Author: Staff Writer

Categories
News Scandal

Young Megachurch Pastor Steps Down as Allegations of Sexual Misconduct Rise Up

Ben Courson, 33, is the head pastor at the megachurch Applecare Christian Fellowship in Oregon. He is an international speaker who is the founder of Hope Generation, as well as a best-selling author. He has a TV show that is played in 180 countries, has a radio show that is played on 520 stations and has 154k followers on Instagram, gaining name recognition and influence every day.

He also has stepped down from leadership at his church after three former members have come forward alleging that he has engaged in sexual misconduct with them. Another woman has filed a police report claiming she was sexually assaulted by him, according to Rebecca Hopkins of the Roys Report, who broke the story.

In response to these allegations, Courson has shuttered his ministry page for time being, replacing it with a video that was also published to the church, where he confesses in part:

In some of my dating relationships, I have made mistakes, and I am truly sorry and deeply repentant. While it was always consensual, and there was never sex outside of marriage—there was never adultery—still, we let things go beyond what God requires of a relationship. When it comes to this area of women, I take full responsibility.

He further describes any other accusations of innuendo beyond what he admits to here as false and unfounded.

The women have a far different story. The Roys Report spoke to them, and they say that Coulson (who recently went through a divorce just two years ago after his wife says he committed adultery) initiated sex acts with them, frequently with no time wasted between meeting them and pressuring them to undress. One woman alleges:

He essentially pushed himself on me attempting to have a sexual encounter, if you will, but I didn’t let him. I was fully clothed but he was trying to put his hands in places I wasn’t comfortable with and I yanked away from him, and pulled myself off his couch and got the hell out of there.

Another woman says their relationship was consensual but was kept secret, with him insisting she delete the messages between them. “Looking back now, he definitely just did whatever he wanted, and I went along with it,” she said, as he told her that their sexual activity was allowable because he didn’t preach on it.

He said at the time he didn’t like to identify as a pastor, more like a motivational speaker. He said because he doesn’t speak on anything sexual that what he was doing was OK.

Apparently, Courson’s modus operandi was to be naked in the bedroom and rub his sexual organs against the woman until he ejaculated on her stomach.

Despite the acts being considered consensual by the parties, due to the nature of the clergy-layperson relationship, these ought to be considered abuse.

After the allegations were confirmed in June, Courson still preached the next Sunday while the elder team, including his father Jon Courson who is the Pastor Emeritus and handed him the reigns of the pastorate two years earlier, decided that this was not disqualifying behavior, but rather just disappointing behavior, and sought to keep it quiet.

They decided to keep him on staff and simply change his title from “Senior Pastor” to “Hope Generator” – resulting in two of the elders resigning over this unbiblical process and practice.

They also never told the congregation about any of this, and Courson continued to engage in public ministry for the next two months until he was exposed by Lorin Lynch on Instagram just a few weeks ago. (You should watch the whole thing. It is incredibly eye-opening.)

This resulted in the leaders finally telling the congregation the Courson version – that he went over the line a little bit, and all the other allegations are unfounded.

Still, for his personal growth, he has revealed that he is taking the next 6 months off from his pastoral roles to “learn and reflect and grow,” and then plans on coming right back there, restored and good as new.

Editor’s Note: For more information, and for a much deeper dive with more information, visit the Roys Report. If you know anyone else who has been involved with Ben in this way, reach out to us at protestia@outlook.com or Julie Roys at her website.



Categories
Critical Race Theory Evangelical Stuff Featured

We’ve Lost them. Calvin University Releases the Wokest Promo Ever: Reveals How Far the CRCNA has Gone

Calvin University, the Michigan-based University belonging and affiliated with the conservative CRCNA (Christian Reformed Church in North America) has been lost.

We knew there were deep and abiding problems with them ever since the teachers got mad in 2009 and overwhelmingly voted against a policy that would have prohibited them from supporting homosexuality and same-sex marriage- due to their desire for “academic freedom” and differing opinions from the faculty- but this 15-minute promo released by the University praising Black Lives Matter and regurgitating Critical Race Theory froth shows in a frightening way the depths of which they’ve descended.

The video features a host of students and professors after professor after professor proclaiming that “Black Lives Matter” and all the ways racism is as pervasive and commonplace as air in our society, and as a result must be repented of. Here are just a few snippets from perhaps 100 separate clips all collated together.

“We repent of our complicity and structural racism.”

“We repent of our silence in the face of injustice.”

“We repent that we prioritize our own comfort while our neighbors live in fear.”

“We repent of the racism that runs deep in our tradition and our churches, our communities, and here at Calvin University.”

“We know that we all have implicit biases that impact the way that we think and the way that we behave. Racism isn’t something that’s perpuated by a few bad people, it’s in all of us through our socialization. We’re committed to deconstructing these biases, reckoning with them and helping our students do the same. We study human flourishing and we can’t all thrive we can’t all flourish unless black lives matter.”

“Educational systems for too long have perpetuated systemic racism. As teachers, we have a unique opportunity and responsibility to speak and act against racism and for justice. We commit to actively and continually dismantle racism and white supremacy in our classrooms, schools, and society.

“As geographers, geologist, and environmental scientists we recognize that oppression and inequality have been written into our maps. Into our cities. Into our infrastructures, and even into the quality of the air we breathe and the water we drink. Therefore we commit as a Geo Department to building communities places and regions where all God’s children can enjoy peace and the goodness of God’s creation.”

“As scientists, we acknowledge that we working in a field that has long excluded and marginalized our colleagues and students of color much to our own detriment. And as educators, we commit to choosing pedagogies and structures that will help to amplify those voices of chemists of color and to prepare pathways for underserved students to contribute, to be heard, and to see themselves within STEM.”

“As world language teachers, we bring learners into practices of humility and empathy. As we work to express ourselves in a language not our own, it forces us to recognize our linguistic privilege, to de-center ourselves, to learn to respect the perspectives of others and briefly to experience what it’s like to occupy a position of less privilege. So we commit to help develop a radical empathy; one that grows our will and our ability to stand alongside our black and brown brothers and sisters.”

“As engineers, we acknowledge that whenever the work or products of engineering shuts out or marginalizes groups of people, it perpetuates injustice rather than building Shalom. And frankly, it’s just bad engineering. It is diversity that leads to innovation and the development of enduring solutions to global problems.”

And on and on it goes, teacher after teacher, professor after professor, until all that’s left is the echoing refrain of ‘Black Lives Matter’ ringing in the eardrums and the distinct impression that things for them will only get worse from here.

Categories
bad theology

‘Wiggly Baby’? Tim Keller Sounds off on a Simpering God

Tim Keller, founder of The Gospel Coalition and cultural Marxist extraordinaire, has a long history of saying awful, terrible things, such as when his church called for more same-sex intimacy in churches, said that if you have white skin, the bible says you’re involved in injustice, trashed the Social Justice and the Gospel Statement, endorsed the notion of a “gay Christian,” affirmed Christians have “liberty of conscience” to vote for pro-abortion Democrats, and explained that Christians will be purged from government and schools and that they brought it on themselves.

In fact, he’s usually so bad and distinctive in his wrongness, that we created a Tweet Generator about him.

Now, in all his wisdom, he posted a new tweet this morning that sounds like something you’d hear by a newly converted 13-year-old girl at a Hillsong Church youth camp, given how self-centered, self-absorbed, and wrongly focused it is.

His tweet is barely a step above the cringy and icky classic “Jesus loves you so much and died on the cross to prove His love for you.”

As @machencyberwarr aptly points out:

I’ll disagree because it obfuscates why Christ became man. God is omnipresent, He’s “close” regardless of our state. He became man to satisfy His justice to save mankind. While seemingly small, one take is to God’s glory while the other is close to man’s glory.

Exactly.

It is not hard to not say foolish, unbiblical things on Twitter, and yet Keller has a bad habit of tossing out his pithy little Kellerisms that half the time barely make a lick of sense, and the other half is little more than esoteric ramblings. We’d ask him to stop, but he’d probably just tweet back at us something like “Stopping is a refusal to let God start something in the moments that stop your heart,” or whatever else would engender golf-clapping and scores of retweets from his frenzied followers.

Bonus beatdown:

Categories
Evangelical Stuff Featured In-person Church

A Gallery Of The Faithful Gathering For Church. Album 4

The fourth album in our series showing our brothers and sisters in Christ gathering for church service as faithful believers. While going to church does not make one a believer, refusing to faithfully attend a local church should seriously call that faith into question. This is a glimpse of what the global church is up to, and will feature images in chronological order, week to week, of the men and women being obedient to the scriptures. As always, click to enlarge.

For previous albums Album #1, Album #2, Album #3

For our multi-volume series showing the progression of the Church worldwide experiencing the lockdown and pandemic, from March 2020- July 2021, click here

Categories
News

Bethel’s Sean Feucht Bringing Worship Tour to Greg Locke’s Church

What an ugly pairing. Sean Feucht, the worship leader made famous after his illegal “guerrilla” worship sermons swept through the nation during the heat of the pandemic, putting on maskless concerts all throughout the United States that attracted tens of thousands of people, is putting on a worship service at Greg Locke’s church.

Readers of Protestia will recognize Locke as the foul-mouthed, spouse-abusing-and-abandoning, Tennessee “pastor” who notoriously divorced his wife of two decades and quickly married his secretary, claimed that “Mitch McConnell is being controlled by Illuminati hand signals,” threatened a Dunkin’ Donuts worker with kicking his teeth down his throat, and recently said that if you deny the existence of tunnels under the White House or Capitol Building that were uncovered by the military and used to house both live and dead children, you’re just as complicit in the abuse as “crack-smoking perverts.”

Set for Saturday the 28th, Locke reminded his congregants during yesterday’s service:

And so just before we get up, don’t forget this coming Saturday night, six to eight o’clock, Sean Feucht’s Let us Worship will be under the tent. We’re hosting, it’s is going to be their whole worship set, their whole worship opportunity for those two hours. I will be preaching up front at the beginning just for a few moments, but we’re hosting them, the chairs will actually be out. Because this tent will stand – it’ll seat about 3000, it’ll stand about 4000 – and so we’ll probably have about three or four thousand people here.

We have reached out to Feucht’s press team and asked him to what extent he was aware of Locke’s history before he agreed to the booking, and we will update this page accordingly.

Categories
News

‘Twerking for the Lord?’ Steven Furtick Laughs as TD Jakes Disgraces his Wife

Speaking at Elevation Church after receiving a thunderous ovation and praise from the congregants, and after Steven Furtick gushed all over his Trinity-denying mentor while calling him his “north star,” the heretical T.D. Jakes invited the congregants to gaze upon his wife and reveal that she can still ‘twerk for the Lord.’

“My lovely wife celebrates you. Stand up Honey, show them I did good. You the finest grandmama I ever saw in my life. Five kids, nine grandkids and still rocking it. She can still twerk for the Lord, give God a praise.”

This is gross behavior. Jakes invited his wife to stand up before the congregation and basically tells the crowd to evaluate her physical looks and attractiveness, asking the crowd if he “did good” while noting how attractive she was for her age and that she has apparently some skill in a particular sexual dance.

Though everyone is laughing uproariously, there is no reason for a so-called preacher to be talking about his wife’s sexual writings from the pulpit. That is not the place for that. That is information that does not and should not be shared with the congregation publicly, and is functionally no different than telling the crowd what sex positions they like and what other activity they engage in in the bedroom.

In any normal church, that sort of comment would instantly cause the crowd to tense up and become incredibly uncomfortable, sucking the oxygen out of the room. But Furtick not only stands by as it happens, he laughs his head off at the funny comment, oblivious to how shameful and disgraceful it is to put one’s wife out there like that.

Sadly, this sort of lascivious behavior is to be expected from false teachers.

Bonus. For the h/t and to watch an extended commentary, see this video by Colin Miller below, which was our source.

Categories
News

Oooooh…We see…TGC Says that Online Church is Not Real Church. Wow! Do They Really? How Interesting!

The Gospel Coalition (TGC) thinks you are stupid. No really, they think you are so slow, that they have done whatever the theological equivalent is of peeing on your head and telling you it is raining. What other explanation do we have for Jonathan Leeman’s recent article in that rag geared at effete men telling you that “There’s No Such Thing as Virtual Church” after these people have spent the last 18 months telling you that there is and that it’s awesome and it’s the best thing ever?

The overarching message from the coalition has been loud and clear: “You should obey the government if they say not to gather, or only gather in small batches, which is an act of sacrificial service, and an act of love, and a good witness to your neighbor.”

In doing so, the Gospel Coalition has essentially been functioning as the Ministry of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment for the government, giving writers the platform to explain how pastors being arrested for having church services isn’t persecution, how if you say the government has “overreached” in their actions towards refusing to allow people to have church services, that it Is a denial of “objective reality” and claiming that Christians have endured no “hostility” or “ill treatment” from the government during the pandemic.

TGC has taken all sides of the argument then tried to convince you it’s a circle. These cowards and frauds have been telling the world how being together in church isn’t safe right now, and maybe congregants should not sing in church, why we need to obey the government, why it is an act of love towards your neighbor to stay at home and not gather, why the virtual church is a good option and is the source of so many ministry opportunities, and how to boldly witness while streaming online, and etcetera ad nauseum.

Now in the new article, Leeman posits:

Once the pandemic began, many churches livestreamed their services, and many voices extolled the enduring value of “virtual church.” Pastors who had previously decried the idea now opened up “virtual campuses” and staffed them with full-time pastors, promising that the campuses would continue indefinitely. This was an exciting development in the history of fulfilling the Great Commission, some said.

He leaves the identity of “many” and “some” up to the imagination when he really could have been pointing to a contributor list to the website.

The push toward the virtual church, we fear, is a push to individual Christianity…to offer or encourage (even with good intentions) virtual church as a permanent option, hurts Christian discipleship. It trains Christians to think of their faith as autonomous. It teaches them they can follow Jesus as a member of the “family of God,” in some abstract sense, without teaching them what it means to be a part of a family and to make sacrifices for a family.

…Pastors should encourage people away from virtual “attendance” as much as they are able. We need to find a gentle way to remind our members that the livestream option is not good for them. It’s not good for their discipleship, and it’s not good for their faith. We want this to be clear to them, lest they become complacent and not work hard at gathering with us, if they can.

Yes. That is completely true. Stand up. Slow Clap. Yea and Amen.

The only thing is that it was said 18 months too late when no one cares and it costs nothing to say. While we were saying this back in March and April of 2020 and getting crucified for it, people like Leeman and organizations like TGC and the Southern Baptist’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) were arguing that the government has the God-given power and authority to shut down churches and that the church should submit, leaving either “no church” or “virtual church” as the only options – the latter of which he now says is not a real church.

Just stellar stuff.

You will recall it was Jonathan Leeman and Mark Dever who took a swing at John MacArthur last year for insisting on having whole-congregation in-person gathering while extolling the right of the state to restrict in-person gatherings so long as it was temporary. This might explain why Cheverly Baptist Church, where Leeman is an elder, along with basically all TGC churches “temporarily” shut down for such a long time, over 14 months with some of them. (And a side note, why is Leeman’s church insisting any children older than 5 are required to wear masks? Gross, dude.)

Now, we learn the whole thing was a mirage. You were doing something through the webcam and your digital communion, but it was certainly not church and it was certainly not good for your soul.

Good to know.


Categories
Conspiracy Cursed Headlines Evangelical Stuff Money Grubbing Heretics

Bethel Pastrix: ‘Jesus Laid in that Bed with Me and Started to Play with my Hair’

A Bethel pastrix (because there are no such thing as women pastors) claims that she had a radical encounter with Jesus that resulted in her being healed of mental illness, psychosis and suicide, one that involved the Lord of glory slithering up next to her in bed and playing with her hair, running his fingers through it, his fingertips lightly scraping her scalp and his whispered sweet deliverances.

Jenna Winston is a pastrix at Bethel in California and also the proprietor of the ‘Heartscaping’ ministry. Her testimony is that she is a diagnosed schizophrenic who spent the first 40 years of her life going through psych ward holds and ‘multiple abuses, mental illness diagnosis’, extreme drug addictions and suicide attempts’ before winding up at a faith-based recovery program where she claims to have a radical encounter with Jesus that forever changed the trajectory of her life.’

Finding freedom from her demons, she calls herself a ‘Seer Prophet’ and does counseling through her Heartscaping ministry and “specializes in inner healing, prophetic deliverance, identifying and cultivating your spiritual gifts and restoring your full identity.” One distinctive is that unlike most people shilling their wares, her are unusually upscale in terms of their price, with a typical course video being $129,

In a video published by Reformation Charlotte, she explains what this radical encounter was, while she was in the psych ward.

Not long after I got there I ended up having um this encounter- well no, I ended up having what I now know to be natural deliverance, okay?

So much Jesus was going in and all of a sudden to me it felt like I got connected to all of this rage and I started screaming and yelling and cussing and throwing stuff, and now I know it was actually the demons leaving. And after that happened I literally, I’ve never experienced anything like it. I was spiritually, mentally emotionally physically exhausted- like nothing left in me.

I passed out on my bed and that is when Jesus became real for me, because Jesus walked in there and laid in that bed with me and started to play with my hair. And instead of telling me all the things I needed to fix, he said “I am so sorry for all the things that happened to you that made you not want to feel, and if you trust Me, I’m going to make every day of your life better than any day that you ever lived.”

It makes one wonder if the schizophrenia really left.

Categories
News

Woke Truth’s Table Podcaster Michelle Higgins: ‘The Trinity is Queer’

‘Pastrix’ Michelle Higgins really showed her true colors this time, didn’t she? One-third of the podcasting trio ‘The Truth’s Table’ she recently preached a sermon at Saint John’s Church where she prayed over her congregants of goats: “Let the Lord show you the queerness of the Trinity in ways that you had not felt welcome to before” as well as offer a prayer if supplication that they embrace “queer parenting.”

The Truth’s Table is “built by Black women and for Black women” and they describe their podcast as “women who love truth and seek it out wherever it leads us. We share our perspectives on politics, race, culture, entertainment, and gender which are filtered through an accessible yet robust Christian theological framework interspersed with hearty cackles and cathartic tears.” She shares the mic with co-hosts Christina Edmondson (wife of Mika Edmondson) and Ekimini Uwan, with all parties affirming her as a sister in Christ. Even rapper Lecrae sampled the show on one of his albums.

A popular speaker, she is frequently invited to do conferences with Jemar Tisby and the Witness Black Christian Collective, speaking at his events despite having these views being known. Naturally, her website bio is well aware of this:

“Michelle is a Director and founding member of Faith for Justice, a Christian advocacy group dedicated to continuing the biblical story of activism. Faith for Justice promotes public justice actions and leads training events that connect Christian communities to Black Power movements.…Michelle actively promotes the pursuit of social justice as a gospel imperative. She participates in civil disobedience and disruption for the sake of public justice…Michelle supports the work of organizations working nationally to ground local contexts in the Black queer feminist politic.”

She is no stranger to controversy, gaining scrutiny when a series of 2016 conference comments were unearthed where she stated:

Some of you know this shirt: ‘I met God. She’s black.’ Does anybody have that shirt? I have got to get me one… Have you met God? Do you know Him? She’s black… Do you know Jesus? Jesus is a trans-person of color… Your God is not heterosexual… Your God is the deepest, most forgotten, most ignored pieces of you and of your community…

She is a ‘proud supporter of OBS’ which is the Organization for Black Struggle– a group that has as a major part of their agenda to “ensure that all women enjoy equal access to quality health care and full reproductive rights, including the right to determine when or whether they will bear children and the right to a safe, legal abortion.”

Michelle Higgins is also the Co-Director of ‘Action St Louis’, which is another group that is also vocally pro-choice, pro-LGBTQ+ and routinely posts Facebook updates and tweets about the need to support Pride week, Planned Parenthood, and the demand for ‘full reproductive justice’ and access to abortion.’

During her June 20, 2021 service, she told her congregants:

…the Holy Spirit came down and filled us with the ability to communicate with one another and to understand each other. And so what better season to celebrate that reality (Pentecost) than a season of creativity and blackness?

Against all odds, (unintelligible) every road that we trod, the creativity of the writers of this very song, and it expressed a desire to continue to be more like our heavenly family. We also celebrate in the month of June, PRIDE, that is liberated from a whitewashed version of our identities.

What is gender? What is desire? What is orientation in a way that will tell you who you should love, when and how?

We have liberated God’s Pride, in a Pentecost of the Pride of God, to say that however the Lord made you, however you identify, that is how the Lord would look upon you and smile. And so of course, as it is Father’s Day, and God, the Creator is often known to be called father, there is no better time to remind some, and inform others, that not all fathers are men, and and not all men are daddies.

…Let the Lord lead you in this month of liberated Pride, to not only redefine what is romantic love, what is relational love? What is your interpersonal love? Let the Lord lead you to queer parenting.

Let the Lord show you the queerness of the Trinity in ways that you had not felt welcome to before.

I welcome every thought, every question, every part of you that desires to reconnect with your Creator, and maybe, just, maybe it is God, the original, non-masculine, non-bodied father, who will help you to redefine what fatherhood really is. And so it is the spirit that informs us and leads us to understand all of these things that the descending of the spirit over us the presence of a dove, in the presence of a mighty rushing wind. It shows that peace requires power.

That Higgins is an out-and-out pagan is a given. It is beyond dispute. But what does it say about Ekimini Uwan and Christina Edmondson that they insist she is a faithful sister in Christ? What does it say about their relationship to the Holy Spirit that they believe someone can be actively pro-choice and pro-LGBTQ without any conviction? Or how about men like Jemar Tisby and those at organizations like the Witness BBC or the Jude 3 Project that routinely platform her?

We think it says a lot.

Bonus comments made while speaking to Sarah Fenske of STOTA,

I’m a Christian, and my values center on a Palestinian man named Jesus. And Jesus in my tradition is a person who is fully God in all power and made the decision to draw near to his favorite thing, which is people, creation.

So Jesus calls us to care about the physical. And in movement work, my ministry is to live out the’ movement mandate’, which is given to us by activist Mary Hooks, in Atlanta Georgia. (This mandate) is to avenge the suffering of our ancestors, to earn the respect of generations to come, and to be willing to be transformed by the work of shifting the material conditions of oppressed people. Now that to me is a mission…That’s my ministry mission.

…The doors of the church are open, no matter how you identify, and so we see the trans community gender-non-conforming community more embraced. And in my church, I stand up and I preach pretty traditionally black church all over the place and there is no question when I identify God as three people who long to see a liberation for everyone and no judgment for how people choose to live.

Categories
abortion

Christians Graciously ‘Troll’ Liberals Into Attending Anti-Abortion Rally

(Daily Wire) A group of Christians led Philadelphia leftists into believing that they were invited to a rally about placing Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill — only to learn that the event was a benevolent troll meant to teach about equal protection under the law for all humans.

For the past ten months, members of Free The States — a Christian organization seeking the immediate abolition of abortion — distributed over 550,000 “Tubman 20s” across the country. The front of the bill features Harriet Tubman holding a lantern and a pistol, while the back of the bill features the burning of Pennsylvania Hall — the headquarters of Philadelphia’s slavery abolition movement, which was torched by an angry mob four days after its opening in May 1838.

In addition to other imagery recalling the abolition of slavery, the bill pointed recipients toward a website called Tubman20.com, which announced an in-person and live-streamed rally on August 1 at the former site of Pennsylvania Hall…

To continue reading, click here.

Editor’s note. This article was written by Ben Zeisloft and published at the Daily Wire.