Rev. Tony Spell, the pastor of Life Tabernacle Church in Central, Louisiana, has gone viral after a video of him was released showing him beating up a man who allegedly threatened to rape his wife and children.
Spell, 48, said he was working on the bus when his neighbor Scott Sherwin, 20, who was known to the church and had a history of harassing them, started shouting at him.
“He said, ‘Tony, I’m gonna rpe your wife, I’m gonna rpe all of your grandchildren,’ and he said, ‘The next time you go out of town, I’m gonna kill them, and what the F are you going to do about it?'”
Spell then ran to the man and took him to the ground, where he began pummeling him, throwing nearly 30 punches and giving him a twist to the neck and a kick to the side for good measure.
Following the incident, Spell claimed that he had a “duty and obligation” to protect his family.
“Number one, I’m a husband, number two, I’m a father, and number three, I’m a pastor who shepherds his flock. I will not allow a man to murder my children when I’m gone.”
He also addressed it with his congregation during a church service, quoting Mark 16:18:
“These signs shall follow them that believe. In my name…they shall lay hands on the sick and they shall recover. So today, I fulfilled the scripture. I laid hands on the sick. I don’t know how much ‘recover’ they’re going to have, but I laid hands on the sick.”
Spell was booked for second-degree battery and faces up to 8 years in prison if convicted.
Spell gained national prominence and notoriety in March 2020 for being known as the pastor of the ‘Last Church In America Still Open.’ His church never shut down and held in-person services without social distancing, possibly making it the only church in his state to remain open. This resulted in him getting arrested, fitted with an ankle monitor, and threatened with 3 years of prison. He defied the restrictions placed on him and preached anyway.
Notably, they are Oneness Pentecostals who deny the Trinity, who believe water baptism using a certain formula and baptism of the Holy Spirit with the evidence of tongues to be the conditions for salvation, and hold to the doctrine of sinless perfectionism.
