Megachurch Blasts Protestia From The Pulpit For Posting Viral ‘Bible-Kicking’ Video + ‘We Received Death Threats’
Crossroads Church is a multisite megachurch in Cincinnati, Ohio. Led by Senior Pastor Brian Tome, it is one of the fastest-growing and largest churches in America, consisting of nearly 40,000 members spread across more than a dozen locations in the Ohio and Kentucky area.
Seeker-sensitive to the extreme, their mantra is “anything short of sin is up for grabs,” resulting in the sermons that feature a trainer breaking a wild horse live on stage, having a Die Hard-themed Christmas service with the pastor seemingly smoking a real cigarette on stage after climbing through a vent and recreating Miley Cyrus’ viral ‘wrecking ball’ swing during their annual Superbowl Sunday sermon series.
Speaking of the latter, Crossroads transforms its church lobby into a stadium or a tailgate party each year, handing out drinks and hot dogs and staging a ‘Super Bowl of Preaching’ contest between pastors. This foursome enters the arena like MMA fighters or boxers and plays secular songs during the intermission, encouraging their congregants to stand up and dance to them.
Famously, during their 2020 service, teaching pastor Allie Patterson and lead pastor Brian Tome had a coin toss to see who would get to “receive the bible,” resulting in Patterson booting it across the stage and into the crowd.
We unearthed and posted the video, which was covered everywhere from The Christian Post to Breitbart, to the point that Tome wrote an article about, explaining that what they said was the bible that was kicked was actually a “Bible case made from football leather” that they put an old piece of styrofoam in.
Tome said that the clip was “shared by fear-and-fury-mongers with questionable backgrounds, whipping their followers into a frenzy” and that we were “using it to stoke hatred toward a woman who they don’t believe is qualified to be in leadership.” He offers, “They could have used a clip from any year from the last twenty as an example, but they cherry-picked a year when a woman “kicked off.”
We don’t see it the same way. From our perspective, they said it was a bible multiple times, which they then punted off stage. We took their word that it was a bible and reported that they punted it off stage. It’s pretty simple.
If you don’t want people to think you punted a bible off stage, don’t tell people that it’s a bible and then don’t punt it off stage.
The fact that a woman did it isn’t the point- we would have been just as irked if a man had done it. Furthermore, the comment about cherry-picking this clip out of twenty years of content is a non-starter. No one is shocked or surprised that a pastor preaches a sermon, but they are when that pastor then claims to kick off stage the material that sermon is coming from. Lastly, to folks asking why we would assume it was a real bible- when you just watched pyrotechnics from the stage and a pastor swinging on a chain like Miley Cyrus, why would we think it’s not?
This brings us to this year’s Super Bowl. Along with a segment featuring a recreation of the ‘Hot Wings’ show featuring poop and fart jokes, and with a half-time show encouraging the congregation to get up and dance to a bunch of secular songs by artists like Guns N Roses, Kendrick Lamar, and Taylor Swift, they blasted us from the pulpit.
Lead pastor Kyle Ranson criticized us for sharing the clip of the bible kicking, saying we “lied” about it while describing us as “highly questionable” whose founder was “convicted of embezzlement and defamation.”
Ironically, our Founder, JD Hall, was not convicted of embezzlement at all, making this statement to his tens of thousands of listeners untrue and slanderous, which is a type of defamation. He later added ‘not a single one of the podcasters and pundits who read that article ever questioned it, ever to this day have reached out to us to ask the truth. They just swallowed it whole and repeated the lie.”
If they would like to play that game, Christian Post writer Ian Giati wrote an article about it which included the following: “CP reached out to Crossroads Church for comment on Tuesday. This story will be updated if a response is received.” At the point of writing this article, a year later, no update has been given.
Furthermore, it’s not lost on us that Crossroads never contacted us before they took shots at us from the pulpit to get our side of the story or before they falsely accused our founder of being an embezzler. To be clear, we don’t care that they didn’t, but it reeks of a certain hypocrisy.
Ranson adds that this situation caused him “irritation,” and to make his point, he whipped out a prop he was given earlier that he was supposed to cleverly work his way into the sermon, which was a package of Preparation H. Used to relieve pain and itching caused by hemorrhoids, he tossed it into the crowd where it ultimately made its way into the hands of a child.
This begs the question: was that actually Preparation H he sent flying into the crowd? We know it looks like it is, and the pastor is telling us that it is, but according to Ransom and Tome, we can’t trust them that it is, and may be lying if we say there is, and therefore, should reach out to them before reporting that there was indeed hemorrhoid cream in that box.
Also more from yesterday’s service:
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So the “pastor” gets up in front of his congregation to preach with foam in a Bible cover? It would be easier to just carry a Bible, so why the prop? Why is he so adverse to having a Bible in the pulpit?
For the sake of your eternal souls, RUN from this false church !
I don’t get who would go to a Superbowl themed service where they kick a Bible like a football. People who actually watch football, on superbowl sunday, want the pastor to give a 5 minute homily like a Catholic church so they can get home and watch the game. People who don’t care about football, don’t care about football, so don’t want to have a longer service that’s football themed. So who is this for?