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Where did the Repentance go? The Randall Terry saga continues May 31, 2008 As the continuing battle between Randall Terry and Troy Newman over the Operation Rescue label has escalated, I find myself wondering what Jesus would say if He was walking amongst us today. I am convinced He would say something very similar to what Gordon Peterson, Jr., my former pastor in Minnesota might say when he hears something ridiculous, to wit: “OH! COME ON!”
When the Protestant Rescue movement began, Randall and the people that followed were all agreed on one thing: We must always approach this in a spirit of humility and repentance. It was important that we recognized that we were merely imperfect instruments in the hands of a loving, perfect God. The people that went to the doors of the various abortion mills across our country fully believed that that was the only appropriate mind set in relation to our ongoing battle against child killing.
However, sometime after the Lord’s great movement that was the Summer of Mercy, in 1991 Wichita, Ks. the rescue movement began to get a little puffed up. We started to think there was nothing we could not do. We pushed the Holy Spirit, who had, up to that point, been our guide and general in the battle, to the side and said, “That’s alright. We can take it from here!” Well, we did run it from the Spring of Life in Buffalo, N.Y., on. We ran rescue right into the ground. I'm not saying ALL rescuers got that way, but a sufficient number did, to the point that the concept of rescue died out, and a lot of us were looking around, saying, “What happened?”
In place of all this, we have now come to the point where it’s become important to fight over a name. A NAME! TWO WORDS! Is this what the Lord expects from His people in the fight against child killing and idolatry?
This is as bad as a WCW or WWF wrestling match. In one corner, we have the founder and former director of Operation Rescue, Randall Terry, a man who abandoned his family, his church and Operation Rescue, whose biggest concern seems to be “MY name, MY legacy.”
In the other corner, we have Troy Newman, who looked around and saw that nobody was really using the name Operation Rescue anymore, so he decided to latch onto it and do something with it. After all, he’s only doing battle with George Tiller, the most infamous abortionist in the United States, let alone Kansas.
Several of Randall’s peers & former cohorts have spoken out about this whole mess. These include:
However, I have noticed that one name is noticeably absent. That name is Rev. Flip Benham, director of Operation Save America, which is, as most of you know, what used to be Operation Rescue National (ORN). Operation Rescue was changed to ORN to get out from numerous lawsuits that the pro-aborts have used to try to cripple the pro-life movement. Rev. Benham, who has been actively calling on Randall to repent of abandoning the wife of his youth, and their children, and misrepresenting himself and his needs to donors for several years, has sided with Mr. Terry against Mr. Newman in the “Case of the Purloined Name.”
Rev. Benham also has his own ongoing animosity toward Mr. Newman in relationship to the name flap.
Some on Mr. Terry’s side, like Rev. Bob Behn of the Buffalo, N.Y.-based pro-life group Last Call Ministries, have taken issue with Mr. Newman’s “abrasive nature.” Since I first got involved in the pro-life movement, in 1989, I've met all kinds of abrasive natures, 80% of them were in what we called leadership.
Others have intimated that Mr. Newman is a comparative “Johnny-come-lately” to the national pro-life scene. I beg to differ. I know that I first heard his name during the 1991 Summer of Mercy. It was always mentioned in conjunction with Jeff White, who was, at the time, the head of what was called Operation Rescue West. My then-fiancée, the former Aline Beban, and I, visited Jeff at his offices in Southern Ca. during the Thanksgiving/Christmas season in 1991. Mr. Newman was definitely active at that time and present in the OR West offices during our visit.
In his most recent statements, Mr. Terry has continued to make his claim that he was driven to bankruptcy by NOW, Planned Parenthood, et al. He claims to have lost his upstate N.Y. property in these legal battles. However, he once again fails to mention that he did, in fact, make a deal with his opponents in the Scheidler RICO suit so that he could run for the U.S. Congress in 1998, and that he sold his property as part of the settling of the deal that he made.
This flap over a name is ridiculous, precipitated by an unrepentant adulterer, who has misrepresented himself to his donors and the public, and received monies in a deceitful manner from those misrepresentations. He has brought an unbiblical litigation against a brother in the Lord. In addition, the pro-aborts are sitting back and laughing their heads off at this.
Mr. Terry says that he is concerned about his name and his legacy. I submit that the damage to those 2 items initially occurred almost a decade ago, and has been ongoing in the time since.
When we stand before the throne of God, legacies and our name status will be burned, like hay and stubble. They won't mean a thing. In the case of pro-lifers, after our trust in the Lord Jesus Christ for salvation, the next most important thing will be what did we do for those being led to slaughter? Did we hold them back, or did we faint in the day of adversity.
It won't be, "did we protect our precious legacy."
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