I met Bill Shanks, the pastor of New Covenant Fellowship, while filming God Stories at a meeting of the Greater New Orleans Pastors’ Coalition. Unlike other pastors who began talking before I could position myself to record their comments, Bill paused until I had a clear shot. When the meeting concluded, I asked for his card and permission to contact him.
I entered Pastor Bill’s home to a disarming warmth and delightful kindness. His front door revolved with people filling his house with life. While I set up my camera, he prepared a fresh pot of coffee. I poured sugar into my coffee cup and gave him my standard spiel: “People tend to talk in random, disconnected thoughts. I’ll guide the conversation and interrupt to clarify. If you regret anything you say, I will not make it public, etc., etc.” He smiled, and I pushed record.
Bill felt close to the Lord as an altar boy in the Catholic Church. By the time he married, he had drifted from his faith, but life was good. He had a good relationship with his wife. Selling hospital equipment in a three-state area provided an adequate living for his family. He still attended Mass but only did so for the sake of his children.
On the way to a sales appointment, Bill poured out his heart to the Lord. “Why am I here? Is there a purpose for my life? Show me what you want from me.”
That night, Bill checked into a hotel room. He set his suitcase on the bed and examined the empty room. Feeling restless, he returned to his car and drove down the town’s deserted streets looking for a cocktail lounge but couldn’t find one. He spotted a movie theater and pulled into the parking lot. “Closed” glared from the sign in the ticket window.
Bill returned to the hotel and asked the manager, “Where is everybody in this town?”
“Most of them are at the church.”
“Church on a Wednesday night! Where is it?”
“Just down the street,” replied the manager.
Reluctant to return to an empty hotel room, Bill went to the church. He was accustomed to the solemn reverence of a Catholic Mass. The Pentecostal church service was different. People clapped their hands to lively music. Some held both hands in the air, joy emanating from their faces. A preacher stepped behind the pulpit and opened his Bible to the book of Revelation. “I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm — neither hot nor cold — I am about to spit you out of my mouth” (Revelation 3:15-17).
The scripture sliced through Bill like a hot knife through butter and challenged his belief that only murderers and thieves went to Hell. The preacher’s exhortation to repent at the conclusion of his message disturbed Bill. “I would have become a priest if I wanted to dedicate my life to God,” he said. “I left the service without repenting, sorry that I had attended.” As Bill drove back to his hotel room, a thought made him uncomfortable. You asked God to show you want he wanted, and now you are walking away.
Bill’s refusal to repent haunted him. Eight months later, he broke while listening to his priest talk about Jesus’ sufferings. Bill returned home and searched the phone book for a Pentecostal church.
Bill laughed. “They were singing ‘He is Coming Soon’ when I walked into the church. I thought they were talking about me and ran to the altar. I felt like Jesus embraced me and said, ‘I’ve waited for you.’ I left that church radically changed.”
Bill questioned his priest about the experience. The priest assured Bill that he had only had an emotional experience that would fade. Bill looked at me and smiled. “That was forty years ago, and it never faded. I had never experienced love like I experienced in that church.”
In the late 1980s, Bill watched The Silent Scream, a 25-minute film documenting an abortion that created a storm of controversy and launched the international pro-life movement. The film deeply moved him. When the question was asked, “Who will speak for the unborn?” He raised his hand.
Bill worked a secular job to supplement his pastor’s salary when he learned of plans to picket an abortion clinic. He decided to join the picketers on his lunch hour. “My biggest fear was that someone I know would see me,” said Bill. “When some girls entering the clinic yelled at me to mind my own business, I wanted to leave. Then I heard God say, ‘If you leave, babies will die.’” The thought of innocent babies dying gave Bill the strength to overcome his fear. He remained for the duration of his lunch hour pleading for the life of the unborn who could not speak for themselves.
Several months later, a pastor called with an invitation. “They are putting pastors in jail for trying to save the lives of babies in Atlanta. I’m going, and I’d like you to come.” Initially, Bill declined, but he changed his mind and traveled to Atlanta with thirteen pastors. The pastors sat in front of the abortion clinic’s door, blocking the entrance. Soon, the police arrived and shouted through bullhorns, “If you don’t move, you will be arrested.”
“Everything in me said move. Obey the police. Then one of the pastors said, ‘If we move, they will kill babies today.’” Bill stayed. The police handcuffed the pastors and put them in the back of a paddy wagon. On the way to jail, Bill heard the Lord say, “This is the first of many times you will be arrested.” Bill grew somber as he continued his story. “In that moment, I realized the degenerate condition of America. Why were authorities putting us in jail for trying to save innocent babies from slaughter?”
Spending a week in the Atlanta Jail radically changed Bill’s life. More than one hundred inmates and guards accepted Christ as their Savior. One of the female guards asked them why they were willing to go to jail. Bill answered, “The unborn children belong to God. He has a purpose for their lives, and the children have a right to live and fulfill that purpose.” The guard burst into tears. She was pregnant and planned to have an abortion.
While the authorities debated what to do with the pastors, they were sent to the hundred-year-old Hero Prison Farm. The buildings had no air-conditioning or screens on the windows to keep bugs out. Roaches scurried across a makeshift altar as the pastors held a communion service with bread and water. They wept and repented for allowing the nation to slip into an immoral abyss.
As he awaited his fate for participating in civil disobedience, fear overwhelmed him. When he marched into the courtroom with the other pastors, he remembered Jesus’ words: “When you are brought before synagogues, rulers, and authorities, do not worry about how you will defend yourselves or what you will say, for the Holy Spirit will teach you at that time what you should say” (Luke 12:11-12). The scripture comforted Bill and dispelled his fear.
The African American judge questioned several of the pastors and then turned his attention to Bill. “Where did you meet these men?”
“I met them in the same cell block Martin Luther King was in,” said Bill.
“What’s that got to do with anything?” demanded the judge.
“Sir, if he had not laid down his life for your rights, you would be cleaning this court instead of sitting in judgment.”
The judge was silent for a moment and then brought his gavel down with a thud. “Case dismissed.”
In the summer of 1991, Bill participated in the Summer of Mercy sponsored by Operation Rescue and Operation Save America. Dr. George Tiller had sent a letter to doctors all over the country advertising his late-term abortion services. He had developed a method called MOLD, which produced, according to Tiller, “a normal, safe, natural miscarriage.” Tiller killed the baby by injecting digoxin into the baby’s heart. He used laminaria to dilate the cervix and then induced labor. Mothers of the dead babies had the option of cuddling their aborted child while a picture was taken to aid them in the grieving process. Then the bodies of the babies were thrown into an incinerator.
Bill was one of the forty-thousand people who traveled to Wichita, Kansas, to protest the barbaric practice. “When Tiller turned on the incinerator, the ashes of those babies would settle all over us,” said Bill, “on our bodies, on our Bibles. We planned to block the entrance while another group created a diversion by sitting in the street. The rest would go over the fence that surrounded the clinic. One of the leaders told us we would only incur a $25 fine, but I’d been in it long enough to know this wasn’t a $25 offense.”
Federal marshals arrested Bill, charged him with a felony and incarcerated him until he could post a $10,000 bond. Pastor Larry Stockstill, Bethany World Prayer Center, Baton Rouge, arrived a week later and bailed the Louisiana pastors out of jail.
The protest in Wichita concluded on August 25, 1991, with a rally at Cessna Stadium. Thirty-five thousand people attended the “Hope for the Heartland” rally. Pro-life activists continued to lead similar campaigns of protest and blockade in other cities until 1994. With support from Kansas senator Bob Dole, Congress passed the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act. The FACE Act carried a federal fine of $10,000 and one year in jail for the first offense. The $10,000 fine and ten years in jail for the second offense persuaded many to abandon the campaign against abortion.
I attended an abortion protest with Bill. He has adjusted his tactics to be gentler and kinder. From the public sidewalk, he challenged the people in the clinic to search their hearts. Then Bill and his team took turns repenting for their own sins and praying that God would grant repentance to the employees within. Women entering the clinic were offered the names of pro-life doctors and the locations of free pro-life clinics. One woman hollered, “I’ll kill my baby if I want to kill my baby.” Her disregard for life stood in sharp contrast to a man pleading for everyone’s right to live and fulfill his or her God-given purpose.
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