Estimated reading time: 5 minutes.

I want to bring relational apologetics to the pro-life movement. I’ve written and spoken previously about my dear friend Deanna Unyk. I’d encourage you to check out one of those two links to get the beginning of the story that I’m going to continue here. I’m so excited to tell you why Deanna now calls herself pro-life.

Meet Deanna, my good friend.

In case you didn’t click either of those links, Deanna was a pro-choice, atheist lesbian in Canada who befriended me in February 2013, through a YouTube message. Deanna was one of the most intelligent pro-choice bloggers I’d ever read. We exchanged nearly 120 philosophical emails, then started Skyping together.

I’m eager to share with you how my relationship with Deanna has progressed and the ways that her thinking has changed, but there’s a danger in this. It’s possible that some people would read this and interpret it as me telling you about a project of mine. It’s very important to me that you know that Deanna is not an object to me, a mind to be changed so that I can get another notch on my pro-life belt.

I have no shame in telling you that I love Deanna.

Yes, I have close friends who are girls, and if you want to know why I think it’s healthy for some Christians to have cross-sex friendships, my friend (notice I didn’t call her a colleague) Jonalyn Fincher has published some wonderful thoughts on this subject. I’ve also written on the subject here.

When I say that I love Deanna, I mean what Jason Lepojärvi means when he defined love this way:

Love says that it is good that you exist and insofar as I am able I will contribute to your happiness, your existence, your flourishing.

Some of my pro-choice friends have not changed their thinking about abortion very much, but Deanna has. I want to share with you some of the changes in her thinking. Don’t read these as the reasons I’m friends with Deanna. Deanna will always be my friend, regardless of her views on abortion, her religion or her sexuality.

“Chaplain John,” a fun-loving prison chaplain who saw me speak at a banquet a few months ago interviewed me for his YouTube series, “Chaplain Chat.” I’ll be posting them this week.

In this second segment, I talk about my pro-choice friend Deanna and offer a clarification about the kinds of arguments that are bad and which arguments are very needed. This is important because I notice Christians equivocate on the word “argument” a lot.

“Chaplain John,” a fun-loving prison chaplain who saw me speak at a banquet a few months ago interviewed me for his YouTube series, “Chaplain Chat.” I’ll be posting them this week.

In this first segment, I offer some reasons that pro-life and pro-choice people should try relational apologetics, befriending each other as well as having conversations on college campuses.

(Is anybody else loving the frame that YouTube grabbed for the embedded video?)

I had the opportunity to speak to the 7th-8th graders at St. Joachim School yesterday. It’s about a 40-minute trip, so during my drive I pondered what I wanted to talk about. I knew I would include a lot of my standard material on being a good ambassador for Christ and making a persuasive case for life. I also wanted to talk about relational evangelism.

You see, I have several pro-choice friends. I believe that many people need more than one conversation to change their mind about an important issue like abortion. Some people need relationship.

I told them about my friend Deanna, who emailed me eight months ago after watching some of my YouTube videos. I could tell from her first email that she was both fiercely intelligent and open-minded. But if you compared our lives on paper, you would probably be surprised to learn that we are good friends.