The ProGrace Podcast Angela Weszely

If you don't feel at home in either Pro-Life or Pro-Choice, welcome to the ProGrace podcast. Angela Weszely, CEO and co-founder of ProGrace invites you into a conversation on how to rise above the political divide and develop a compassionate approach. She founded ProGrace to equip Christians with a new way to think, talk, and engage around abortion so we can create safe spaces for conversations. Let's model our approach after Jesus, not politics.

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Are you a person who wrestles with how conversations about abortion are happening (or not happening) in our churches? If so, listen as Angela unpacks how Christians can find common ground aside from political binary views and meet from a place of empathy based on her journey. If we believe that God loves the woman and the child equally, how can we focus on what we agree on, position the Church as the solution, and open safe spaces to meet people where they are?

Resources:


Barna Group:  Openness to Jesus Isn’t the Problem—the Church Is, May 17, 2023 
ProGrace: Discussion Topic: Conversations with Christians, July 30, 2018

What’s in a story? We all have one. Hearing a person’s story requires listening to understand and identify the connecting points. What if we stopped the back and forth in the abortion debate to emphatically listen to the other side?  In this episode, Angela sits down with Christy Vines, President and CEO of Ideos Institute, who introduces us to how she and her team use Empathic Intelligence (EmQ) to transform spaces of division. The results advance empathy, transform systems, and inspire solutions. As with the ProGrace approach to help Christians think, talk, and engage differently in unintended pregnancy and abortion conversations, Ideos Institute uses Jesus’ teaching model to help people navigate contentious topics to find common ground. Learn how you can retrain your brain to do a different job of moving from debate to dialogue by putting yourself in someone’s story.  For more on Ideos Institute, see the show notes below, including their groundbreaking documentary Dialogue Lab: America.

LINKS:

1. Dialogue Lab: America | Documentary Film (2022): https://youtu.be/RJA7W3hQggEIdeos Institute official website: https://ideosinstitute.org/ 2. Narrative 4: https://narrative4.com/3. Barna study: https://www.barna.com/research/polarization-2015-2022/5. Christy LinkedIn profile https://www.linkedin.com/in/christyvines/ 

A nonpolitical discussion about the Barbie movie is important because it touches many people. It's sparking a cultural conversation about how women and men relate to each other, which must be healthy if we're going to have conversations that lead to empathy and understanding of divisive social issues like abortion that the Church is called to address.  Listen in as Angela and her special guest Simone Halpin, CEO of Naomi House, unpack their takeaways from the Barbie Movie and connect it to their personal stories. Using art and comedy, can the movie be one tool to help us deconstruct some teachings we have absorbed about gender inequality from culture and the Church and replace them with true Biblical principles?  As leaders of organizations that work for the social good, Simone and Angela discuss the importance of women and men in the Church coming together for nonpolitical conversations around gender issues that reflect God’s intention of partnership.Spoiler alert: If you plan to see the Barbie Movie, storylines, scenes, and themes are discussed.

Click on the links below for the resources mentioned during the episode:https://www.naomishouse.org 

Books:


She Deserves Better: Raising Girls to Resist Toxic Teachings on Sex, Self, and Speaking Up
The Great Sex Rescue: The Lies You've Been Taught and How to Recover What God Intended 

We encourage you to read and listen to the following for further resources. We appreciate how these two Christian leaders with different theological interpretations on women's roles agree on the Biblical imperative to prevent toxic gender narratives by following the example of Jesus.https://www.churchandculture.org/church-culture-podcasthttps://www.holypost.com/post/neither-barbie-nor-ken

Angela interviews Rev. Dr. Darice Wright, Associate Pastor of Life Church in suburban Chicago, for an eye-opening conversation on her work to help pastors disciple people in racial reconciliation - and how she discovered that extending grace is essential to healing. They discuss how we can apply grace to discussions on gender, the political divide, and how we, the Church, show up for those who experience unintended pregnancy and abortion. Together they go back to Barbieland to uncover themes art can reveal about this cultural moment and how we can catalyze God's way of doing and being in our world.

Research shows that many people in our culture have positive personal experiences with individual Christians in their lives but a negative perception of Christian institutions and how they interact in the public square. How do we bridge that gap and show up differently on contentious issues like abortion, especially after the overturn of Roe v. Wade? In this episode, Angela welcomes her friend, noted author, speaker, former pastor, and host of the Holy Post Podcast, Skye Jethani. Listen as they discuss his book What if Jesus Was Serious About the Church and explain how the political abortion debate fuels the divide. How can church leaders change this perception to bring healing and unity to the body of Christ? How do we lay down the political idolatry, refocus our allegiance to our representation of Jesus, and mark our churches safe for much-needed dialogue?

“Politics did not create the abortion problem in this country, and politics alone will not solve it.” - Skye Jethani