgment” (James 3:1) — and that cuts both ways.

It does not pretend the cost is nothing. Wilberforce fought about twenty years before the slave trade was banned and forty-six before slavery itself was abolished, days before he died. The students of the White Rose wrote “We will not be silent. We are your bad conscience,” and were put to death for it. The letter explicitly refuses to compare safe churches to their danger, and borrows only their refusal to stay silent.

Read this part in full in the letter →

The six requests, in the order they are made

“So we ask you for six things. We have put them in order on purpose.”

First, prepare resources before you preach. Gentle, private, gospel-centred help, ready — women for women and men for men — before this is ever taught from the pulpit. The letter says why this is first: “No shepherd should name this wound in public before he has made a place to bring it in private.”

Second, say it plainly in writing — in the statement of faith or membership materials: that human life begins at fertilisation, and that this means standing against abortion, euthanasia and abortifacient contraceptives.

Third, explain the methods. Most members simply do not know what these drugs are built to do. Teach it in plain words and without shame.

Fourth, give a better vision — real guidance on family planning that honours life, helping couples receive children as a gift rather than a danger.

Fifth, pray — for broken hearts, for courage in leaders, for repentance where there has been silence, and for a revival that would make abortion unthinkable.

Sixth, disciple the young, so that the next generation never has to be told this in their forties, “the way we were”.

On church discipline the letter is deliberately restrained. If a member is taught this clearly and patiently and still persists, in time it becomes a matter for ordinary discipline (Matthew 18:15–17; Galatians 6:1) — as faithful churches eventually made the slave trade a matter of membership, but “only after years of patient teaching, not before”. And then, plainly: “this is not where the church stands now… The first and greatest need is simply that they be told.”

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“This is not a gospel issue”

Part Eight takes the objection a careful brother will raise, and grants what is true in it: the sanctity of life is not the gospel itself. “We would never have you preach the sanctity of life in the place of Christ crucified.”

Then it presses the consequence. The gospel calls people to repent and believe (Mark 1:15); repentance means turning from sin; and to turn from a sin a person must first know what it is. “How can a person repent of a thing no one has told him is sin? How can the church be a place of healing if it will not name the wound?”

It also names the move it is guarding against, again through Wilberforce: respectable Christians take the hard commands of Scripture and explain them away until “the pure but strong morality of the word of God is explained away, and its too rigid canons are softened down.” The letter’s charge is that “this is not a gospel issue” can be that same move, “while sounding more gospel-minded than those who name it”.

And it ends the part with the simplest form of the argument: the second great command is to love your neighbour. “Who is a smaller neighbour, or a nearer one, than the child made inside a family in your own church?” He cannot ask for the love he is owed — which is exactly why Proverbs 24:11 presses him on us.

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A call to turn back

Part Nine is, in the letter’s own words, “not information. It is repentance, and the grace that makes repentance safe.”

It returns to Isaiah 1, and insists on reading the whole passage. After “your hands are full of blood”, God does not say so despair. He says: “Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your deeds from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression” (Isaiah 1:16–17). Cease and learn — turn from the wrong and take up the right.

Paul’s two sorrows are set side by side: “godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret, whereas worldly grief produces death” (2 Corinthians 7:10). Worldly sorrow sinks into despair and does nothing; godly sorrow drives us to God and then out to act. So the letter asks that sorrow neither fall into despair nor sit still.

Then it sets the grace down once more — 1 John 1:7, Romans 8:1, 1 Timothy 1:13–16, John 8:11 — and does not take it back: “The church should be the one place on earth where a person sees the full truth about sin and finds the full healing of Christ. Many who once grieved most over this have become, once they knew that healing, the strongest defenders of life.”

The closing ask is modest: look honestly at what the letter says, test it against Scripture and against the makers’ own words, repent where needed, and then lead your people into the light you have found.

Read this part in full in the letter →