Pastor of Church Targeted by California Has a Powerful Message for Believers
By Andrew J. Sciascia
Published October 10, 2020 at 3:37pm
A prominent American evangelist is back in the news this week with another inspiring message from the front lines of the months-long fight to protect in-person worship.
In a short video released Wednesday on social media, Grace Community Church pastor John MacArthur of Los Angeles called on churches and believers across the country to “be the church” and continue gathering, despite government efforts to prohibit such activity through the strict legal enforcement of coronavirus-related public health restrictions.
“This is a church committed to the bedrock conviction that the Bible is the word of God,” MacArthur said. “And we, in obedience to that word, have met together every Sunday for all these years.
“We have been protected by our government. We’ve been given freedom to do that,” MacArthur added.
“Today’s current crop of politicians are trampling on the Constitution and on the resolve of citizens to demand their rights under the pressure of a manufactured fear.”
The video was initially posted by presidential lawyer Jenna Ellis, a member of the Thomas More Society legal team defending the pastor in his courthouse battle with the state.
It’s not the first time that MacArthur has spoken out regarding dangerous governmental attempts to shut down the American church in light of the global COVID-19 pandemic.
In a July 29 radio appearance, the evangelist slammed not only these policies, but the policy of uncritical Christian submission to authority as well, comparing it to the 20th-century societal complacence that allowed Adolf Hitler to institute a dictatorship abroad.
“It doesn’t start with massacring 6 million Jews. It doesn’t start with massacring 13 million people between Russia and Germany in the killing fields in those years, the late ’30s and early ’40s. It starts this way. It starts with intrusion into the life of the church, and the violation of law is by the governor because that’s against the First Amendment,” he said.