Chat with a pastor who shut down his church during COVID
Recently I found a church community that I cautiously hoped we could join. They seemed refreshingly casual, relational, and non-authoritarian, and believed in the Holy Spirit and his gifts, things sadly lacking in the church we just left.
Until a couple of weeks ago the pastor, during a sermon on Jesus’ teaching on persecution in the Beatitudes, launched a pointed criticism at pastors who were arrested for resisting the government’s COVID shutdown orders in Canada. I wrote about this in a recent post, “A major misunderstanding about persecution”.
This was, admittedly, discouraging. I’d dared to hope that maybe this could be a place to call home, but though I questioned whether I was overreacting, I realized I could not feel confident about continuing there.
To his credit, the pastor, when I emailed him to inform him of this, suggested we sit down to discuss it further. Yesterday, we did. Unfortunately, the chat confirmed my concerns instead of dismissing them, but hopefully it will be helpful in some way to both parties.
I’ll call the pastor John. John began by semi-apologizing for how he’d expressed his thoughts that Sunday, insisting that he hadn’t described them well. He indicated he was in agreement with much of what I’d said in my email, that he did think the government had overstepped during COVID, he supported the Freedom Convoy though he hadn’t gone, and he and his family had not taken the COVID shot (good to know for the sake of their health).
He said that he wasn’t in disagreement with pastors resisting COVID measures per se, but with the way some did so, which he found to be over-belligerent, rebellious, and lacking in the fruit of the Spirit. It’s a fair-enough point, although it seems a bit armchair-quarterbackish from someone who did not take action and pay a price for it as those pastors did.
John went on to say that he did agree with pastors who resisted when their governments were treating the church differently than other groups, such as a pastor in BC who kept his church meeting when other groups were allowed to do so but churches were not. He stated that this was his line in the sand: if the government treated the church differently, or told him that he couldn’t preach Jesus, then he would disobey. He thought it wasn’t worth risking trouble over “a vaccine”.
I found this reasoning lacking. For me, the point isn’t whether the government is singling the church out; it is, does the government have the authority to tell the church not to gather? Is what the government ordering you to comply with good, or is it evil? Is it true, or is it a lie?
For me, I realized that the entire COVID operation was evil, and to cooperate with it would be to cooperate with evil. I felt a duty to resist, out of love to my fellow humans who were being shut up in their homes, fired from their jobs, deprived of human contact, left to die in hospitals alone, prevented from flying to visit dying family members, committing suicides of despair, having their businesses fail, denied medical care, getting sick and dying from the shots, and on and on.
The COVID psyop took a massive and grim human toll, and I didn’t and don’t believe it was possible to be neutral. When evil is at work, you either cooperate with it, or resist it. If you cooperate with it, you are enabling and furthering evil. Period.
I mentioned to John that he’d given China as an example of a place where Christians face “real” persecution, unlike, he says, in the West. I asked him if he knew that China persecutes all religious minorities, not just Christians. I told him that persecution almost certainly wouldn’t come in the form of telling pastors not to preach about Jesus. It does come in the form of: “Oh, you believe there are only two genders and that men don’t belong in the women’s washroom? Bigot! We will fine you, arrest you, expel you from school, fire you from your job.”
And of course, during COVID, the government didn’t persecute pastors for preaching about Jesus. They did arrest them for their conscience- and faith-motivated choices to obey Jesus’ commands to gather together and continue preaching the gospel and nurturing their flock’s faith as they are called to by God.
John told me he expected to someday be martyred here in Canada for his faith. I told him that it’s very easy to think that you will be able to pay the ultimate price, especially when that seems far off, but the real question is, how do you act in the lesser, day-to-day tests? If you can’t risk backlash when the stakes are lower, what makes you think you will be able to pass the most difficult test of all? Courage is like a muscle: it must be exercised at every opportunity so that when you need it most, it doesn’t fail you.
In the end, I expressed my concern that if we join John’s church and there is a repeat of the COVID psyop, he would again comply and shut down his church. He could not say that he would not, and so for me, sadly, the decision to not integrate into that gathering was confirmed.
I want a spiritual leader who, when the chips are down, leads with courage and takes risks to continue following Jesus, while encouraging his flock to do the same. I don’t want someone who plays it safe, complying until the perhaps-unlikely time when things meet his standards of what persecution should look like, and he’s then willing to resist. I need a community of faith which will be a source of encouragement and support during difficult times, not one that allows itself to be scattered like sheep without a shepherd.
On the other hand, I do appreciate the reminder that we need to be gentle and gracious and led by the Holy Spirit even while resisting. I have felt convicted lately that I am sometimes guilty of conducting resistance in an overly-defiant, ungracious, belligerent manner, so that rebuke is timely. We all must seek to conform ever-more-closely to the image and example of Christ.