This transcript is taken from a daily program originally aired on May 26, 2023. To listen to the program, please click HERE.
Isaac Crockett: Well, hello and welcome to the program. I’m Isaac Crockett, and joining me today as co-host is Dr. Joseph Green. He’s the pastor of St. Paul Missionary Baptist Church in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Joe, it’s great to have you on. I know that you stay busy with a lot of different ministries as well as the church ministry, but thanks so much for making the time and being on this program with us today.
Joe Green: Oh, great. Isaac, it’s my pleasure to be back with you guys again. I missed being on the air with you and Sam and the rest of the crew.
Isaac Crockett: Well, today we’re going to be interviewing one of your good friends and a good friend of Sam Rohrer as well and a lot of the folks listening have heard them not just on our program, but on a number of different TV programs and things. And so our honor today to have our special guest, Bishop Dean Nelson, National Chairman of the Douglass Leadership Institute, and also the Vice President of Government Relationships with the Human Coalition and a number of other groups as well, and churches and things. Bishop Nelson, thank you so much for taking time in your busy schedule to be with us to talk about important issues today.
Dean Nelson: It is a deep honor to be part of you and definitely have been huge fans of both Sam Rohrer as well as my good friend, Joe Green. Thanks so much for the opportunity.
Isaac Crockett: Well, Dean, we have a lot of questions we want to get into and pick your brain on all sorts of things, but before we go into some of that, a lot of our listeners are already very familiar with you and some of the different groups you work with, and some of our other guests have worked closely with you. But could you just explain the purpose of the Douglass Leadership Institute for us, go into some of that? And maybe also introduce some of what you do at the Human Coalition, because I think a lot of our folks have a familiarity with you from some of the things you’ve talked about with the Douglass Leadership Institute, but it’d be good to be reminded and then to hear some of what’s going on right now too with the Human Coalition.
Dean Nelson: Yeah, man, thank you so much. Yeah, so the Douglass Leadership Institute was started back in 2015 really to kind of carry on the legacy of the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass. One of my famous greatest quotes from Mr. Douglass was he said that, “I have one great political idea. The best expression of it I have found in the Bible. It is in substance, ‘Righteousness exalts a nation- sin is a reproach to any people.” And Frederick Douglass was an abolitionist, most people know. He was also a minister, a licensed minister of the gospel, but his favorite book was the Bible, and he had a profound encounter with God when he was a teenager that left an indelible impression upon him that ultimately would kind of lay the foundation for the cause of ending slavery and other things that he fought for. So we seek to kind of continue in that same legacy of righteousness and justice at the Douglass Leadership Institute.
We’re based here in the Washington DC area. We have staff across the country. Our tagline is righteousness, justice, liberty, and virtue. And we basically do our work through round tables with community leaders and religious leaders, many pastors. We do forums around the country on important issues like strengthening the black family, on meaningful criminal justice reform. We do programs around the country on economic opportunity and also educational freedom. So those are kind of like the four buckets that we do programming in. And over the last five years, we have worked in 23 states, we’ve done over 500 programs, and we’ve engaged with over 6,000 community leaders helping to train and equip them to be more effective in engaging people, really citizens from a Biblical worldview. So that kind of gives you a little bit of an idea of what we do there day in and day out at the Douglass Leadership Institute.
Joe Green: And I know you do some tremendous work and especially have worked on a couple of things with you, and especially think that it’s vitally important to talk about how we strengthen the black families. But from a historical perspective, and I love Frederick Douglass as well, one of my favorite historical figures, and I think one of the most important historical figures for this country. Not just black Americans, but America as a whole. And with that being said, another thing that I think is vitally important for us too as a nation to celebrate is Juneteenth. And can you tell us a little bit about the upcoming Juneteenth Jubilee that you have going on?
Dean Nelson: Oh, man. Thank you for that, Joe. Yeah, so over the last… even prior to Juneteenth becoming a federal holiday, we were advocates of Juneteenth. Some states like Texas has had it as a holiday for decades, but we felt like that it was important to call attention to this important holiday. If you remember back to Frederick Douglass gave a famous speech, I believe in 1852 in Rochester, New York, “What to the Slave is the 4th of July?” And a lot of advocates for black rights and things like that love to choose that speech Frederick Douglass talking about, because he really challenged America. I mean, he ripped America because he is like, “Why am I celebrating this holiday? This is not a holiday when millions of black people are still enslaved.” But the point is that that was Frederick Douglass then, but he would give many more speeches after that and after what we now celebrate as Juneteenth, because America had made progress.
And as important as the 4th of July is, and we love and celebrate that great day of independence, we feel like that it’s also important to highlight the importance of what happened when slaves didn’t know that they were free. And it took the Union Army to come to Galveston, Texas to let them know, “You don’t have to work on these slave plantations anymore.” And so that’s kind of like the holiday. And we will celebrate this year on Juneteenth here in the Washington DC area as we have done over the last five years by drawing attention to that great holiday, but celebrating community leaders, particularly black and white Americans who have done a lot kind of in the tradition of righteousness and justice. So some of the people that have won that award in the past, Joe, you would know as Jeron Smith who did a lot of great work on criminal justice reform with President Trump, the great legendary Bob Woodson, who has been just an icon and a great example for many of us.
Kay Coles James has won that award, and we have a great number of people that’ll be doing that. So that’ll take place here in Washington DC as a luncheon on Juneteenth, and we’re really excited about it. We’ve got a great group of sponsors like The Heritage Foundation, Liberty University, Hillsdale College, and others. So we’re really excited about that day.
Isaac Crockett: You know what, Joe, I’ll have you maybe talk to him a little bit more about that when we come back from this break. We’re about to go into the break to describe a little bit about Juneteenth because as pastors, I think it’s a great object lesson of when we are freed from sin to the shed blood of Jesus Christ, there was a lot of sacrifice that went in when you think about what happened in the whole Civil War, Jesus Christ was sacrificed for our sake. But if we don’t know about it, if we don’t hear it, if we don’t accept it, then we’re living as slaves to sin and what it physically here in America that the Juneteenth celebration, there’s so much, so many good things to get out of that. We want to talk a little bit more about that and segue into some other questions for you.
I think we have enough for three or four programs, just about one or two of these topics. So hold on to your seats as we get ready. We’re going to take our first time out. Here’s some of our partners, and we’re going to come right back and have a lot more questions for Bishop Dean Nelson and talk about some of these important topics and look at the most basic right of all, the most basic freedom of all, and that is the right to life, the right to be born. And we have so much to talk about today. We’ll be right back on Stand in the Gap today.
Welcome back to the program to this Friday edition of Stand in the Gap today, and my co-host today is Dr. Joseph Green. Our special guest is Bishop Dean Nelson. And Joe, we were just asking Dean because they have a special Juneteenth celebration, the Jubilee celebration this year, but you’ve had a whole program where you and I have discussed Juneteenth and what it can mean for us as a nation, not as something that’s divisive, but as something that brings us together. Could you talk a little bit about that and then I want to talk some more with Bishop Nelson about that if he wants, and some other issues we like to get into.
Joe Green: Absolutely. And I love the topic of Juneteenth. Being in Pennsylvania when I was growing up, we didn’t have a lot of celebrations around it, but as I got older and I began to study history more, I thought about what a wonderful celebration that is. It’s something I think that all Americans should be celebrating along with July the fourth, because we know that July 4th is when this country became independent. But at the time, July 4th, 1776, slavery was still legal in America. And so in a nutshell, the story of Juneteenth, for those of you who may not be familiar with it, is although the Emancipation Proclamation was passed and went into law, there was some places in the south that hadn’t received the information. And so a Union army went down through the south notifying newly freed slaves that they were no longer enslaved. And of course, the June 19th in Galveston, Texas, the last place that had to be notified that slavery had been abolished, had occurred.
And so that’s where you get the idea of Juneteenth as a celebration. And the reason I say it’s so important is because although we know that this country was founded on certain principles that they hadn’t a hundred percent lived up to when the country was first formed, but there was this effort to begin to move towards fulfilling the promises of our founding fathers that all men are created equal. They’re endowed by the creator with certain inalienable rights. So I think that Juneteenth is something that we could brag about and celebrate as a nation. And I think we’re very unique in regards to the nations around the world because of the efforts that were constantly made in order to fulfill basic human rights for all people.
Isaac Crockett: I love that, Joe. Dean, I want to talk to you there with the Douglass Leadership Institute. You have a lot of things there, but also the Human Coalition is a big ministry that you’re really involved with as well. And you look at the unalienable right of the right to life. And if you have anything more to say about Juneteenth, that’d be great too. But I’d also like to get you to talk a little bit about, you have spent so much of your life talking to people, defending the right to life, educating people about what it really means and what it doesn’t mean, and that’s what you do with the Human Coalition and some of these ministries you’re involved with. So I’d just love to get you to talk about that and to introduce some of those things to us and tell us some about that ministry.
Dean Nelson: Yeah, no, thank you so much, man. Both of these ministries that I’m involved with really just flow out of my personal dedication to Christ, my worldview that has been shaped and formed just as Dr. Green was saying, I’ve pursued and had to come to grips with not just my opinion, but that God has an opinion about all of these areas. And we try hard to search the scriptures to come up with this ethic. And that’s what we’ve done at Human Coalition, this idea of Imago Dei that all of us are created in the image and likeness of Almighty God. And if we use the idea from Jeremiah 1 and 5, it’s not just life at conception, but from a Christian vantage point, God had us in his mind, even from the foundation of the world. So even before, as it says in Jeremiah 1:5, before we were formed, the prophet was formed in his mother’s womb, God had purpose for him.
And so that’s the vantage point that we come from when we talk about these issues at Human Coalition. We believe strongly in protecting pre-born children. We believe that they should have the same protections that everybody has. And my own personal story was I considered myself a pro-choice Christian. When I was in college, I had an encounter with God. I had prayed a sinner’s prayer, but my worldview was still behind the times. I remember going to a little booth on the campus of the University of Virginia and there was a pro-life student sitting behind that booth. And I don’t know why I was drawn over there, but I picked up some literature and she began to ask me my thoughts. And I explained to her that I thought that abortion was fine because it was legal. And then she appropriately asked me the question, “Well, slavery was legal at one point in America. Did that make that okay?”
And that really set me on a trajectory to reevaluate the claim that just because something was legal, it was okay. And I then became a early college pro-life advocate. When I learned more about the disproportionate targeting of abortion in America through eugenics, it also gave me a bigger perspective on this issue and how abortion and population control had been used against black people. Some of your audience may be aware that the founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger once wrote in 1939 in a letter to the Clarence Gamble who was head of the Procter and Gamble fortune that, “We don’t want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population.” She said that, “The minister is the one who can help straighten out this idea if it ever occurs to them.” And so that was kind of how I got involved.
And I’m proud to say that at Human Coalition, we in our short history, celebrated over 25,000 children that have been rescued from abortion. And we do it through a very unique process by engaging with women who are seeking to get an abortion and help to provide them with alternatives. If you look at our logo, there’s a thumbprint, and that thumbprint is a beautiful young lady who is a teenager now. She was from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her mother came in and I think that she was the third person that was rescued through our ministry. And her mother still today with tears in her eyes, tells how grateful she was that she did not go to Planned Parenthood, but that she came into our clinic in the Pittsburgh area and made that heroic choice with all of the challenges that she had facing her. She made that heroic choice to become a mother with the aid of people walking alongside of her.
And that’s really what we’ve done at Human Coalition around the country. One important stat that we highlight is that 76% of women who are seeking to get an abortion say that they would choose to parent if their circumstances were different. And so we try at Human Coalition to be a bridge between her needs and the challenging circumstances that she has so that she will choose life for her pre-born child. So I’m proud of the work that we’ve done, and I’m excited about the new innovative approaches that we’re using around the country, partnering with state legislatures, many of them who have said, “Hey, look, we don’t want abortion. We want to reduce abortion.” And we’ve done that successfully in Texas, North Carolina, Tennessee, Indiana. We’re working in Florida, Arkansas, and Arizona as well. And we also hope to engage with some great folks that are working in the legislature there in the home state where you guys are broadcasting from in Pennsylvania. So that’s part of our desire. Ultimately our vision is to make abortion unthinkable in America.
Joe Green: And that’s great, and you guys are doing some good work and really appreciate the human coalition and all it’s doing to preserve life. It’s always ironic to me that some people that are really against racism and the mistreatment and the marginalization of a certain groups of people are okay with abortion, which we know that those are two branches from the same bitter root. And so I think it’s important to put that in perspective. And the beginnings of abortion or eugenics was ethnic cleansing basically. And Margaret Sanger also considered people of color and other people to be what she called human weeds. And so with that being said, you also mentioned Jeremiah 1, because I’m with you, I have evolved.
I have a similar testimony in my time of prayer. The spirit of God just fell on me and I became passionately pro-life, and even at a time in prayer, I could actually hear babies crying and it really broke me. And so I think it’s something that’s so important for us to as Christians, to take the forefront on to see what is the heart of God for this? Because God doesn’t limit it to the time you’re born. He says, “Before you were in your mother’s womb, I knew you,” and he had a calling and a purpose for each and every one of our lives. And we read that in the book of Jeremiah. So Bishop, can you tell us a little bit about the Jeremiah 1:5 project that was briefly mentioned in our talk?
Dean Nelson: Yeah, man. As you would know, Joe, we have a lot of pastors in America who feel like, “Hey, we don’t really want to talk about abortion because it’s a political issue.” And we’re like, “Hey, look, abortion is not a political issue. Abortion is a moral issue.” And so we really wanted to start to engage more pastors, to equip them to be better prepared to talk about this. You could talk about it from a theological standpoint. You can talk about it from a historical standpoint, a moral standpoint, even a scientific standpoint. And we wanted to equip pastors to better discuss that. So we launched the Jeremiah 1 and 5 project to engage first African-American pastors because the way that the narrative is in this country, you would think that all black people were pro-choice, liberal, leftist, but that’s not true. That’s kind of how the media has spun it. You have black Americans are… if you break down different demographic groups, they’re more likely to go to church, more likely to read their Bible, more likely to be in Bible study than any other ethnic demographic in our country.
Isaac Crockett: Bishop Nelson, I’m going to interrupt right there. I’m sorry we’re coming into a hard break here, but we want to talk more about that and look at who the real victims are when we talk about the supposed pro-choice or pro-abortion. We have much more to go on this program on Stand in the Gap today. We’ll be right back.
Welcome back to this program. I’m Isaac Crockett and co-host today is Dr. Joseph Green, and we’ve been talking with someone who’s been on our program before, Bishop Dean Nelson with the Douglass Leadership Institute and the Human Coalition, and just so many things to talk about and so much information on every one of these questions we could spend a lot longer with, but it’s been a good beginning of the program. It’s hard to believe we’re already halfway through. Before we go back to peppering Bishop Nelson with more questions, just want to go to our program producer real quick. Actually, it’s his birthday today. Tim, thanks for being here on your birthday, but I wanted to see if you could give us some information about things going on at the American Pastors Network and Stand in the Gap media.
Tim Schneider: Well, thank you very much, Isaac. I am here wearing my birthday hat today, but you can’t see it because it’s radio. But I can guarantee you I have some type of hat on my head. But I wear many hats around here. So I’m very happy to be able to tell you about the things that are happening here behind the scenes at the American Pastors Network. We’ve been talking about it all year long. Return to God, Letter to America from god.org, 23 minute video. Go and check it out at our… excuse me, man, excuse me, my throat got clogged. Letterfromgod.org is a site you need to go to. Letterfromgod.org, you can see a 23 minute video, and there’s lots of other great resources there, that website letterfromgod.org. Also, we have two great websites, americanpastorsnetwork.net and standinthegapmedia.org.
Go and check out archives of radio and TV programs, other great things, articles written, lots of resources there on the americanpastorsnetwork.net website. You can also sign up for our e-newsletter. We do not inundate your inbox with spam, but we’ll send you information about the ministry that you might find useful. One of the really cool things that you get once a week is a recap email of the previous week’s TV programs and radio programs, and it’ll give you an opportunity to hear some clips, read a transcript and some other great things. You can also sign up for an e-newsletter about how to pray for our ministry. So go and check that out. If you have not signed up for e-newsletter, americanpastorsnetwork.net and look for the e-newsletter option to be able to sign up. Also, we encourage you to please pray for this ministry.
Nothing happens without prayer. We believe it’s the most powerful thing that can happen to allow God to be able to do the things that He wants to do through us, and hopefully we can be obedient to Him. So please pray for us, pray for this ministry and everything that’s going on. And if the Lord has blessed you through this ministry and you have some financial resources, please consider giving. No amount too big, no amount too small is too much. So please give financially if you can to what we’re doing here, and we believe that the Lord will bless you because of it. So like I said, Isaac, today is my birthday and another year older, hopefully another year wiser, we shall see. But I will go ahead and send it on back to you.
Isaac Crockett: Well, thank you, Tim, and happy birthday. Well, as we go back to this topic, looking even as we talked about the freedom that slaves had, but they didn’t know they had it until Juneteenth, when the last of the slaves were told by the Union soldiers, and we’re talking about the sanctity of human life, and we were talking about Jeremiah 1:5, where we know that God knows us before we were even born, we were still a person even in the womb, no matter how small we are, that personhood, that sanctity of human life. And when we talk about abortion or pro-choice, things like that, there are so many victims involved. And of course there’s the human, the baby whose life is taken. But many times, and Bishop Nelson, I’m so glad you said this, you said the vast majority of women interviewed about abortion say if their circumstance was different, they would prefer not to have an abortion.
And I think of a good friend of our program, a personal friend of mine, a friend of both of you too, Tony McFadden, she’s spoken at a lot of big gatherings, been involved with human coalition and different programs like that. But as a teenager, she felt pressured largely by her boyfriend and by pressures and didn’t want her parents to know. She felt pressured into abortion, goes to Planned Parenthood, they give her a pill that almost killed her. It killed her baby, and almost took her life too. God did an amazing work in her life. And later on, years later, they both came to know Christ and came back together. But those things are happening. But then there are men. I’ve had many men come up to me after a sermon where I spoke about abortion and they’re crying and they’re telling me, “I still have guilt decades later from a wife or a girlfriend that I pressured her or helped her to get an abortion. And I still have that on my conscience.”
And so Bishop Nelson, I guess what I want to do is to ask you why it’s important that we understand that abortion not only kills the unborn baby, but there are devastating physical, emotional, and spiritual things to the mothers and to other people involved. Could you talk about that a little bit?
Dean Nelson: Without a doubt. When you think about what really occurs with an abortion, whether or not a mom fully understands what’s going on, you have some younger teenage mothers that get pregnant that don’t fully understand the biology of what’s occurring, that this is a real life that is inside of their body. But when you think about what has actually taken place, there has to be trauma, guilt, and psychological emotional damage that’s done when a person really comes to grip with they have just taken the life of their pre-born child. And again, not everybody sees it that way, perhaps right when it happens, but at some point they will grow to know that that’s literally what took place. And there are plenty of studies that show the emotional, the mental darkness that many women go into after this act has occurred. And so at Human Coalition, one of the things that we try to do as we engage with women who are pursuing an abortion, even if they choose to terminate that pregnancy, we will walk with them as long as they allow us to.
We will provide counseling and encouragement, healing. We ultimately try to get them in into a community of faith where there are other Christians that can come around to provide support and help so that they can turn their life over to Christ and that this is a new beginning for them and that they don’t have to fall into the trap of what they did before. But you’ve also highlighted and mentioned there are many men. I have talked to numbers of them. I’ve read in Christian counseling literature, the pain, the turmoil that they have gone through.
The President of Human Coalition, Jeff Bradford is working on a book right now about his story with his wife. They got bad advice, they were engaged and they got pregnant, and he went to a person in his life, his father, quite honestly, and he encouraged them to go get an abortion. And the pain of that still rests with them today. However, in Christ, the redemptive story is Jeff is now leading one of the largest pro-life organizations in the country and sees the value of human life and really is passionate about every child that we possibly can save by giving the mother the right information, not the bad information that he got when he was making that decision with his wife.
Joe Green: And that’s a great point, and I think that as Christians, we should recognize the true healing occurs when we allow Christ to heal our hearts and transform us. I had a similar story, I won’t go into it now, but when I came to the realization that it was what it was, I had been given bad advice and didn’t understand the depth of what abortion represented. And then when I did, I had that spiritual rebirth, if you will, in that area of my life. But the healing only occurred because of Christ in my life and understanding forgiveness and the redemptive value of Jesus. And so with that being said, me and you have had a conversation not long ago, and some of the polls suggest that the reason Pennsylvania’s Governor race went the direction it was, was abortion was a big topic. And so we know that we had one candidate on the Republican side who was pro-life and even suggested the criminalization of abortion, which I’m not a big fan of that aspect of it, but what advice do you have for lawmakers considering criminalization of abortion?
Dean Nelson: Yeah. No, I think that it’s an important question. What I would say, particularly for those elected officials, I’m looking over my shoulder with Frederick Douglass. Frederick Douglass was an abolitionist, but he understood and knew that there was a process to ending slavery in America. So he had the zeal and to know that it was wrong every day, to have one person to say that they owned another person. But yet you have to win hearts and minds. He went through a legislative process. He did many things. One was by challenging President Lincoln to allow black men to fight in the Union Army. Why? Because he knew that it would be harder to say that these men who would die for their nation, they could not have the right to vote. But my point is that there was a progression. As wrong as we knew that that was, there still was a progression.
Look, God is sovereign over all things, and He still has His word is very clear, but yet He allows us to participate in this process. He calls us co-labors. And so I use that as a backdrop to my perspective on this issue with abortion. I pray, as you guys do all the time to see abortion ended in America. One strategy is by changing laws. And if you’re in a state and you know that people have not caught on to that same principle about let’s say, to eliminate abortion completely, then you’ve got to make your case to winsomely convince people that this is the right position.
And I think that if we go so far as to put the cart before the horse by emphasizing that we need to criminalize because we do see it as a crime. I mean, we know that the taking of innocent human life is against the moral law of God. But even in the moral law of God, there are different gradations. There’s a different penalty in the Bible for first degree murder than there is for accidental murder. There are different penalties for those things. And I look at this, at Human Coalition, we have never advocated because of our strategy of supporting women, we’ve never advocated for criminalization for abortion. And the question is criminalization for whom? Is it for the doctors who are the ones who are the most knowledgeable and have sworn an oath to do no harm? Is it for the abortion provider?
Isaac Crockett: Well, Bishop Nelson, those are all such good questions that have to be thought through, talk through. We’re going to take our break here, come back for our final segment as we look at the real victims of abortion.
Welcome back to the program. And as we were talking about at the tail end of our last segment, the real victims in abortion go beyond just the baby whose life is taken. Everybody involved, as they learn what’s really going on, they suffer the consequences. But especially those young mothers who are going through this, and in many cases, they really don’t really want the abortion, they just feel like they have no other option. And so Bishop Nelson, I just wanted to have you kind of finish up what you were thinking there as, there’s so many things to think through that you’re doing at the Human Coalition as you’re talking with lawmakers and helping influence laws on the statewide level all over the nation. But there’s a lot to think about when it does come to, who is the criminal involved here, who’s the victim involved? And if you could just maybe finish some of your thoughts on that.
Dean Nelson: Yeah. No, I think it’s an important point that our broad pro-life community has to be thinking about. But yet Human Coalition, because our emphasis is advocating for women because we know, as I stated, 76% of women who are even seeking to get an abortion say that they would choose to parent if their circumstances were different. So we would never advocate for criminalizing abortion, particularly for women. I do think that there is a discussion certainly that can be had if in a state abortion is not legal, and you have doctors that are actually performing abortions or organizations that are sending abortion pills into the state, I think that they should be held accountable. But I believe that when it comes to the women, we treat that as very different simply because many of them are being forced, as you stated, many of them are getting bad information, and we believe that they deserve to be served and helped.
95% of the women that come into Human Coalition’s doors say even if they decide to get an abortion, they say that they would choose to give our information to a friend and refer us to a friend or a family member because of how they were treated. We are in the service industry serving as Christ would for these populations that are often overlooked and marginalized. And that’s why I’ll close by saying we were really proud of our work in Texas before they passed their Heartbeat Act.
And now even after Roe has returned to no abortions, we were proud that the state had appropriated over a hundred million dollars to help work with women that are in that valley of decision. We believe that women should be helped, should be served. And so far, those programs that we’ve been engaged with in Texas have gone very well in serving women. I believe that there’s a proper role of government to help the somewhat of a safety net for those who are in very difficult times. And we’ve worked with other groups to make sure that we move them to a place of independence so that they’re not stuck in a dependency situation with the government and with the state.
Isaac Crockett: Well said. For those who are listening who are maybe wanting more information, either about the Douglass Leadership Institute or for the Human Coalition, we’re just barely getting the tip of the iceberg today. There’s so much more, and even during the breaks as we talk, I just think, “Oh, I wish everybody could hear what you’re saying.” What are maybe some websites that you could point them to where they could find out more information about these ministries?
Dean Nelson: Yeah, I would definitely encourage them to go to humancoalition.org. That’s humancoalition.org where we have videos that winsomely talk about the work that we do, powerful testimonies of women that have come into our centers and to our clinics. They can also find some good information, some articles and things of that nature, and find out how they can support the work of Human Coalition, which is a national ministry. We do have women’s clinics in a variety of states, and we work really well with pro-life pregnancy centers in some states where, like in Texas where we refer our women that we engage with to many of the pregnancy centers that are there. And so we know that it takes a lot of effort and there’s a place for all of us to be able to work together in making abortion unthinkable. If they want more information on Frederick Douglass and the Douglass Leadership Institute, they can find us at dlinstitute.org. That’s dlinstitute.org.
They can find information on our upcoming events like Juneteenth, as well as if they want us to come and to do programming in their state. We can do programming on strengthening the black family programming on economic opportunity that we just did like down in Charlotte, North Carolina, providing valuable information to first time home buyers. There’s a variety of ways that people can get plugged in, and we love coming to states and doing our forums to help educate people on Biblical principle and good policy that matches that Biblical principle. And that’s again, dlinstitute.org. And if they just want some great information on Frederick Douglass, we have one called whoisfrederickdouglass.org, whoisfrederickdouglass.org. Most Americans that know of him don’t know that he was a minister of the gospel.
They don’t know about the great encounter that he had with the Lord. And I’m proud to say that even though our organization has been knocking on doors to help get… providing good information to help get good candidates elected, we are about to embark on an ambitious project to share the gospel door to door and to help develop a Biblical worldview in many of these Americans who say that they’re Christian, but lack of Biblical worldview.
So we’re really excited about that, and we’re going to do that through providing tracks and small videos on Frederick Douglass’s conversion as a young man and his escape from slavery. This is an exciting story to be told, and I think that if people in our country know about Frederick Douglass and his powerful story of conversion coming to Christ, being an abolitionist by the call and ultimately forgiving his master for what he did. That’s the ultimate story of redemption. And I think that that needs to be told in our nation now.
Isaac Crockett: Well, that is excellent, and that is so exciting. We talk so much here on the radio and on TV about Biblical worldview and how so few born again Christians have a true Biblical worldview anymore. And we can talk about politics all day long till we’re blue in the face, but if our hearts don’t change, if we don’t have a renewal where our hearts are renewed by God, our nation is not going to really trust in God and in God we trust, as we say, we won’t until we actually turn to Him and understand His word. And so that is all fantastic. Amen. We want to continue to have you back on to talk more about some of those things as well in the future. And Joe, as we get ready to close the program, could you just talk… we know James says, “Don’t just be hearers only. Don’t just listen and go your way without doing anything, but be doers of the word.” And you’ve worked from Capitol Hill and the White House to Harrisburg in Pennsylvania in your home state, to your neighborhood streets and the community around you and around your church.
And think of what you’ve done, you’ve really been a doer of the word. What would you maybe say to our listeners who… they say, “I know things are wrong in America right now. What can I do? What can I do about it?” What advice would you have for them?
Joe Green: Well, the first thing we have to do is, as you stated, and that as Bishop Dean stated is a Biblical worldview. Before you can get anyone to really move and to do what they need to do, they have to have the right understanding. And so as we pastors and we’re encouraging people to not only read the Bible and study the Bible, but have a Biblical worldview because that’s what shapes our actions. And then our actions have to… we can’t just talk about it, but we have to go out and be the hands and the feet of Jesus. And so whether it’s feeding the homeless and taking care of the widows and the orphans and those type of things, showing compassion for people, because [inaudible 00:38:51] saying is nobody cares what you know unless they know that you care.
And ultimately, everything has to be rooted and grounded in love. And so our motivation to do everything is to be that representation of Christ. A lot of people may not walk into the church, but you can be the Christ that they need to see, whether it’s in the workspace, whether it’s in the community, whether it’s all those type of places. And so we have to be very diligent in the message of the gospel, which is advancing the kingdom of God, which is not just knowing about Christ, but also being able to exemplify Christ in our word and our deeds.
Isaac Crockett: Amen. Amen to that. Thank you, Joe. Well, Bishop Dean Nelson, thank you so much again for being on this program, my co-host, Dr. Joseph Green. This is Dr. Isaac Crockett just thanking all of you for listening. Please keep praying for us. And until next time, stand in the gap today for truth.
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