Anti-abortion church near Planned Parenthood Spokane relaunches as ‘Voice’ after legal battles

Anti-abortion church near Planned Parenthood Spokane relaunches as ‘Voice’ after legal battles

News Story by Aaron Hedge | FāVS News

The Church at Planned Parenthood (TCAPP) — the anti-abortion ministry founded in 2019 in Spokane by Pastor Ken Peters, who built a modest national profile on the ministry’s brand — is reemerging after years of legal battles. 

Under a new banner, “Voice,” the church held a worship service in the parking lot of the Salvation Army, across from Planned Parenthood’s Spokane Health Center on Indiana Avenue, on Oct. 26. Led by Patriot Church Pastor Aaron Noble, it will host another on Dec. 1 at 2 p.m at the same location. 

Peters characterized Voice in an interview as a “spinoff” of TCAPP, which sometimes hosted services of hundreds of people praying to end abortion and trying to convince women entering the facility to change their minds.

TCAPP’s slogan was “a worship service at the Gates of Hell.” It sees the fight against abortion, largely embodied by Planned Parenthood, as an existential struggle against demonic forces it believes have infiltrated the culture and government of the United States. Voice’s slogan is “They can’t speak for themselves.”

Abortion as healthcare

Abortion is an often necessary and comparatively safe medical procedure in which a pregnancy is terminated, mostly before the fetus can survive. About 93% of the procedures are performed in the first three months of pregnancy, or before 13 weeks of gestation. According to the Brookings Institution, a centrist think tank, most people who terminate their pregnancies do so for reasons that “include finances, partner-related issues, the need to focus on other children and interference with future education or work opportunities.”

Planned Parenthood is a national, full-service reproductive healthcare provider that specializes in birth control, care for sexually transmitted infections, sexual education, mental health care, gender affirming care, prenatal and postpartum care and abortion. It is subsidized by the federal government, but federal law bars public money from being used for abortions.

From 2019 to 2023, TCAPP staged controversial “worship services” at Planned Parenthood locations in Spokane and around the country during which demonstrators were accused of blocking access to healthcare and frightening women seeking care. The events resembled protests.

Patriot Church — originally Covenant Christian Church — is a small franchise with locations in Spokane Valley, in Moses Lake and in Knoxville, Tennessee. Noble, who grew up in inner city Portland, pastored at the Moses Lake location and coached football at Moses Lake Christian Academy before coming to Spokane Valley this fall. Noble earned a master’s degree in ministry from Ohio Christian University in 2023. He is not related to Brian Noble, the prominent Spokane Valley pastor who now leads the Family Policy Institute of Washington.

Far-right connections

TCAPP has hosted a number of figures from far-right Christianity at its demonstrations. Fiery Nashville pastor Greg Locke, one of the most outspoken influencers on the Christian right who maintains that Democrats are “demons,” visited TCAPP in 2020 and told the Spokane City Council he did not want Spokane to “butcher babies.”

Rusty Thomas, the director of Operation Save America who said at an anti-abortion rally that he once “pummelled my children,” later asking for forgiveness, appeared at a TCAPP event, according to a 2021 interview Peters did with Saved magazine.

Matthew Trewhella is another. Trewhella is a prominent Christian pastor and anti-abortion activist who wrote a book saying local government officials should defy federal law based on their faith. Threwhella once signed a petition calling the murder of abortion providers “justifiable homicide.”

As journalist David Neiwert noted, at a notorious TCAPP event in Salem, Oregon, Proud Boys wearing helmets and flashing hand signals promoting the far-right Three-Percenters militia group glommed onto the TCAPP cause.

Peters distanced himself from the Proud Boys in an interview, saying, “We have our services in public. I’m not God. I can’t control who shows up and who doesn’t. All I control is who’s running it and who’s leading it and who’s in the organization. If Proud Boys show up, they show up.”

‘The Proud Boys were protecting us’

But he also expressed a level of gratitude for the Proud Boys’ presence in Salem.

“Antifa was attacking us,” Peters said. “The Proud Boys were protecting us.”

He added that tying his church to far-right organizations and figures is a tactic of “the left” to discredit him.

“They try to make me a right wing extremist by finding one extremist or two or an event that happened in Salem and say, ‘Oh, look at the Proud Boys and Pastor Ken,’” Peters said. “The only time I’ve ever seen a Proud Boy is at my pro-life events. The rest of my life is Proud Boy free, so what am I gonna do?”

In its early years, TCAPP was supported by the ministry of former Washington state Rep. Matt Shea, who declined to run for reelection in 2020 after being accused of domestic terrorism. Peters had hired Shea to run his church, then Covenant Christian, after he left his lawmaking responsibilities, and Shea was a stalwart “friend in the cause,” Peters told FaVS.

But Shea later betrayed Peters, taking Peters’ congregation and, from it, forming his own church “just down the street,” Peters said. They continued partnering on TCAPP, but their working relationship was over. They are no longer friends.

“I don’t like him,” Peters said.

Asked whether they would partner with Shea — one of the most vehement anti-choice voices in the Inland Northwest — in the future, Noble was open to the idea.

“I’d love every Christian church to be involved,” he said. “Any church is welcome.”

A national fight

Abortion care became inaccessible in much of the United States — for example, in Idaho, where it is now mostly illegal — after the U.S. Supreme Court, in 2022, overturned the right to seek abortion, which had been enshrined in constitutional law for nearly half a century. 

It was the first time the high court ever removed a right that had been protected by the Constitution.

The online investigative news organization ProPublica has started releasing a series of stories documenting the deaths of pregnant women who sought reproductive healthcare in southern states where abortion is illegal and were denied because doctors were worried about legal consequences.

Idaho is seeing an exodus of doctors specializing in gynecology because they don’t know how to do their work under the abortion ban, which healthcare advocates worry is eroding reproductive health care generally. The Idaho law can send doctors convicted of providing abortion care to prison for up to five years.

Though most people in the U.S. support some level of access to abortion care, conservative ministries, politicians and advocacy groups consider the decision a massive victory. Still, they believe their work is not done until abortions cease completely.

Since the Dobbs decision, which overturned the right to abortion, 13 states, including Texas, Georgia and Tennessee (where Peters now pastors a church), banned the procedure through legislation.

In many places, the electorate is doing the opposite. Voters in seven states protected the procedure, including deep-red Montana, in the last election.

In the two years since it has become illegal in many places, there have been more rather than fewer abortions, largely due to some states protecting doctors’ rights to prescribing abortion medication through the mail. A little more than half of abortions after Dobbs were performed using a series of pills that induce miscarriage. 

The rise of TCAPP

Peters founded TCAPP in 2018 as a pop-up church that would gather as close to the Planned Parenthood clinic as possible. 

“We want to get as close to Planned Parenthood as we can, because the closer we are, the bigger the statement that it makes,” he told Crosscut (now Cascade PBS) in 2020. “It makes a statement that we disagree with what they’re doing.”

He staged services around the walkway leading into the clinic, which Planned Parenthood said was disruptive to patients, and the clinic had sued the ministry for excessive noise. According to Crosscut, noise from TCAPP demonstrations exceeded the legal level, but the church was never cited by police. 

TCAPP’s intensity often brought the ministry into national headlines from 2020 to 2023 for methods criticized by reproductive healthcare advocates and providers as extreme and for litigation over these tactics. Peters and Noble both insisted the events — which they call worship services but seem like protests against abortion — are peaceful and not designed to disrupt women’s healthcare.

In interviews, Noble told FāVS that Voice would remain peaceful, and in a sermon Nov. 24, repeatedly emphasized to his congregation that the event would be held across the street from the reproductive health clinic, rather than on the same side as the clinic. This abides by a 2021 injunction issued against the ministry by a Spokane Superior Court Judge, which said the church could not demonstrate within 35 feet of the facility.

Shortly after that injunction came down, TCAPP demonstrators violated the order, praying on the same side of Indiana as the clinic.

In 2023, a judge decided TCAPP owed Planned Parenthood $110,000 on top of $850,000 in legal fees.

Voice’s goals

Noble conceded in an interview that some pregnancies necessitate abortion care. He said rape, incest and the health and safety of the mother are legitimate reasons to have an abortion.

“It’s really hard for me to be black-and-white because there’s a lot of gray and color in this,” Noble said. But “beyond that, I don’t see any reason to have an abortion. In some ways I’m an abolitionist, I just don’t want it at all, but I also understand there’s layers, there’s color to it.”

Peters was more absolute. Asked whether he wants to eliminate the procedure by influencing culture or by making the procedure illegal, Peters said “Yes and yes.”

But he added that banning abortion in Washington is a nearly impossible task. Abortion is legal in Washington until a fetus can survive outside of the womb. It requires no waiting period or age limit for pregnant people to be approved for the procedure and mandates health insurance includes reproductive healthcare to cover abortion care.

Peters said he does not want there to be exceptions for abortion for rape or incest. He imagined a scenario in which a 12-year-old girl is impregnated through rape.

“Get the baby to viability, induce it and get the baby out of that poor 12-year-old,” Peters said. “Try to save them both. And then, death penalty for the rapist.”

But he did say if a woman is miscarrying, doctors should be able to treat her. He does not consider that scenario to amount to abortion.

Why rebrand?

Peters told FāVS that the name “Church at Planned Parenthood” proved to cause confusion among people who were looking to fight abortion. Some misread the name as the “Church of Planned Parenthood” and drew the conclusion that it was advocating for abortion.

“They think we’re pro-Planned Parenthood,” Peters said. He said people thought, “Oh man, what is that, like some satanic Planned Parenthood church or something like that?”

“The word ‘Voice,’ it eliminates any confusion,” Peters said. “It bottom lines why we’re there. We’re there to speak for the unborn.”