Kaeley McEvoy, the Fellowship Program Director and Staff Chaplain of Sojourners gave a progressive sermon and posted it on social media. In her rant, she recounted her experience at Planned Parenthood and described how she felt God’s love while there. Social media erupted in response, with many commentators criticizing the female pastor.
“I personally have never felt more known and heard and loved by God than when I entered the doors of a Planned Parenthood in Bleecker Street,” she said. “The declaration of God knitting life in a woman’s womb is used frequently to manipulate a narrative of reproduction which omits abortion as a sacred decision. The misinterpretation of this Psalm has caused harm and invoked shame on an immeasurable number of women.”
McEvoy spoke from Psalm 139: “For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth.” Pro-life activists often cite the passage.
However, McEvoy has an alternative take. “Psalm 139 exposes a relationship with God who knows and loves her children so fully and fiercely that the entirety of their stories, from beginning and end and every threshold in between, is known and heard,'” she added. “I personally have never felt more known and heard and loved by God than when I entered the doors of a Planned Parenthood in Bleecker Streets in New York City.
“That morning, I made the decision to receive an abortion, and I was not alone. I was in the process of being known, but there is a moment at a health clinic when there is only one person who can pass through the threshold of the medical doors,” she explained. “So there I was, leaving my network of care behind and stepping forward with only the God who knew all of the parts by me by my side.”
“Making the decision to receive an abortion was one of the hardest of my life. … And yet, even in that moment of alone, of aloneness, there was never a moment where I felt God’s presence leave my side,” she concluded. ” In the eyes of the other women awaiting procedures on Bleecker Street, there were the comforting and suffering eyes of Jesus reflected back at me in the shock and the phone calls and the insurance paperwork, there was the Holy Spirit providing good comrades.”
“We need a database of churches we can go to that believe this heretical crap so we can stay away, not inadvertently support, and not direct new and hungry believers to,” one X poster identified. Another humorously added, “That’s 2 minutes and 41 seconds of my life that I’m not getting back…you owe me. On a side note, it’s impossible to count all the wrongs in that 2 minutes and 41 seconds.”
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One user pointed out, “My greatest contempt is for the gray-haired man in the foreground, neither turning tables nor getting up to leave. There is one in every such clip. Sitting contentedly, nodding along, conscience seared from years of forsaking prudence.” “So so incredibly sad and evil at the same time,” another user said with regret. Despite all the online backlash, the pastor has refused to recant.
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