Credits / Links to Other Related Pages: Love3 Notes / Flagship / Invite a JFA Speaker or Event

Justice For All’s Training Materials - Credits

  • “Abortion: From Debate to Dialogue” Interactive Guide, v. 3.5

  • Love3 Workshop Interactive Guide, v. 3.5

Note on Version 3.5:

Beginning with version 3.5, the interactive guides for our in-person training events and our online training events feature the same material from pages 3 through 42. The Love3 guide adds a different title page and table of contents as well as additional pages at the end with the conversation starters found on our Notes page.

General Credits

JFA’s trainers and volunteers have spent thousands of hours (collectively) interacting with pro-choice advocates all over the country over the past 25 years. More than anyone else they have contributed insights and reflections that have shaped our training program and our materials.

In addition, we’d like to say “thank you” to organizations and speakers who have mentored us or walked alongside us as partners as we developed our material: Trent Horn of Catholic Answers, Greg Koukl of Stand to Reason, Scott Klusendorf of the Life Training Institute, and Josh Brahm of Equal Rights Institute. And thank you to Gregg and Lois Cunningham of the Center for Bioethical Reform for helping JFA in its early days and for providing pictures we continue to use to this day.

The JFA training program was created through a partnership between Justice For All and Stand to Reason from 2003 until 2008, when JFA’s current Executive Director, Steve Wagner, served as a speaker for Stand to Reason. So, you’ll notice many similarities between Stand to Reason and Justice For All materials and approach to dialogue on abortion. We owe a great debt to Greg Koukl, Melinda Penner, and Stand to Reason for helping the JFA training program get its start.


Versions and Updates

Portions of this material were originally published in the Abortion: From Debate to Dialogue Manual and Interactive Guide used in the Justice For All training program 2005-2010. Major revisions and updates took place in September 2010 and January 2015 (v. 3.0). Further updates were made in June 2015, October 2018, January 2019, April 2019, and November 2020. The present edition (v. 3.5) marked a major revision including a completely new format and was published in September 2023 (ADD) and in July 2024 (Love3).

Disclaimer

Throughout this material, references to organizations and authors should not be construed as a blanket endorsement of everything those organizations and authors have said or done.

Authorship and Credit

JFA attempts to give credit within its training program whenever it’s feasible to do so. Within JFA’s written material, when an idea is clearly the unique creation of a person, something that we remember learning from a person, or a direct quotation, you will see either a citation within the paragraph or in a footnote. We encourage you to use these citations to do further research on your own.

These citations signal to the reader JFA’s overarching philosophy of authorship. Ideas found in the various articles are the result of a learning process that includes reading other authors, engaging in dialogue with other people, listening to lectures, and other learning activities. Personal reflection in that process does sometime yield new connections and ideas, but truly new ideas are rare. Unique ways of teaching them are a bit less rare.

Accordingly, when you see an author’s name in a by-line within this material (a secondary line in an article title containing an author’s name), it does not mean that the author is the sole person responsible for all of the information in the article. It means that he or she is the person responsible for putting the information in its present, unique form. As you read, please assume that the author’s work is the product of a rich learning experience that included the contributions of many unnamed people.

If it were feasible, we would like to credit anyone who contributed, but tracing how an author got to a certain idea or argument would actually render the article he has written useless. Isn’t an article simply a summary of a process of learning so that you don’t have to repeat it (or at least so you don’t have to spend the same amount of time repeating it)? It allows you to move beyond the process the author has been through and make your own connections…and possibly your own articles.

It is the author’s responsibility to give credit whenever possible. If you as the reader find an instance in which credit is misapplied or neglected, please email jfa at jfaweb.org with your suggestions for amending the document to more accurately reflect our goal of giving credit where credit is due.

Note from JFA’s Founder

Credit for the contents of this guide is doomed to be inadequate, because as our good friend Scott Klusendorf rightly reflects, “We all stand on some pretty broad shoulders.” Having said this, specific acknowledgment is due those who have had a special role in helping mentor the authors who have in turn collaborated to produce this guide.

Attribution first and foremost goes to the Creator of heaven and earth, for everything of value that we are and have comes from Him and His resurrected Son, Jesus Christ, the author and finisher of our faith. Second in a very long list of those who have made possible this manual are our families who God has used to prepare and sustain us for this work.

Mentors past and present, whose work has greatly shaped our own, include Greg Koukl of Stand to Reason (www.str.org), Gregg Cunningham of the Center for Bioethical Reform (www.abortionNO.org), and Scott Klusendorf of the Life Training Institute (www.prolifetraining.com). In addition, the Justice For All staff outreach team (past and present), thousands of volunteers who have done the work, and hundreds of thousands of students who engaged in dialogue and labored to help us understand their views, have all contributed to making this guide a reality.*

The person most responsible for writing and assembling not only this interactive guide, but more importantly the training program that it has come to represent, is Steve Wagner, the Director of Training for Justice For All.** He has labored long and hard to put this “Seat Work” material into your hands to prepare you for the much needed “Feet Work” yet to be done.

Finally, we are mindful that none of the ideas and approach presented here would be possible without the tireless support of the Justice For All office staff past and present. In addition, thousands of donors have sacrificed to partner with us. Without them, Justice For All would not exist.

Throughout this guide we have endeavored to credit ideas and words to those who have in significant ways contributed to the contents of this manual. Please forgive and bring to our attention any oversight or error in this regard.

It is our ambition that each participant in this training program will be able to join our good friend Pastor Allan Taylor in saying, “I got to do what Jesus did.”

David Lee

Founder, Justice For All

September 2010

Note: This appeared in the printed guide up through version 3.32

*    Josh Brahm, who contributed especially to the current form of Activity 4 and Activity 6, is now serving with Equal Rights Institute (www.equalrightsinstitute.com).

**  Steve Wagner is now the Executive Director of Justice For All (since June 2014).



Three Essential Skills

Can Images Help?

  • JFA owes its approach to showing graphic visuals in presentations to Scott Klusendorf of the Life Training Institute. This approach includes the following:

    • We warn the audience before any graphic visuals are shown.

    • We clarify why we show the graphic visuals (pictures clarify the truth about abortion in a way that words never can).

    • We make it clear the audience members can look away or close their eyes (there is only soft music in the background and no narration, so the contents can be avoided completely).

    • In addition, whenever appropriate, we remind the audience that Christ is just as eager to forgive the sin of abortion as any other sin, and we encourage the audience to turn a difficult confrontation with the reality of abortion into the beginning of a healing journey by accepting Christ’s completely sufficient sacrifice for sin.

One Central Question: What Is the Unborn?

  • Thanks to Scott Klusendorf at the Life Training Institute for helping us learn to Trot Out the Toddler! Go to www.scottklusendorf.vom or www.prolifetraining.com for LTI’s great training and resources.

  • Also, Greg Koukl’s book Precious Unborn Human Persons and Stand to Reason’s Making Abortion Unthinkable curriculum were formative for our material in this section.

Biology: Is the Unborn a Living Human Organism?

Equal Rights Argument

  • Josh Brahm and Tim Brahm were instrumental in the development of our Equal Rights Argument material. Josh serves as the President of the Equal Rights Institute. We heartily recommend ERI’s speakers and resources.

Question of Rape

  • For a reflection on how we came to approach the question of rape mindful of the relational and intellectual challenges the question presents, see Steve Wagner’s September 2023 letter, “Be Relational…then Be Intellectual.”

Bodily Rights

  • Many of JFA’s trainers and volunteers helped develop our approach to bodily rights and our materials for training people to respond to these arguments. These include Trent Horn (now a Speaker with Catholic Answers), Tim Brahm, Josh Brahm (now the President of Equal Rights Institute), Matt McKinley, Tony George, Jacob Burow (now with Abortion Dialogue Academy), Joanna Bai, Tammy Cook, and Catherine Wurts.

Other Sections




Page 40: Helping Those Considering Abortion

This page was created by JFA team members in the late 1990’s and was updated by the JFA Team in 2010 and 2023.




Credits / Links to Other Related Pages: Love3 Notes / Flagship / Invite a JFA Speaker or Event