St. Paul lives on in Rev. Paul Schenck, a convert from Judaism.  Schenck is the Pastor of the 2,000 member New Covenant Tabernacle, in Tonawanda, New York.  One third of his congregation consists of converts from Judaism, He has a Friday night service based on the Jewish synagogue ritual for them, and as he describes it, all of them attend the “generic” service on Sunday morning.

Mr. Schenck is also the founder and past president of Buffalo’s National Clergy Council for Operation Rescue.  On February 14 of this year he arrived in Toronto to kick off the founding meeting of the National Clergy Council of Operation Rescue Canada.

Twenty three clergymen – Protestant and Catholic – came from all over southern Ontario to listen to this unassuming but dynamic speaker tell how he came from a “pro-choice” position to being jailed for his involvement in Operation Rescue in Atlanta in July 1988.

Nine of the clergy, including Rev. Ken Campbell, Pastor Fred Vaughan and Rev. Gary Sweetman immediately let their names stand for the Council.

Conversion

Pastor Schenck dates his intense love for Christ and the unborn from a visit, with his wife, to a Holocaust museum in Jerusalem in 1983.  There, they saw lampshades made of human skin and other accoutrements made of body parts.  There, they entered The Room of The Children that memorialized the children that perished in the holocaust.  That experience made an emotional and spiritual impact that has lasted to this day.

But, in addition, he and his wife went through another, more recent, personal experience.  It all stated in his church from the town of Kenmore, near Tonawanda, noted that a doctor across the street from them had a clientele of fairly young women.  These would appear regularly three times a week, always between a given number of hours.

One day, the wife saw the doctor come out of the building and drop a plastic bag into the trash dumpster.  By this time she was suspicious.  When her husband came home, he and two other friends checked the dumpster at midnight, recovering the bag along with two others.  These they bough to the church office.

In one of the bags were the bodies of four unborn children – real little sleeping babies, as Schenck described them.  The sex organs were still discernible, but each one had been mutilated – head severed, body split open and disemboweled, arms and legs cut off.

“When I looked into those babies faces,” he said, “I recoiled.  You know that I have seen and read the pro-life literature and from time to time maybe I had heard someone address the subject, but it never really touched me where I was.  It was just in my mind another sin that devastates our world and didn’t require my particular attention.”

Funeral

They called the police, who referred them to the state health department which assured them that what the doctor had done was perfectly legal.  There are no laws in the state of New York covering the disposal of human “fetuses,” they said, but if they had been puppies, an investigation could have been started because there is a law governing the death and disposal of animal remains.

Pastor Schenck decided to schedule a funeral.  Notification would be by word of mouth only, but interest grew.

A funeral home donated four little coffins. The Catholic diocese of Buffalo donated four burial plots across the street from the Assembly of God church in Tonawanda.  Another funeral service donated a hearse to carry the babies from Kenmore to Tonawanda.

The funeral service was held on the front lawn of the abortion doctor’s practice in Kenmore!  Pastor Schenck was joined by Catholic and other Protestant clergy.  They all felt that the incident was a defilement of a community with the motto, “It’s a great place to live.”

Four hundred people turned out, including the mayor, half the town council and the chief of police!  There was such a large crowd that they had to block off the street.  It was the longest funeral procession in Kenmore’s history, with over 200 cars going to the cemetery in Tonawanda.

Operation Rescue

Pastor Paul Schenck’s conversion was completed when Randy Terry, the executive director of Operation Rescue and a classmate of his at Bible College, showed him a ten-minute tape of an actual Rescue.  When he discovered that two pastors on his staff were planning to participate in Philadelphia and New York Rescues, he encouraged them to go.

“I never really had concern whether the Bible would allow us to disobey the law, Schenck explained, “I saw early many instances in the Scripture where it was permissible and I saw certain the spirit of the word which would allow that.”

Soon thereafter, Schenck himself participated in a Rescue at an abortion “clinic” in Buffalo, N.Y.  He went with some misgivings, dressed as a layman, and tried to keep a low profile.  He found that the prayerful and dedicated demeanor of the Buffalo Rescue edified him.

When he saw a “client” talked out of getting an abortion, he remembered, if that is a life saved, and then it is all worth it.  He and his wife were arrested and almost missed a dinner that evening with Dr. Billy Graham, in Buffalo for a crusade.  The officer who arrested him was an usher in his church!

From these initial efforts, the first national U.S. clergy council was formed in 1988.  Rabbis were also invited and they now have a strong leadership role.

The peaceful rescue movement has spread all over the U.S. and Canada.  It has shut down abortuaries – often for days at a time – and saved an uncountable number of babies from being murdered.