When the Buffer Excludes John 3:16

What's happening

On May 7, 2026, a district judge in Northern Ireland convicted a 78-year-old retired pastor for preaching the gospel in public. Clive Johnston was holding an open-air Sunday service in 2024 near Causeway Hospital in Coleraine — playing a ukulele, recounting his conversion, preaching John 3:16.

He did not mention abortion. The clinic was closed for scheduled appointments that morning. He was fined £450 under Northern Ireland's Abortion Services (Safe Access Zone) Act 2023, which makes it a crime to do anything that could be seen as "influencing" people seeking abortion services within 100 meters of one of eight protected sites. Body-camera footage shows Johnston being interrupted by a police officer who tells him he must stop or face removal. He has a criminal record now, for the first time in his life. He plans to appeal.

This is the first conviction under the act for speech that did not mention abortion at all. It is not the first prosecution of religious expression near a UK hospital — Rose Docherty was arrested in Glasgow last year for a placard, and Isabel Vaughan-Spruce was charged in England earlier this year for praying silently. But Johnston's case is something new. He was not protesting. He was not engaging anyone entering the clinic. He was holding a Sunday service that happened to fall within an invisible 100-meter line, and the court ruled that the line covers John 3:16.

The Christian Institute, which is funding his appeal, called the verdict a precedent for prosecuting religious speech based on what listeners might infer about the speaker's views. That is the claim the appeal will test.

What the Text says

The verse most people reach for in moments like this is Acts 5:29 — "we must obey God rather than men." It is the right neighborhood. But the sharper passage sits one chapter earlier, in a quieter scene.

Peter and John have been arrested for healing a man at the temple gate and drawing a crowd. The Sanhedrin — the actual ruling council, the legitimate religious authority of the day — interrogates them overnight and then issues a direct order: stop speaking, stop teaching, stop using that name. The apostles' answer is not a fist. It is a calm sentence in the first person plural.

Acts 4:18-2018They called them, and commanded them not to speak at all nor teach in the name of Jesus.19But Peter and John answered them, "Whether it is right in the sight of God to listen to you rather than to God, judge for yourselves,20for we can't help telling the things which we saw and heard."

The Greek of "we cannot stop" is ouk dunametha — literally, "we are not able." Not "we refuse." Not "we will not." Incapacity. The apostles are not threatening the council or grandstanding for the crowd. They are reporting, with something close to regret, that obedience to the council's order is outside the range of what they can actually do.

And notice what they say next: you judge for yourselves. They concede the council's jurisdiction. They do not deny that the Sanhedrin is a court. They do not refuse to appear. They invite the council to do its job — to weigh the apostles' answer against the laws the council is charged with administering — and to decide. They assume a court that is mistaken on this matter but reachable, addressable, still functioning as a court. The whole exchange depends on that assumption. Take it away and there is nothing to say.

This is the position the text gives. Buffer zones name a real good: women entering a clinic should not be intercepted, harassed, or pressured. Open-air preaching names another real good: the public square is a place where people can speak about ultimate things, including badly and including at inconvenient moments. The text does not collapse the tension between these two goods.

What it does is ask what kind of square is left when the line is drawn wide enough that a Sunday hymn and John 3:16 fall outside it — whether the court that hears Johnston's appeal is still the kind of court Peter and John were addressing.

The reflection

Peter's answer presumes a forum. He speaks to the Sanhedrin as men who can judge for yourselves — men capable, in principle, of recognizing whether the apostles' speech belongs inside or outside the boundaries the council is supposed to be guarding. That presumption is the load-bearing thing in the passage. Without it, the apostles are not in a conversation with authority; they are simply waiting to be punished.

A society can debate where the buffer should sit. It can decide that 100 meters is right, or too narrow, or too wide. It can decide that the burden of proof falls on the speaker or on the state. Those are real questions, and reasonable people will reach different answers about them.

But it is a different kind of society — a different kind of court — when the line is drawn so that a Sunday hymn and John 3:16 register as legal inference about the speaker's mind. At that point the court is no longer weighing what was said. It is weighing what a listener might have suspected the speaker was thinking. That is a category of judgment Peter and John did not face, and one the text gives no script for.

Johnston is 78. He has never been in trouble before. He is appealing. The Sanhedrin let Peter and John go because the apostles' speech, however inconvenient to them, was still legible to the court as speech — something the council could weigh and judge. The question Johnston's appeal puts on the docket is whether a British court in 2026 can still do the same: hear what was actually said, and judge it. Not infer. Not assume. Hear.