Calling in the wilderness

A bearded man in a green beanie stands in front of the Planned Parenthood in Grand Rapids, Mich., a headset microphone on his face and a portable speaker hanging from his shoulder by a black strap. Notebook in hand, he kneels down on the sidewalk and prays silently. Then, he rises.

“Well, good morning,” he says through the speaker, facing the grassy lawn in front of the dark brown brick of the Planned Parenthood facility. “My name is Jordan. I’m a street missionary—street preacher—here in Grand Rapids, and I’m here today to bring the gospel, the good news, the glorious news of Jesus Christ to you.” Nearby in the grass, a few signs bend in the wind. One says, “BABIES ARE MURDERED HERE.” Another calls on passersby to “BELIEVE ON THE LORD JESUS, & YOU WILL BE SAVED.”

For the last five years, 30-year-old Jordan Sweezer has been a fixture outside local abortion facilities. He started with Heritage Clinic for Women, half a mile away on busy Fulton Street. Starting in 2022, he stood outside 15 to 20 hours a week—until the facility’s abortionist, Thomas Gordon, died from heart disease in August 2023. That facility closed, so Sweezer moved his signs and his preaching to the Planned Parenthood on Cherry Street, a normally quieter location with a pro-life pregnancy center on the other side of its driveway.

While people coming to the Heritage Clinic always sought abortions, people arriving at Planned Parenthood could be there for several reasons—abortions, STI testing, birth control, or hormonal therapy. Sweezer has learned to tailor his message accordingly.

“Whether you’re here today to kill your child, whether you’re here today for birth control, whether you’re here today to change your gender, I plead with you with this good news,” Sweezer calls out with urgency in his voice. “Come to Jesus Christ today, by faith alone. Repent, which means turn away from your sins. Turn to the loving arms of Jesus Christ as Savior.”

Sweezer preaches for about 20 minutes before resuming what he had been doing before the sermon: offering tracts to drivers pulling into the parking lot, talking with passersby, and calling out to people walking from their cars to the building.

Instead of going in, one college-aged girl with a nose ring who arrives for STI testing walks over to talk with Sweezer. Later, a short woman missing her front teeth stops by on her way out. She was with her teenage daughter who is struggling with puberty. Sweezer tells them about sin, Christ’s sacrifice, and other local clinics that could help them, without ties to abortion.

Sweezer is one of an increasing number of Christians nationwide who are going to abortion facility sidewalks with a specifically gospel-first approach—sparking one-on-one conversations while also preaching about sin and the hope of salvation found in Jesus Christ. That strategy puts them at odds with other pro-life sidewalk counselors who say leading with evangelism is ineffective—even detrimental—to the main cause: saving babies. It’s a debate at the heart of the pro-life movement. What place should spiritual conversations have in the efforts to save unborn children and their moms?

Street preacher Jordan Sweezer sings with friends and family members outside Planned Parenthood on Cherry Street in Grand Rapids, Mich. Darrell Goemaat / Genesis

IN MORE WAYS THAN ONE, abortion facility evangelists like Sweezer represent fringe techniques and views controversial in the mainstream pro-life movement. I talked to nine other men currently or formerly involved in ministry similar to Sweezer’s. Some use a form of voice amplification. Some display pictures of bloody aborted babies. Most preach, sometimes quoting Proverbs 6:16-17, which says “the Lord hates … hands that shed innocent blood.” Most tell their listeners that abortion is murder. And all support abortion abolitionist bills, which would classify abortion as homicide and allow women to face severe penalties for aborting their babies.

Many also have direct or indirect ties to the pro-life rescue movement—another strategy that causes division among pro-lifers. In the 1980s, groups like Operation Rescue organized blockades and sit-ins involving hundreds of pro-lifers at abortion facilities across the country. When the 1994 Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act introduced federal penalties for participating in that kind of civil disobedience, the movement lost momentum. But that decade, under new leadership, Operation Rescue morphed into Operation Save America, an organization current director Jason Storms said focuses largely on equipping churches to have “a presence and a voice” at local abortion facilities through preaching and sidewalk counseling. Today, the group has a loose network of abortion facility missionaries across the country.

The parking lot of the Planned Parenthood in Grand Rapids hides behind the brick building, but Sweezer has a few seconds to call out to people as they walk around the corner to the side entrance. It’s maybe 70 feet away, so he yells to be heard, but in a tone of pleading—not of anger. His pronouncements that “God says abortion is killing, it’s murder,” come with requests for them to come talk with him. “There’s help up here. We care about you,” he says.

And he does. Sweezer has helped arrange baby showers for women he met at the abortion facility who decided against abortion. He’s provided furniture and gas cards to women trying to start over. He hosts Bible studies for them and invites their families to spend time with his wife and five children. And he wants to make sure they don’t leave without hearing the hope of Jesus’ sacrifice for sin.

Sweezer can recall three times in the past three years that he’s had to pull aside angry pro-lifers to tell them he’s not on board with their approach. “What sets them apart is they’re not here to win their neighbor. They’re not here to save babies,” Sweezer says. “They’re here because they want to be the one to cast a judgment … to just spit and scream and lose their mind.”

For Sweezer and other like-minded activists in this loose network of sidewalk evangelists, the accountability of their local church is key to ensuring they don’t become like that. Sweezer worked as a pastoral intern at his local church until recently and is sent out as a sidewalk missionary by One Life for Life, a ministry of One Life Church in Flint, Mich.

James Adamson is a deacon at his church and a local missionary to the Orlando Women’s Center in Florida. As a representative of his local church, he wants to be aboveboard in everything. “I think that the leadership of the churches would truly change the trajectory of this type of work,” he said. “If we don’t have a presence, the vacuum that’s going to be created is going to fill in with a bunch of people who are there for the wrong reasons.”

Other groups that try to reach women outside ­abortion centers say the evangelists are the ones causing problems.

Melissa Yeomans and her Sidewalk Advocates for Life team use a different approach at the Cherry Street Planned Parenthood. Darrell Goemaat / Genesis

“When that type of an approach comes in, you see that … the opportunities for peaceful and calm conversation really is inhibited,” said Melissa Yeomans, a Grand Rapids program leader with the national organization Sidewalk Advocates for Life. It has had a presence at Grand Rapids abortion facilities for almost a decade. Yeomans described the group’s model as relational—prioritizing the women and trying to discover the needs leading them to consider abortion. Sidewalk Advocates doesn’t rule out gospel ­conversations, Yeomans said, but that’s also not the priority in their brief interactions with women. They hope to engage women so that later they can connect with someone who can help them spiritually.

Yeomans said the extra noise of the preaching sometimes made it hard for her and other sidewalk advocates to hear the women who stopped to talk. It also riled up the once-quiet Cherry Street neighborhood. For the first ­several months after Yeomans’ group and the evangelists moved from the shuttered Heritage Clinic to Planned Parenthood, tensions ran high on the sidewalk. Some locals screamed vulgarities from across the street. Residents threw eggs at pro-lifers and blasted loud music from their cars to drown them out. Sweezer said he and his family received death threats, and people sustained injuries in tussles—stories common to sidewalk evangelists. Sometimes, people with Sidewalk Advocates got caught in the crossfire.

Through the street preachers’ arrival and the increased safety concerns at the Planned Parenthood location, Yeomans said, Sidewalk Advocates lost maybe a third of its volunteers. “We have a certain model of outreach, and the model is loving, peaceful,” Yeomans said. “It can be really frustrating if there’s something totally different that makes what you’re seeing in the training and what you think you’re coming out for really challenging.”

Despite their offers of help and hope, Yeomans still ­considers the street preachers’ tone to be judgmental. And research, she said, has proven that “shame-based, con­demning messages are not effective. They don’t reach that woman in her moment of considering abortion.”

But Sweezer’s method has reached some women. He said he has seen 122 women decide against abortion since he started. Shadae Roberts, a single mom of six in her early 30s, credits Sweezer’s persistence with saving her life and the life of her youngest child. She made obscene gestures and yelled at him when she came to Planned Parenthood in spring 2024, seeking an abortion. Hearing him talk about sin and quote Scripture made her angry—but she said he never seemed angry. His sense of urgency won Roberts over, and she said the speaker ensured she could hear him. “Jordan actually put in the effort to, like, literally hunt me down. That’s what made a difference,” she told me during a Zoom call from her car. The baby she would have aborted was sleeping on her shoulder. “I feel like if you’re going to be out there, you really need to try to stop me.”

BRANDON HAMMAN KNEW what he was signing up for when he accepted a job offer from Coalition Life. The pro-life sidewalk organization has staffers assigned to work outside abortion facilities in Missouri, Illinois, and Kansas and hired him to work full time in Carbondale, Ill. The group’s approach to pregnant women relies on methods it says are tested and proven effective. “They were very clear in the interview process that I was not going to be evangelizing,” Hamman said. “Their focus is on getting the women to resources.”

According to Coalition Life founder and executive director Brian Westbrook, staff may only bring up spiritual topics if the woman initiates it. “We go out as Christians to serve them, but not to convert them,” Westbrook said. He described that approach as coming from “an engineering and a sales and marketing perspective.” Techniques such as waving with the left hand, wearing an orange vest, and not using any signage, he said, get more women to stop and talk. “We tweak our conversations to really, most importantly, meet those clients exactly where they are—meet their needs,” Westbrook said.

Hamman started on staff in June 2023. He handed out pamphlets with information about a baby’s development in the womb and studies about the effects of abortion on mothers. He encouraged women to get ultrasounds at nearby pro-life pregnancy centers, where they could find other resources. But he estimates about half the women who left would come back to the abortion facility. “There is at least a good hour to an hour and a half of just anxiousness, hoping you didn’t see that car come back around the corner,” Hamman said.

Around February 2024, Hamman started feeling convicted for not sharing the gospel with people coming for abortions. While letting them see their babies or giving them resources was great, too often he saw that wasn’t what the mothers needed. One of the last days he worked for Coalition Life, Hamman talked to a couple who went to a nearby pregnancy center then came back, carrying the brand-new ultrasound photos of their baby. Hamman saw the dad taking a picture of the ultrasound image on his phone. Then they headed inside for the abortion.

Sweezer hugs a friend following a sidewalk prayer service outside Planned Parenthood. Darrell Goemaat / Genesis

Hamman saw that the issue was a heart problem. “The way we change hearts is by sharing the gospel and letting God work through the proclamation of the gospel to change people.” He said he watched too many people leave the abortion facility after aborting their babies without hearing about the hope of forgiveness for sins—including the sin of abortion—in Jesus Christ.

In September, with the support of his church, Hamman started his own organization, Gospel for Life, and began relying primarily on sharing the gospel message. He still prefers to stop people in their cars and talk one-on-one before they pull into the abortion center parking lot. But if the number of cars slows and patients are waiting in the parking lot, he calls out and tells them the story of creation, the fall of Adam and Eve, and Christ’s death on the cross. “The way I look at this … is roughly 10,000 babies are going to be murdered in Carbondale this year,” he said, basing his estimate on a post from one of the city’s three abortion facilities. “And then if you think on top of that, there’s 10,000 mothers that need to hear the gospel, that are coming there to take the life of their child.”

Sweezer in Grand Rapids prioritizes gospel conversations for similar reasons. He tries to be “just always gospel centered, always rushing to the cross because it’s the power of salvation. You can save a baby, but they can both go to hell if they don’t know Jesus.”

WHILE EVANGELISTS and more traditional pro-life sidewalk counselors battle for the attention of women outside abortion centers, pregnancy centers have to navigate how to relate to these groups without attracting pushback. Rusty Thomas, the former Operation Save America director, said several pregnancy centers in his area refuse to talk to him or the women he brings to them because they don’t want to be associated with his work.

Vicky Mathews, executive director at the pro-life Choices Women’s Clinic in Orlando, can attest to that sense of aversion. When she first started as the center’s director more than a decade ago, people encouraged her to visit the nearby abortion center to meet the evangelist who was largely responsible for the high rate of abortion-minded women coming to the pregnancy center.

Historically, she saw the pro-lifers on abortion facility sidewalks as offensive. But she visited—and kept going back. John Barros’ ministry captivated Mathews. She saw him preach the gospel, share Scripture, and pray with people. Sometimes, the things he said made her uncomfortable. But she learned to respect what he did.

“When you are at the true gate of hell and you are right there at the final hour, it takes something different than what it takes for us,” Mathews said, comparing sidewalk ministry to pregnancy center ministry. “I felt like [John’s] approach was solid. … It was so easy to see the humility and the care and the passion, not just for that unborn child, but for that mom and dad. I saw that it was effective.”

Mathews said she and Barros were like brother and sister in their pro-life ministries until his death in 2024. People like herself in pregnancy center work, she said, “owe it to ourselves to build a relationship” with people like Barros. “I think sometimes there could be more in common than what we think.”

Yeomans talks with Sidewalk Advocates for Life volunteers. Darrell Goemaat / Genesis

Back in Grand Rapids, that’s what staff at the pregnancy center next door to the Planned Parenthood on Cherry Street have tried to do. But they’ve also set boundaries to distance themselves from all sidewalk groups, even those not using amplification. When the sidewalk groups moved next door, the pregnancy center’s CEO sent an email to the leaders at the Planned Parenthood facility to explain that the pro-­lifers on the sidewalk acted independently. The pregnancy center also asked the sidewalk groups not to use their parking lot or bathrooms. “Because everyone has cameras,” said Becky Buick, chief operations officer of PRC Grand Rapids. “So we have to be very clear … that they’re separate groups. And if they would come back and forth from our building … the optics would look as if we’re paying [them].”

But while the center maintains its distance, Buick said she has grown to love Sweezer and the other street preachers who come to the sidewalk. She said she and another PRC staff member met with some of the evangelists to talk through misunderstandings and hear the heart behind their work. They’ve come to recognize that these men sense a clear calling. “I’m so thankful for their spirit and that the Lord created men like that, that are willing to be that bold,” Buick said.

Buick remembers the early days after the street preachers’ arrival on Cherry Street, when a feeling of disgust would come over her any time she heard them preaching through their speakers. She attributes her “prejudice” at the time to a belief that their approach to women in crisis pregnancies was wrong and insensitive “because their method wasn’t my method,” Buick said. But she’s tried to look at their ministry with an open heart. She’s heard their stories of how Scripture has influenced women to decide against abortion and of how they’ve met the practical needs of mothers. She now sees how the Holy Spirit can use their work.

“As Christians, it’s really easy to throw a stone at someone who’s preaching on the corner and to have prejudice about them,” Buick said. The evangelists remind her of Old Testament prophets. “For goodness’ sake, they certainly weren’t liked, and … some of the things they said are horrible. So are we not thinking that still can happen, or that God still calls people to call out rough stuff that we don’t want to hear?”