Elim Church urges parliamentarians to ‘resist culture of death’

The Elim Pentecostal Church has pleaded with Westminster to honour the sanctity of life from birth to natural death.

In a press release responding to decisions in the House of Commons advancing Kim Leadbeater’s assisted suicide Bill and liberalising abortion law in England and Wales, the Elim Movement warned that these developments undermined the value of every human life.

The statement followed an address by Professor John Lennox at the National Parliamentary Prayer Breakfast on the theme of ‘God in the public square’.

‘God-given dignity’

The denomination, comprising over 400 churches in the UK and Ireland, expressed gratitude “for the work of all parliamentarians” and assured them of its prayers.

It set out the Church’s “deeply held belief in the God-given dignity and worth of every human life” and urged Westminster to “consider the importance of human dignity from conception to natural death”.

Elim also called on both Houses to reject “the belief that a just and compassionate society pits the rights of an unborn child with the rights of their mother, or spends time and money on assisted dying rather than improving palliative care and support”.

MPs, it said, should therefore revisit the decision to decriminalise abortion “as a matter of urgency”, and urged Peers “to engage in rigorous interrogation of the Assisted Dying Terminally Ill Adults Bill”.

Salt and Light

Christian apologist Prof John Lennox told those gathered at last month’s event in Westminster Hall that “we need Christian faith in the public square”.

He warned: “Removing God from the public square does not leave it in some kind of neutrality. No. What happens is that doing God is replaced by doing not God—in other words, allowing the worldview of atheism to dominate”.

He reminded parliamentarians that “the very values that lie at the heart of all thinking about human beings and Western society — whether religious or secular — actually come from the fundamental teaching of the Bible: that all men and women are of equal value and dignity, since they are created in the image of God”.

Prof Lennox encouraged Christians “to be salt and light in the world – to bear witness to the truth by reasoning in the public space, as Jesus and his apostles did”. He added: “And if we don’t speak, then maybe even these thousand-year-old stones will cry out: Imago Dei.”