By Dave Andrusko

Chuck Colson, founder of Prison Fellowship, speaking to hundreds of pastors and ministry leaders at the 19th Annual National Conference in Woodbridge, Va. on Tuesday, April 9, 2008.
Chuck Colson, the renowned pro-life author and founder of Prison Fellowship Ministries, is in critical condition four days after emergency surgeon, according to a statement issued Wednesday by Prison Fellowship Ministries.
Colson was speaking at a conference last Friday “when his speech became garbled and he had to sit down, according to witnesses at the event,” Baptist Press reported. “He was taken by helicopter to a nearby hospital, where he underwent evaluation and then surgery early Saturday.”
In updating Colson’s medical condition, Prison Fellowship Ministries said
“Chuck Colson, founder of Prison Fellowship, Justice Fellowship and the Colson Center for Christian Worldview, underwent surgery on Saturday morning to remove a pool of clotted blood on the surface of his brain. Colson became ill while speaking at the Wilberforce Weekend conference on Friday night.
“His attending physician, a cerebrovascular neurosurgeon, reports that Colson suffered an intracerebral hemorrhage. On his arrival at the hospital, the neuroscience ICU stabilized him and took him to the operating room for evacuation of the blood clot in his brain.
“Colson is listed in critical condition at this point but has shown some early signs of potential for recovery.”
On Tuesday Prison Fellowship Ministries CEO Jim Liske said, “We believe that we serve a mighty God – the ‘Great Physician’ – and are hoping and praying for Chuck’s full recovery. When I visited him yesterday, I was encouraged to see that as we prayed, Chuck was responsive.”
Over the years I have read a number of Chuck’s most important books. Many has been the time when I couldn’t find just the right way to convey an important truth and, then, I found something Chuck had written. For example, for years I strove to find a way of explaining what passage of the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act and the Supreme Court’s subsequent upholding meant.
Here’s what I eventually wrote:
“I have striven for years to find an apt comparison. Thanks to Chuck Colson, a staunch pro-lifer, I have it.
“In a Breakpoint commentary, Colson likened what happened with the April 18 [2007] decision to the 20+ year crusade of William Wilberforce. He is a hero to all pro-lifers, a model of what it takes to defeat a deeply-entrenched evil, protected by the Establishment. In Wilberforce’s case, it was the British slave trade.
“Colson reminded his listeners that if you looked at the initial victory Wilberforce won in 1788, you could say it didn’t challenge the legitimacy of slavery at its core. And it didn’t! It ‘restricted the number of slaves that a ship could be allowed to carry based on the ship’s tonnage.’
“But it was a victory nonetheless because ‘it proved that the slave industry was vulnerable.’ Colson correctly calls this a ‘small’ victory, in the short term, but it proved to be a decisive victory, in the long term. ‘[A]fter nearly two decades of hard work, in 1807, the House of Commons voted by an overwhelming majority to abolish the slave trade.’”
I look forward to borrowing many additional insights from the 80-year-old Colson. Please keep him in your prayers.
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