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FORT WORTH—On a flat-screen television monitor visible from an outside window, a black and white image of a tiny hand seemed to wave at everyone in the room. Then the outline of a face became visible and on a bedside monitor of the same image, a heartbeat thudded rhythmically, signaling a little person only six weeks along in the womb of its mother was alive and moving.
Unfortunately, not all lives that begin get the chance to continue. According to the Planned Parenthood-affiliated Guttmacher Institute, 22 percent of all pregnancies end in abortion.
In 2008, that meant more than 1.2 million women chose to abort their children. With the help of Diane Montgomery and her colleagues at the Fort Worth Pregnancy Center, though, some of those lives will have a chance to continue—a chance to grow up and a chance to make their own choices.
“[These mothers] don’t know what to do,” Montgomery said. “They need someone to listen to them. They need someone to care about them because everyone else is just saying, ‘Do what you’ve got to do for your own self. It’s your body.’ And nobody is really listening to the emotional troubles they are having, and so through that, because we care for them and listen to them, it opens a door for not only the potential of lives to be chosen, but for her life to be changed, for the Lord to influence her life and spiritually to be changed as well.”
Montgomery, who began volunteering at the center shortly before she took a staff position there in August, said the Lord used her time in studying for her master of divinity degree at Southwestern Seminary to prepare her to minister to the women in crisis.
“I was applying all that I was learning here into writing and ministry, so I was applying a lot of the academic stuff, but I wanted to apply the practical [aspect]—to get down to the women of the real world— and I wanted to give back to the community,” she said. “You’re poured into so much here at Southwestern, and I wanted to pour into other women who have no clue what they’re missing out on.”
With women aborting 6,000 babies in Tarrant County each year, Montgomery said the center is in constant need of help, be it time, money or prayer.
“We always need volunteers because it breaks my heart when we have to turn away women because we don’t have enough volunteers and we don’t have someone that can meet with them,” she said. “I think Southwestern women would be ideal volunteers because whether they’re a wife of a student or they are a student, they’re getting the training, they have a heart for ministry, and they understand the practical side of helping people in crisis.”
The center does not just need women, but men, too, added Montgomery, whose husband, Alex, plans to get involved in the crisis pregnancy ministry.
“He wants to become a volunteer to help those guys who are sitting there in the waiting room when their girlfriend is with us, who just say, ‘OK, yeah, it’s your choice. You can do whatever you want. I support you.’ And they have no idea what an abortion really means,” Montgomery said. “We have guy counselors that go in there to encourage them to know how to support their girlfriend or wife in this situation and to educate them on what’s going on in their girlfriend’s body, in their mind, what would happen with her during an abortion or adoption and just kind of how to be a man in a relationship.”
Though she and Alex will deploy as missionaries to Columbia sometime in 2012, Montgomery said she plans to take the crisis pregnancy ministry with her.
“There’s a huge need for pregnancy centers where we are going,” she said. “Legal and illegal abortions are rampant. There is no pregnancy center that gives these women alternatives. They feel like they are stuck there. I just hope that I touch not only women in Tarrant County but also women in South America because it is a huge issue.”
Montgomery, who was named in October as the 2011-2012 Priscilla Scholarship recipient, came to Southwestern after graduating from Tarleton State University. A tennis player with dreams of opening her own bakery, she never imagined God would lead her into ministry, but she followed willingly wherever he led her.
“I started out in the master of arts in Christian education degree,” Montgomery said. “After taking Mrs. Patterson’s biblical theology of womanhood, I just wanted more. She spurred me on to want to know more, to grapple more with Scripture, to know more about women in Scripture. It was the Lord doing a work in me.”
That spurring led Montgomery to switch to the master of divinity in women’s studies degree, which she completed in May 2011. She said her involvement in women’s programs during her time at the seminary has developed skills and ministries in her that she never would have predicted for her life.
“The program offers you so much education and preparation that you can do anything. Because of the women’s program here, the Lord developed in me a writing ministry that I never thought I’d be able to do,” explained Montgomery who, with two other women, writes content for a website—UnlockingFemininity.com—and is working on a book.
From the pregnancy center to her writing to meeting her husband in a personal evangelism class, Montgomery said the Lord has determined her path. Whether going door-to-door or working at the pregnancy center, Montgomery said she strives to share the hope and truth of Scripture.
“That is kind of how I got turned on to the pregnancy center, was my love for women and ministering to women and then also a love for the gospel,” she said. “It’s the perfect opportunity that I can love on women, that I can help them, and that I can share the Lord with them. It’s just kind of the perfect place for that.”
