The ProLife Team Podcast | Episode 5 with John Ensor | Vision of Growing the Team

The ProLife Team Podcast
The ProLife Team Podcast
The ProLife Team Podcast | Episode 5 with John Ensor | Vision of Growing the Team
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The Power of Unity: Enriching and Expanding the Pro-Life Cause

Summary:

Hi, I’m Jacob Barr, and in our recent podcast with John Ensor from Passion Life, we explored a powerful concept: “If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.” This quote, originally from G.K. Chesterton, emphasizes the importance of starting something even without expertise. John elaborated on this, highlighting the necessity of beginners in initiating great movements. We discussed how this aligns with the vision and calling of our pro-life work, inviting everyone to contribute, regardless of their skill level.

A significant part of our discussion centered around the pro-life movement’s evolution and the need for inclusivity and expansion. John emphasized the importance of beginners in the movement, who start with passion and faith rather than expertise. We also touched on the global aspect of the pro-life mission, acknowledging the need to reach and include minorities as key leaders.

We discussed the role of volunteers in sustaining and growing movements. John mentioned that over-professionalizing can alienate potential volunteers. The simplicity and immediacy of involvement are crucial. We also talked about how movements must create and share resources freely for rapid growth and impact.

Towards the end, we delved into the complexities of running a nonprofit, especially in the pro-life arena, balancing different audiences like clients, supporters, and leadership teams. John shared insights into keeping things simple yet effective for beginners, while also striving for professional development.

This conversation was a deep dive into the nuances of initiating and growing a movement, particularly in the pro-life context, and the power of starting small and inclusively.

Transcript:

The transcript was automatically generated and may contain errors.

Jacob Barr :

Hi, my name is Jacob Barr and I am here with John Ensor with Passion Life. And today we’re going to talk about how when something is worth doing, it’s worth doing badly. Welcome, John.

John Ensor :

Good to be with you, Jacob.

Jacob Barr :

So this quote of if something is worth doing, it’s worth doing poorly or badly. I think this is just extremely exciting because it aligns with a vision that I think helps me connect with where I feel called by God to go can you tell me a little bit more about this quote, John?

John Ensor :

Well, the quote is from GK Chesterton, who is famous for being able to say complex things in a very simple and a pithy way. What he was arguing for in this quote is that people. Need to appreciate how beginners get started doing great things and anything that’s worth doing well he’s arguing is worth doing poorly. Meaning getting involved, even if you’re not very good at it yet, is better than waiting for an expert to get to it because there’s a for everyone expert. There are 10.000 thousand non experts and so. You want to create a movement you need to really be able to attract people to your cause who are not experts, and put them into places of impact where they can make a contribution without feeling like they have to become experts or excellent or perfect in everything that they’re doing. Movements don’t grow that way. And whether you’re talking about someone who opens up a donut shop or starts a church or a business. Anything that people do takes initiative more than expertise. Expertise is something that grows along the way. And that’s the point anything worth doing is worth doing badly to begin with.

Jacob Barr :

What sparked my positive reaction to this article you wrote is this lady, Lori Devillez. She prayed at the beginning of this pro-life Team podcast when we were getting things ready. She prayed the prayer of Jabez, which was to increase her territory. But she defined it in a way that was unique it wasn’t about more money or more power or more, you know, a larger influence. Essentially, she defined it as more volunteers on the pro-life team working towards this common goal of helping women and men who are experiencing an unintended pregnancy and who are being marketed to by Planned Parenthood to choose abortion. With this ministry then drawing those people away from abortion and promoting the reasons and benefits of choosing parenting, of choosing adoption and how that will align with long term joy more so than short term relief and so I just think this is very exciting to see this quote and your passion behind it connect with how we are growing this movement, inviting people to join, to volunteer, to become involved, to pray and to provide ministry to those who were trying to serve. I think this quote and Laurie’s prayer pair perfectly together and align with this vision that I believe God is calling us as a group towards and or at least calling me towards, which is to grow the pro-life team and to encourage and find new volunteers in a way that will invite them to start where they are and to not be overwhelmed by people who are experts in a given area but essentially recognizing that we all start on day one we all start as new and it’s OK to make mistakes, it’s OK to, you know, start off as just OK or at a beginning spot. And it’s still good to progress, it’s still good to Polish and enhance. But at the same time, we are inviting people to join in this movement in a way that will invite all people, not just those who have had a certain amount of practice or a certain type of skill set. There is room for everybody to assist and to help and saving lives in the pro-life world.

John Ensor :

You know there are pregnancy help clinics now that are approaching the 50 year mark of their existence. And of course, recently Harpy International celebrated their fiftieth year of as an organization that’s right and as a movement begins to mature, it begins to develop books and training manuals and high levels of expertise. And that’s kind of where we are at this moment and I myself have written a book on crisis intervention, which I’m trying to develop our skill set. But in spite of all of that, if you want a movement to grow, you must never lose track of those initial thoughts and feelings that people had when they started the movement or when your pregnancy center first began. It began with people who had no more expertise. Than the fact that they had a desire to help mothers and babies, for example. They didn’t know how to do phone counseling they didn’t know how to counsel people, They didn’t know how to raise money. But all of those pioneers that were the founders of Harpy International or your local pregnancy center, they had initiative, they had passion and they had faith in God. And that was enough to get started. And I like to remind people even the, you know, the Good Samaritan did not go to a conference to figure out how to help the man who was about to die. He didn’t have to read one of my books to figure it out. Love is his own teacher, and we need more than love alone. But love is enough to get us started. And then as we gain experience, we’ll ask the right questions and we’ll learn more. And if we want our movement to continue to grow, we have to have this tension between wanting to be get better at what we do, but at the same time actually get better at helping new people learn immediately just enough information for them to engage in the battle and be put to work. And if we don’t do that, what we’ll do is we’ll overwhelm people without books and 300 pages of material and their initial childlike passion to help moms and babies will be smashed. And that’s kind of what I’m calling for is as we get better at what we do, let’s actually get better at helping people know how to get started, even if they do things poorly.

Jacob Barr :

Yeah, I like that that’s and so and I feel like that’s the future and i think you were writing about this years ago and I think you called it something in regards to like the third wave, about the 3rd wave and how that involves people joining this movement and you know where you think you might, where we might be today in that regard.

John Ensor :

Yeah, you know, there’s one of the founders of Heartbeat International. Is Sister Paula Vandegeer Catholic nun and a woman that I met probably 25 years ago when I was just starting as a Baptist minister to get our churches involved in Boston to start a pregnancy center. And she talked about the first wave of the pro-life movement and the second wave of the pro-life movement and how initially. It was a Catholic movement Almost all it was just entirely pro-life with Catholic and it was a kind of a proverb. Oh, well, I’m not Catholic you know, that’s the kind of the pro-life thing well, if you’re Catholic, you’re pro-life if you’re not Catholic, then you might have different views. Ok, Then she talked about the second wave of the pro-life movement is really when people like Doctor Dobson and Doctor Kennedy. Jerry Falwell and a few others started to summon the Evangelical church into the cause of life and she called that the second way when the Catholics were joined by the Evangelicals. And I’ve been talking to her and lots of other people ever since then about the 3rd wave and the third wave. Of our movement will be the minority wave when our cap, when our when our African American and Hispanic Christians not only join our movement but lead our movement. I think they will be necessary for us to achieve any level of victory in our country and culture because abortion is targeted primarily in the minority community at this point so they hold the key to our success. And I just call it the 3rd wave and it’s just part of this idea of just keeping a movement growing and expanding, bringing more people in all the time and immediately finding a place for them to make a difference.

Jacob Barr :

Yeah, I really appreciate you know your this vision that you have casted over years ago in regards to growing the team and also part of that growing the team was including, you know the groups of people who are essentially you know, have the most to benefit from overturning abortion because their groups are more targeted than the average group. It also makes sense that you know we want all groups to be included in this work and just to have the vision to like see you know essentially to see abortion overturned in the future and to have that desire and to see the trends and I have a great deal of gratitude for those people who are you know the early starters in this movement who helped you know who helped initially with so little resources and so little you know idea of how to how to do it right who essentially was trying to do it out of love. And then over time now we’ve got more data we’ve got more examples we have more case studies we have we have more tools we have more professionals who are willing to help and it’s definitely a different environment today and there’s still a lot of work to be done and I think in the end there’s so much work to be done that my encouragement for people is we need more people to join in the effort there is there’s no shortage of good work to be done here. I was once sitting on an airplane talking to someone about what I do. And he asked me, well, you know, essentially in the end he asked me, you know, what would I have to do to help save a life? And my encouragement to him is just to volunteer at the local pricing clinic in his area. And it just seems remarkable to me that this is, you know, there’s an opportunity for someone to volunteer there’s so much space for people to get involved. And literally this is the work of superheroes when it comes to saving lives but it’s better than the Marvel superheroes, because these are real life superheroes who are. You know, giving out of their time and care in order to save someone’s life they don’t know personally, but because they love God, they know that you know unborn child and that mother and that father reflect who God is. Even if that, if they haven’t chosen God, they still reflect a piece of who God is.

John Ensor :

Yeah, I think it’s really important for us who are now considered to be leaders of our pregnancy centers or the larger pro-life movement. To never underestimate the need for and the power of volunteers. This is another thing that typically happens to a movement as it matures. It develops its own experts and then it starts to look down at volunteers well, no. Real movements always continue to find a way to capture and to employ volunteers otherwise the movement actually slows down and it stalls. But a movement that grows has to be able to attract more and more volunteers. And in my research on this, in crisis intervention services like take Mothers Against Drunk Driving for example, they’ve made tremendous impact on how. Americans think about drinking and driving. How did they do that they found multiple myriad ways to start chapters in town after town using nothing but volunteers. Almost all crisis intervention ministries or services heavily depend on volunteers, so it’s important for us as we grow and mature and professionalize. That we recognize that volunteers are always a part of crisis interventions services, and are necessary if you want a movement to keep growing rather than to stall out. And the more we send the message to our churches and to our people, there’s a place for you to serve, and we can equip you sufficiently, not expertly. But sufficiently for you to come in here and make a contribution in the life of a mother and a child, our movement will continue to grow.

Jacob Barr :

Awesome yeah, i agree completely. So I’ve been praying. I was praying last week and I felt like God was laying on my heart that we have a need as a movement to have a new type of volunteer in the future which would be a volunteer that helps multiple clinics such you know, because essentially this whole world that we live in where people can work remotely and help you know they, you know we people go to work remotely sometimes we’ve many of us have learned how to include remote church as part of our experience in 2020 even though we prefer in person. But I feel like we’re God is, you know, leading in there’s going to be an opportunity for people who want to serve multiple clinics and not to simply serve one clinic and I think that’s something I don’t know where God’s playing with this, but I just know that that’s been on my heart lately and I feel like he’s asking me to work on it, but I really have no idea of really how to. I’m essentially thinking how to figure that out right now. But I do believe God’s working in that new space of like a multi location volunteer opportunity and that’s about as far as I’ve gotten when it comes to this new direction. But yeah.

John Ensor :

It’s a good idea i think the again the mark of a great growing movement is there’s a constant creative energy flowing through it finding different ways to do things We’re like. Ants at the picnic, OK, whatever it put in the way to block US one way, we figure out how to go around over under, you know, we do whatever we need to do. And that’s again and that great sign of energetic growing movement that can’t be stopped, even though it has many obstacles. And COVID has really opened up a lot of new avenues for work that would not have been accepted. A year ago, year and a half ago, working from home, counseling, using video, medical counseling on video, a lot of these things would have been uncomfortable for both us as a counselor or a woman or a couple in crisis to engage in less so today because it’s now just part of the fabric and part of the tool kit of communication today. And I think it will be important for us as we start to think about abortion as a worldwide effort. You know, Americans only, we only have 3 % of worldwide abortion in the United States only three percent, 97 % of the problem or the injustice of abortion lies outside of the United States. So again, finding these tools that you’re talking about. Is part of it some of us need to go to places like China and Vietnam and Cuba. We’ll get into that that’s what we’re doing. But there are ways now that people can sit at home and talk to people i talked to people yesterday who are sitting in their home in South Africa, OK? And we regularly are talking to people sitting in Cuba and at. And at the end of our time together, I’m going to be having a meeting with a leader in Cali, Colombia yet today talking about the things that we want to do in that country so using all these tools as another way to keep growing and bringing more people in counseling, fundraising, storytelling, encouragement can all be done from multiple sites now using multiple tools.

Jacob Barr :

Yeah, especially when it comes to some professions. We, you know the average clinic has not had a legal team in the past i mean they there’s NIFLA and ADF they haven’t had like a local legal team to review content or to you know to review certain pieces that they’re looking to use i mean some have, but it was definitely just a small % because of the extra cost of having that kind of resource. However, there are some groups who are looking at trying to create a shared network of, you know, of legal professionals in order to support and bolster the movement and support and bolster clinics to need that help and service. And there’s some talk of that i’m not sure you know, it might end up being mostly in California or maybe it’ll go beyond those walls. But there’s also talk of there’s a couple different groups who are, you know essentially like networks of nurses and I can imagine that it’s starting to benefit the average parenting clinic. And so if someone is a, you know, a nurse or a Doctor Who wants to get involved, they definitely can get involved with the local clinic in their in their county or zip code. But there’s also room for them to get involved with other clinics as some of these tools we can’t we continue to develop, especially as some of these networks like you know, doctors for life or nurses for life, these groups develop. There’s going to essentially be a way for doctors and nurses to join that network, which then can benefit many clinics. So, you know, 30 doctors might end up serving 100 clinics and that would be, you know, allowing for more rural areas that may not have a doctor in their area on that has a certain specialty to now be able to have the same resources as a more populated, larger city clinic.

John Ensor :

Absolutely, absolutely i think all of those things can be developed and again, the key is to keep finding ways to take people’s expertise and put them into the battlefield somewhere. When I started in Boston 30 years ago, we developed six pregnancy health medical clinics. And we only had one doctor, so we had to set up AVPN network for all six clinics so the one doctor could look at ultrasound scans on his computer and cover all of the HIPAA issues of privacy and medical documents and so on and so forth. And we used the VPN it was a very expensive network we had to build and of course now you can buy, you know, you can go online and use AVPN and. You know, all these tools are just so much easier to use now. So whether it’s legal work, medical work, other areas of expertise, there are ways now for someone to serve a community of pregnancy health centers rather than just a local one. No doubt about that. And maybe one of our national organizations will take more and more of a lead in providing those kinds of services as time goes on. Or maybe a new organization will develop.

Jacob Barr :

Yeah and there’s and i really appreciate, you know, Heartbeat International and Care Net. And then there’s several other groups who are smaller but yet also making a great impact in the areas that they’re serving like for example, International Life Services, the Sister Paula Alliance relied to Missouri and the Right to Life League of Southern California. I feel like, you know, amongst all of these groups, we’re essentially serving several, well in some pieces, thousands of clinics already in some pieces, hundreds or less than 100 I really appreciate these groups ’cause they’re essentially empowering multiple clinics and that’s sort of where perhaps this inspiration came from in a way is that when our when our group like Alliance for Life Missouri is working so hard to support all of these pricing clinics in Missouri and sometimes surrounding areas out fairly outside of Missouri. That’s all, you know, that’s a perfect example of like how it maybe how a volunteer could also benefit maybe not to that number but maybe benefit several clinics. One thing that my team recently have been working on is trying to build really beautiful national grade pieces like for example a Facebook image or Instagram image or an article and then making it so that multiple clinics across the country can essentially use it and we’re leveraging the power of copy and paste and rebrand in order to, you know take something that would normally cost a lot with lots of hours making it so that it takes literally just minutes or less than an hour based on how much work it is to rebrand but trying to find ways to help the movement or the group more so than just a single clinic, which essentially makes it some more things are accessible for the average clinic to use because it reduces the amount of time or the, you know, the amount of cost involved.

John Ensor :

Well, now you’ve swerved into another characteristic of a growing movement, which is that resources need to be created and shared freely, without any kind of encumbrances. Typically we make things and we make sure our name is on them and they’re copyrighted and we sell them, but movements grow when you can hear something, obey it and share it quickly, OK? And that’s why the gospel can spread without having to buy a book. Or, you know, if you’ve encountered Jesus Christ you may not know a lot, but you know enough. For you to know how your life has been changed and who did it and on what basis it happened to the cross and be able to share that with somebody, OK.

Jacob Barr :

So when you’re creating materials that people can use immediately and to share them, you’re adding to the ability for a movement to continue to grow interesting.

John Ensor :

And that’s what we do in China for example, we went over to China we’ve trained over 3 million people in China now since 2012 And the essence of what we do is rapid reproduction, hear it, obey it, share it. So anything that requires high tech, Anything that costs money, all of these things slow repetition down. Ok, but if I can give. 25 pastors, Let’s say a thumb drive that has the videos on it, the biblical training and some PDF models and examples of what they want to create. And all of it can be freely copied and freely shared. Then a movement can grow. So that’s what you’re doing now you’re finding another way to create content that can be immediately shared. In a very quick way. And when you do that, you’ve added fuel to our movement.

Jacob Barr :

Awesome that’s very. And it’s interesting that our movement has so many audiences so like, so like this content we’re talking about in this podcast. This is meant for the team in order to help and incur, you know, help encourage pregnancy center directors, board of directors, you know, the leadership teams at pregnancy clinics. But then the content that many of us, you know, team leaders or different groups will create is meant for the clients, the clients who are experiencing an unplanned pregnancy looking for services. And then we’re trying to meet them where they are to provide them with love, care, listening in order to build rapport. And you know, essentially then provide them with really excellent reasons for why, you know, why they might want to choose parenting or adoption looking more down the road more so than at the short term. And but anyways, it’s essentially those are two audiences, but then we also have the donor audience of church communities, pro-life people who want to help support these clinics and so I feel like the crazy clinic world, while it’s a beautiful thing, it has a lot of audiences that the average nonprofit seems to have less complexity or less audiences to try and balance a bit. And so we have some very different audiences in different groups, especially the client versus the supporter audience. Those are in very different places of life or postures at least. And but anyways, yeah, and I feel like there’s room for growth in all three of these areas for these different audiences with materials in order to support, you know, the client, client marketing, support marketing, as well as helping develop leadership roles which has traditionally been done through Heartbeat International and Care Net and these different groups like International Services, they’ve produced a great deal of materials and try to collect or you know, direct expert content towards these leadership people. But perhaps, maybe having a more grassroots approach to try and share materials such as this podcast, maybe this will be helpful. And maybe this is maybe an example of how the movement is continuing to mature. Because this is not coming from a there’s no price, there’s no, you know, there’s no profit margin of this podcast. You know, this one is freely distributed and being built without, yeah, without compensation. At least not just there’s no compensation.

John Ensor :

Yet, yeah. So I think there’s a paradox. That we’re feeling, which is that on one hand we want to strive toward excellence and improvement. But as we succeed, there is a constant need to simplify everything that we’re doing for the non expert and that’s kind of where we are right now as a movement after 50 years i spent years, I’ve written and published 6 different books and when I started to work in China. From Cuba or Vietnam, I realized that I could not sell books. I could not ask people to read 100 pages for this, or 100 pages for that. So I took the content of three of my books, 300 pages basically, and I reduced them to 10 pages. And I put them on a piece of paper so that anybody can copy them, photocopy them, email, them send them out, whatever oK, so that no one needs to buy those resources now they can, as their interest and their expert and their desire to learn more goes on. The book I wrote on crisis intervention counseling for the pregnancy centers. I also have a. It’s 120 pages, but I have a three page version of the same content. That we use when we go to a place like Cuba, so that we can say listen in these 3 pages, we can provide you an outline sufficient for you to get started. And then as you grow and gain experience, you’re going to ask certain questions you’re going to hit the wall in certain moments. And here’s another resource that you can go to learn more and develop your expertise. And that is constantly, I think, the tension. That we’re in right now, which is, how do we simplify to make our movement grow? And how do we constantly improve our skill set so we develop a professionalism about who we are and what we’re doing, even to the point where we can send, you know, 18 year olds off to college and get a degree in what all of us have had to learn as a grassroots effort.

Jacob Barr :

That’s where we’re at, yeah and that’s. Yeah, that’s a, that’s a, yeah the struggle of simplification in comparison to the struggle of growing our ability to be successful in this movement by, you know, having better numbers, having better, you know, response rates, you know, reaching more women who need our services. And in reality, when it comes to the marketing world, reducing there, there’s a famous quote by someone, I don’t know his name, but the quote is very famous at least I love it. He wrote I would have written you a shorter letter, but I didn’t have time. And so the idea is that if you take, you know, 120 pages and you boil that down to 40 pages, that’s a lot of work. But what you’re doing is you’re essentially increasing the quality because you’re essentially increasing the speed at which someone can get the message, the same message of those hundred and twenty but maybe only in 40 going down to 3 pages that’s sort of a difference that’s a different tactic that might be mostly to pique the interest and then give them all the information in the hundred and twenty, but you press something in half. That’s a lot of work and but it might improve the how quickly someone’s able to get that information we often in the marketing work well in the marketing world will often take a statement of let’s say 40 words and trying to boil it down to 7 words and that’s a very common job that we might take on.

John Ensor :

Exactly and anyone who’s studied the field of development in fundraising has been taught, you know, be able to give your quote elevator speech. Don’t go into a long, lengthy explanation. Have it down to one sentence or you have your one sentence version, your three minute version, and your 30 minute version. And all of those tools are helpful. And I think they’re especially helpful for the context of a pregnancy center work to be able to say, here’s the things that we want to have to develop a level of expertise, here’s a 300 page manual oK, but at the same time, here are the things that we know. That in two hours with a new volunteer, we have them to a place where they can go in to a counseling room and begin to have a conversation with someone about what they’re going to do with their with their unborn baby. And as you begin to do work outside of America, that’s particularly important to simplify and my encouragement for that is. There’s lots and lots of people who have life saving conversations with women in a pregnancy crisis every day all over the world. They talk to their aunties, they talk to their mom, they talk to grandma, they talk to their friend. And these people have no training and yet they are able to come up with the right words and how? How were they able to do that? Well, because they talked very simply. You know, i’m sorry, you’re in this situation let’s figure out what we can do here. We don’t want to go down that road because that leads to crossing a border that you don’t want to do. Killing a baby Swans. They just speak very simply but very powerfully and they figure out how to be a Good Samaritan in that situation. And we never want to lose sight of that because we have everyday people coming into our centers who want to help mom, help moms and save babies, and we want to employ them right away.

Jacob Barr :

So what would you say to the executive director who very likely is overwhelmed because that’s the typical stance of having 14 hats? And So what would you say to her when it comes to like encouragement to ask for volunteers? How would you encourage her to make that ask?

John Ensor :

Well, I think like you say, it’s complex because she needs volunteers to work in fundraising for her banquet and her walk, and she needs volunteers to work in the center of mentoring and following up on some of the moms or maybe the my Baby and me kind of class work and so she just got to identify where she can use volunteers. And then she’s going to have to figure out the next two things, how to make people aware of those opportunities. And what does she need to do to train them just enough to get them started? Not expertly. The biggest problem that I think our directors have made are the ones that I made and that is we bring in 25 new volunteers and we take them through some sort of six week course and 300 pages and by the end of that we have no volunteers left oK, so part of it is to find a way to make your needs known. But then part of the way is. When the when they come in to volunteer, put them to work within a week, you know, doing something meaningful and let their expertise grow from there. And then what happens is people who are happy in their in the making contribution, they tell other people and that becomes your real marketing plan. Yes, you can try sending out this and doing all this messaging, but the end of the day, if you’ve got volunteers doing meaningful things, they’re telling other people about it. And you’re going to have a steady stream of people coming in to find out if they can make a contribution.

Jacob Barr :

Yeah sharing stories of how, like how I’ve been blessed as a volunteer, Yeah, that’s a an impactful story for someone to share and for someone else to hear. That makes a lot of sense.

John Ensor :

Well, my job as a director of a nonprofit when it comes to my donors is to make them happy that they gave. Ok, that’s my job, and my job was the director of a clinic when I was doing that my job with my volunteers was to make them happy that they contributed their time and that they went home with a sense of fulfillment. So happy donors want to give more, happy volunteers want to give more time. And that’s the simplicity with which I would approach my job.

Jacob Barr :

That’s really good, really good insight. Well, as we’re wrapping this up, is there anything else you’d like to share or would you like to tell us anything in particular about your ministry overseas? And we talked about it a little bit, but would you like to share anything else about that?

John Ensor :

Well, I would just say that passion life is basically an extension of the pregnancy help movement here in the States and as we began to see that, 97 % of the problem is overseas. I began to basically take everything I know about missions and try to figure out how could we expand pregnancy help ministry into a global missions movement. And we start in China and then we moved to Cuba and then Vietnam because those are the, you know, those are in the top five countries of the world where abortion and infanticide are most concentrated. So I will just say anybody who wants to see their local ministry be part of the global mission, stop by passionlife.org look at what we’re doing, look at some of the resources there because again, that’s where we can, you know, you can get some of my books that are 100 pages long, but we have the 10 page versions there for people and they’re all free resources so stop by and see what we’re doing and when we were. When we go to a place like Cuba, we bring the pictures and the stories of people that are working here in the States of what you’re doing in your pregnancy center so that they can inspire people in Cuba, inspire people in Columbia, inspire people in China to figure out how to do it in their own neighborhood. And so that’s what we’re about we’re a part of a movement that’s now becoming a global missions movement.

Jacob Barr :

That that’s it that’s just so amazing and I honestly, I feel it’ll equipped to. I honestly, it’s just i focus a great deal on the United States and i don’t have the exposure of the problem in other countries i mean I I’ve seen a few videos or movies i’ve heard you know about China and India and when it comes to like you know the governmental impact that you know, China has on abortion or India, how the dowry will impact people’s decision on abortion. But really I feel like my exposure to that world is just sort of non existent as you know on a on a regular basis at least or in the most part at all in several of those countries you mentioned.

John Ensor :

Well, if you drop by Passion Life, we have a map there of the world and you can literally click on any part of that map and kind of find out what’s going on worldwide there so it’s educational. And then you’re going to be able to look at the countries that we’re working in and jump in whatever way the Lord would lead you and I think many pregnancy centers around this country now want to be a part of what’s going on in Romania or Cuba or China. They want to. They’re like the church you know, the church needs to do missions as well as evangelism and so pregnancy centers are finding ways. To be part of this global movement, not just the pregnancy, health ministry movement in the US, but the global movement. And the more that we do that, I think the more we enrich the movement, make it grow. Our donors are going to be excited that we’re a missions movement. And it’s just it’s the trajectory of what we want to do is we want to just keep going to the neediest places.

Jacob Barr :

Wow i actually met a lady from Romania about 12 years ago at a Heartbeat international conference and she was sharing her story and I think they had zero Princey clinics or maybe one in the entire country at that time. It was very little i don’t remember what number it was right now, but I remember thinking one of my colleagues at that time, you know, decided to pray for her and I think maybe started to donate on a regular basis, but at least was praying on a regular basis because he was greatly impacted by her story and it’s just here in the US we have 3000 crazy clinics but in Romania at that time it was like somewhere between zero and two i don’t remember what number it was, but that was 12 years ago.

John Ensor :

They’ve they’ve been proved, no doubt. I’ve been to Romania three times in the last five years and I have visited some of the clinics there and it’s somewhat encouraging, but the point is. You were glad to get involved we our center in Boston, got involved with a group of people in Zambia, and we have other centers that contribute to passion life and ask us to direct their funds to the work going on in Cuba, ’cause there’s only one pregnancy center in Cuba, so it’s just, you know, it’s just. We’re generous people and we want to keep going to the neediest places and you found a place that was needy and was just getting started and they’re all pioneers and there’s no heartbeat to train them and so on and so forth.

Jacob Barr :

And so it just falls to us to keep helping these pioneers reach the next step and the next step and the next step until out of curiosity, if someone wanted to volunteer, you know, with or through Passion Life in order to help someone in a different country, is that does that opportunity exist or is there a way to volunteer through Passion Life to help you know in another country in some way?

John Ensor :

Well, it depends on what country you’re talking about in China, things are a little bit more challenging there because of the underground church that we work with and security issues. But in other places it’s a lot easier. And again, I know Raul Reyes, he started a ministry called Life Equip and he’s inundated right now with opportunities to train pastors in pro-life bioethics and crisis intervention sitting in on a computer just like we’re talking. And so there’s he’s calling for volunteers to come and help him train pastors in Uganda and all different places of the world. So there’s that hasn’t been our method because we like to get into the countries and work that way, but it just showed me that there’s continually new opportunities for us to put people to work.

Jacob Barr :

So, yeah, awesome. Well, we, yeah, I appreciate what you’re doing ’cause I it’s very different than what I’m doing and I, but at the same time we’re on the same team and then the same body of Christ and it’s amazing to see, you know you as the maybe as the foot. It’s amazing to see what the eyes get to see or do or you know what the hands doing, even though it’s very different than what my day-to-day might look like.

John Ensor :

Well, thank you for giving me some time here to share a few of these things and tease out the idea of doing things well anything doing well is worth doing poorly and hopefully it will help And let’s do it again sometime awesome.

Jacob Barr :

Thank you so much, John.

John Ensor :

All right.

Jacob Barr :

God bless, God bless.

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