(Christian Headlines) Nearly two months after losing a court case over Covid-19 restrictions, Colorado’s governor has declared churches and other houses of worship “essential” and has removed attendance caps.
The new order, issued by Colorado Gov. Jared Polis and the state health department Dec. 7, lists worship services, weddings and funerals as “essential” and says they “may exceed recommended capacity caps” if “they cannot conduct their essential activity” within the current restrictions.
Attendees must still wear masks and practice six feet of social distancing “between members of different households.” The order also says outdoor services “are still strongly preferred.” But with winter approaching in Colorado, such outdoor services could be unfeasible.
Pastor Greg Locke of Tennesse was featured in an interview with CNN for a segment regarding rural America’s disinclination towards wearings masks and taking the upcoming COVID-19 vaccine. With Locke claiming he has never worn a mask (he’s lying, he has) he does represent a certain segment of the population that CNN would love to cover and show to their mocking viewers.
Locke (See more on him here) has been a vocal critic of mask-wearing, even going so far as to threaten to beat up a Dunkin Donut’s worker who asked him to wear one, telling him “I’m going to kick your teeth down your throat.”
His Church never stopped meeting during the lockdowns and the vast majority of his congregations do not wear masks. During the segment with reporter Elle Reeve, after Locke denied that we were in the middle of a pandemic, Reeve asked him to explain himself, resulting in a terse interaction where Locke was unable to explain or define what a pandemic is, prompting Locke’s publicist to step in and move Reeve on to a different question. H/T to TFA for the transcript.
LOCKE: I’m saying the sickness is real. I’m saying the pandemic is not.
REEVE: I don’t understand what you mean when you say “pandemic’s not real.”
LOCKE: … The pandemic is not real.
REEVE: But what do you think a pandemic is?
LOCKE: Not… Not COVID-19.
REEVE: But what do you think a pandemic is?
LOCKE: It is no pandemic.
PUBLICIST (offscreen): I think we’ve stuck on the pandemic question too many times.
REEVE: Well, why can’t you answer it?
LOCKE: It’s ridiculous… I did. There’s no pandemic! COVID-19 is not a pandemic.
REEVE: But what would a pandemic… But what is a pandemic then?
LOCKE: Not what we’re experiencing. I’m 44 years old. We’ve not had one in my lifetime, so I don’t know. And this is not it.
In Wilson County, Tennessee, conservative pastor Greg Locke resists wearing a mask and has no plans to take a Covid-19 vaccine.
The classical definition of a pandemic may be defined as “an epidemic occurring worldwide, or over a very wide area, crossing international boundaries and usually affecting a large number of people. ”
Pandemics can be either mild or severe, and issues of virology, immunity, and disease severity are irrelevant to its nature and classification.
Locke would have been better of saying “There’s a pandemic, but I don’t believe it’s that bad.” But getting got by CNN? That one will likely sting for a bit.
Jackie Hill Perry took some time out of her day to talk with her husband about issues of race and the inherent prejudices of the white race on a 2020 episode of “With the Perrys.”
They spoke favorably of the rubric of Robin DiAgelos’ monstrous White Fragility, endorsed defunding the police, claimed that all white people are racists, butchered scripture, said that white people need to lay down their privilege like Jesus laid down his own, and many other spectacularly wicked things. This is a wild ride. The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
I was talking to you about racism, and how in Robin DiAngelo’s book White Fragility, how she talks about..what she calls the “good/bad binary” which is that after or during the Civil Rights Movement, where we were able to see, you know, the marches and the police dogs and the batons, and them getting sprayed with fire hoses, and how for much of white America, they were able to really see racism and how bad and terrible and how negative it was.
And so racism got labeled ‘bad’. Bad people are racist. Bad people do this. But what that’s done for many white Christians is that now they’ve put racism in a category where they themselves don’t have what they – if they don’t participate in these things that they categorize as racist, then they exclude themselves from the label.
What I mean by that is, if racism is lynching, if racism is calling somebody the N-word, if racism is being deliberately discriminatory, then they’re not racist.
And what that does is you don’t see that racism is a spectrum, where you don’t have to be doing these egregious intentional discriminatory acts to still…to be racist. And so that eliminates you from seeing yourself as you are, which is no, you most likely still have a lot of implicit bias because of the media, because of the narratives, and because of growing up in a society where whiteness is king, right? And so I think people have to recognize that, like, racism is flexible. And it has adjusted throughout the decades.
And it’s a lot more subtle nowadays. But I think people have to do the work of being honest with themselves about what they think about black people, where they got that information from, and what they need to do to deconstruct it within themselves.
So I think a part of the work…because there’s so many things we could do. I’ve been reading about defunding the police, and all these types of structural, strategic things, which are all good and all necessary. But I think, if you did something bogus to me, and you just came back and was like, “what do you want me to do? I washed the dishes.”
And it’s like, washing the dishes is cool, but I want your heart to change. Because if your heart doesn’t change, then you’ll still continue, at some point to walk into behaviors that have hurt me in the first place. And so I feel like until all white people, and I say all white people, look within themselves and say, God, where’s the deceitfulness of my heart? Where have I bought into the narrative that all black people are criminals? Where am I treating my neighbor not as better than myself? Where am I assuming that I am superior and they are inferior because of the color of my skin? I am sorry, I have grieved you because they’re made in your image.
Preston Perry, her husband jumps in:
That’s good. And also too, we have to understand that white guilt is not repentance. (Jackie: ‘Yeah, that’s true.’) Like white guilt, feeling sorry…white guilt will make you do exactly what you have to do to get right to get rid of your guilt.
So it will say, ‘let me do what I can so I won’t feel guilty. So my conscience is clear.’ But yet that still doesn’t cause you to walk in love with your black brothers and sisters. What love does, what love says, ‘I will step out of my comfort zone, I will step out of my own privilege.’ Right? That’s what humility does. Jesus stepped out of his own privilege. He did not count his rights regarding a thing to be grasped, but was able to let them go, but what was able to let them go to serve people.
And so that’s what true Christ-like love and humility does. It says, ‘I will let go of my own privilege. I won’t hold my white privilege a thing to be grasped. I’m willing to let them go. (Jackie speaks in tongues here over that comment.) for my black brothers and sisters in Christ.’
If you cannot do that, then you’re did not walking in love. Period.
(Christian Post) A pro-abortion activist has deleted a tweet featuring a picture of a Christmas tree at an abortion clinic with forceps on top instead of the customary star or angel.
Pro-abortion activist Michael Saenz wrote in the caption of the now-deleted tweet, “IT IS LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE TO TOP OUR TOPPER.” Saenz also used the hashtags #ProAbortion, #Abortions and #Christmas.
Conservatives and pro-life activists were quick to denounce the social media post, with Ben Shapiro tweeting, “‘Celebrate the birth of Jesus with this implement used to dismember babies in the womb’ is a take I didn’t see coming.”
Lila Rose, founder of the pro-life group Live Action, described the forceps-topped Christmas tree a…
A university Student Union is screaming and crying (probably literally) about a message written on a “free speech rock” at a campus that they say is threatening the lives of Native Americans. The existentially evil, offending phrase? “BLT Sandwich.”
In yet another show that the minds of mush on college campuses are going the be the insecure, tyrannical overlords of tomorrow, Northwestern University has a large rock on campus that students can paint and write things on at their discretion and without permission. It was recently painted orange with a face like a pumpkin, then someone put a pilgrims hat on it for Thanksgiving.
Enter the triggered.
With indignant outrage, Native American students doused it with red paint and wrote slogans and political messages around it, like “Black Lives Matter,” “Land Back,” “Natives Only,” and “Native Land.”
This prompted another participant to erase the previous messages and write phrases like jokey phrases, “BLT Sandwich,” “Olives only,” and “Nativity.”
Triggered x10…
Describing this as an example of “indigenous erasure” and violence towards the students, the Northwestern Graduate Workers wrote in a statement:
These messages pose a threat to Native graduate workers, students, faculty, and staff at Northwestern and are thus intolerable to us as an antiracist and feminist labor union that supports Indigenous sovereignty and resurgence, including the central demand of ‘land back.’
and:
Our community was offered an opportunity to reflect on the history of colonization and the ongoing Indigenous resistance and instead chose to continue our country’s and our University’s history of erasure. For this to occur on the National Day of Mourning [Thanksgiving] and during Native American Heritage Month is heartless and goes to show that Northwestern has yet to confront ongoing white supremacist and settler colonial beliefs within its own community, beliefs that are inherently violent and premised on the genocide and elimination of Native people.
These wokescold children are our future politicians and big tech social media managers, and they are graduating hard and fast all the time and being unleashed (an apropos expression) on the world.
Combat it however you can, and support those who can when you can’t.
In the video, Lecrae spends a bit of time giving his pro-life creds but then reminds his audience that there is a spectrum of people on the prolife issue doing different work. He says rather than being at the clinics holding graphic imagery, he’s more in line with “holistic care for young women who are processing the reality of having an abortion.”
He recounts how as a young man he paid for an abortion for his girlfriend – that he came from a disenfranchised background where they had no way to take care of the child, and then explains:
[Abortion] is a moral issue but it’s also a socio-economic issue. It’s also an issue of systemic oppression and marginalization and if you don’t address those issues, then you’re not going to deal with what ultimately allows abortion to thrive…
One, we didn’t know any other options. No clue. Two, we did not have the financial capability to move forward, we did not have the family support to move forward, we didn’t even know there were other realities, and so you’ve got to deal with that. That’s the circumstance in many cases. Now you’re also bringing on compounded issues [sic].
You’re talking about communities and individuals where a brother has just been killed over senseless violence, a mother may be sick and living on Medicaid, and there’s PTSD going on in your world because of maybe some of the things you’ve encountered or seen – the child’s father may be incarcerated for different reasons.
There’s so many circumstances coming into play and you’re saying, ‘hey, don’t terminate the life of the child.’ Well, you’ve got to remember that there’s all these other issues coming into play for certain individuals that no one is addressing.
So what I personally believe is that when you begin to address some of those situations and those circumstances, when you begin to say, ‘hey listen, here’s healthcare for you so you can now take care of a baby.’ Do you know much a doctor’s bill for birth and the child is?
When you begin to address all these barriers, then you begin to put in the minds of individuals, ‘Hey, this is doable.’ You begin to present them with options.
And some of us will say, “well let’s just make it illegal.” Murder is illegal. Still happens every day. Still happens every day. Should it be illegal? Yes, murder should be illegal, but what I’m telling is if you make murder illegal as we’ve seen, it doesn’t mean murder stops. And so sure, it might be the right thing to do to advocate for the end of murder, but that does not absolve the problem [sic]. It doesn’t make the problem go away. You still have individuals and circumstances where murder thrives.
So what I’m saying is what are you going to do about the environments that allow this to continue? And for me I want to see those environments change. I come from those environments. I work and serve in those environments and so if you just outlaw something, I know for a fact that’s not going to be the solution. Not to say you don’t outlaw it, but to say ‘are we thinking critically about what it really looks like to tackle this?’
This is not a hard response. At all. “Yes, abortion should be illegal. Full stop. We should pass laws immediately making it a felony to kill babies in the womb. Furthermore, we should punish the doctors performing and the women having the abortion, as well as enabling boyfriends, husbands, and other accessories to murder.”
The fact is he would never give this answer to the question of whether 19th-century chattel slavery should be illegal. “Maybe it should be illegal, sure, but that’s not going to stop it. Slavery will still happen every day. We need to incentivize the plantation owners by giving them education on crop yields, purchasing new tools and machinery for them, giving them grants to hire un-enslaved workers, pass laws making it easier to sell their cotton, etc. We need to change the circumstances that allow kidnapping and slavery in the first place.”
All of this is notwithstanding the fact that countries that have arguably more robust social welfare programs and socialized healthcare like Canada or Australia still have the same rate of abortion as the United States, despite having Lecrae’s wish list of social support, like options for paid 12-18 month parental leave.
This is just another step towards an all-too-familiar trajectory.
"Some of us will say 'well, let's make [abortion] illegal. Murder's illegal. Still happens every day…Not to say you don't outlaw it, but…" @lecrae
A mother in Tennesee has given birth to a healthy baby that was conceived nearly thirty years ago, making her the longest-frozen embryo ever successfully delivered in a live birth.
Molly Everette Gibson was born on October 26, 2020, but that’s not when she first came into the world. An anonymous couple created her in 1992 by combininig egg and sperm to bring a soul into being, and then froze her for further implantation, one that never came.
Rather than be destroyed and aborted, a very common practice associated with Invitro Fertilization (IVF) her “parents” discarded her and donated her to an Embryo Bank where she spent nearly 30 years on ice in a petrie dish- a child made in the image of God but suspended in time by the damnable machinations of man.
Then Molly’s new mother Tina, along with her husband who had been fostering children for years after he was believed infertile due to being diagnosed with cystic fibrosis, heard about “snowflake adoption” and decided to save a life. They went to a clinic and had the embryo implanted, resulting in a healthy and successful birth, 28 years after the fact.
With Tina being now 29 years old, this makes her almost the same age as her child, with both being conceived a mere 18 months apart.
By giving birth to the longest frozen embryo, however, they actually beat their own record.
They had one other child in 2017, also adopted from the same anonymous donor who had their children cryopreserved three decades ago. That embryo-adoption resulted in the birth of successful and healthy Emma, now nearly three. And because these two embryos were frozen at the same time, it makes them full genetic siblings.
The successful births were facilitated with the help of the National Embryo Donation Centre (NEDC), in Knoxville, a Christian-based nonprofit that takes in donated embryos from biological parents who went through IVF and then “rescues” them by storing them until they can be born.
As long as the embryos are maintained correctly in the liquid nitrogen storage tank at minus 396 degrees, it is thought that they can be stored nearly indefinitely.
Right now there are over a million embryos that have been donated as a result of IVF. In this wicked and sinful practice, because it is expensive, prospective parents will usually fertilize 8-30 embryos at a time. They may use implant a couple of them, ones that are deemed “viable” and not instantly culled, and then when they’ve given birth as many times as they would like, will either destroy these children – effectively abortion and murder on a mass scale – or they will donate them, leaving them to a fate of possibly getting adopted, or being eventually discarded and killed.
The fact that snowflake adoptions exist, a process that where couples can adopt these babies at a fraction of the cost of regular adoption (frequently as little as $5000) is a grace from God – using for good what man intended for evil. This practice ought to be encouraged in the church as a way of “rescuing those who are being taken away to death” and “holding back those who are stumbling to the slaughter.”
Further, if we truly believe that life begins at conception, the Christian community ought to roundly condemn the practice of IVF that creates these embryos in the first place and the mass abortion that nearly always accompanies it. Churches ought to put under church discipline any of their members using it except in possibly the rarest of circumstances, demonstrating that we hold life in the highest regards and will not stand for abortion in any form.
The Gospel Coalition, which is about three months away from saying that “mandatory vaccines are a gospel issue” and refusing to get injected is sinful, has continued their progressive little trajectory in a timely manner. First they said that everyone should listen to the government and close their churches, then they said people should stop singing in Church. Now they’re saying that people who won’t wear masks are engaging in sinful disobedience and that the decision to refuse to wear one is not and cannot be a legitimate “issue of conscience.” This is the thesis of Erik Raymond’s post, where he writes:
I do not believe that conscience is a valid reason for refusing to wear a mask to church. Christians should save the conscience for conscience issues. Instead, call this what it is: civil disobedience.
The article argues that refusing to do something out of conscience cannot trump scripture. He notes three objections that Christians make as to why they cannot or will not wear masks:
A scientific objection: masks are ineffective
A political objection: masks represent unjustified government restrictions
A moral objection: masks represent a false narrative (i.e., the seriousness of COVID is overblown and to wear a mask is tantamount to lying)
and then surmises that because the wearing of a mask is not in and of itself a moral issue – “A person is not sinning if they wear a mask. It’s not a sin to be a dental hygienist, welder, or scuba diver.” None of those really matter in light of our command to submit to government authorities.
He says in a context where masks are legally required for the church’s public gathering, then we obey. If the government dictates that we wear masks to church, we wear masks to church. If they specified the color of masks we have to wear, we’d have to submit to that too. Disobeying the governing authorities is sinful, and we don’t have the right to violate clear commandments of the bible for the sake of our conscience.
There are more arguments than that, of course. He notes that some other scenarios cause “disobedience to the clear teaching of Scripture.”
Love for Neighbor (Matt. 22:39): In our churches, there are various levels of concern about COVID-19. Some have lost friends and family members to the virus. For many, wearing a mask is one reasonable way to love other people and protect them. It would be unloving to minimize or ignore their concerns, especially in light of the evolving data and heightened case numbers. Christian love requires a willingness to follow Jesus and set ourselves aside. Christians should be eager to do this.
Wisdom Toward Outsiders (Col. 4:5): It is saddening to read of some churches who disregard safety standards and then become super-spreaders for the virus. This harms the testimony of the church in the community. Christians should be concerned with reasonable efforts to preserve and promote the gospel. At this moment, failing to wear a mask doesn’t seem wise.
At one point in the article Raymond says, “if the elders believe it is right to submit to the government by wearing a mask, then there is not a provision for the conscience to disregard them.”
Yet if the elders say that you don’t have to wear a mask in their church service, whether that be John MacArthur of Grace Community Church, or JD Hall at Fellowship Baptist Church, ostensibly those pastors are sinning with that dispensation and they ought to be disregarded and not submitted to, and a mask worn anyway.
Finally, that last point about wisdom towards outsiders is a telling one. If refusing to wear a mask is not loving and does not promote the gospel, but submitting to govenment authorities and wearing one does, then by nature mask-wearing is a “gospel issue.”
Of course, we would love to see Raymond do this with other stuff. Mandatory Vaccines? The same article would apply. Christians told by the government to wear certain vestments, such as an armband denote their faith? The same article would apply. Christians told by the government that they may not own guns due to their faith? The same article would apply. Pick your poison. So long as the command to do a thing is not in and of itself technically “a moral issue” (it is not a sin to wear armbands, it is not a sin not to own a gun), then failing to comply with the government’s mandate that you do that thing is.
Refusing to wear a mask? Civil disobedience. Sinful. Not a conscience issue. A betrayal of the Gospel.
Hurry up with that article about mandatory vaccines being a gospel issue that we don’t have the freedom to refuse, TGC. We’re about ready for it at this point.
(Reformation Charlotte)Popular Christian pop icon, Lauren Daigle, made waves in 2019 after she made an appearance on notorious lesbian Ellen’s daytime talk show to denounce the biblical view of sexuality and join hands with the rank and file pagan culture of pop and notoriety.
After declaring that she was “unsure” if the Bible had anything to say about homosexuality, Daigle toured the country bashing the Scriptures and telling people in interviews that she didn’t see herself as a Christian artist. By the time 2019 came to a halt, Daigle had received the prominent Christian Dove Award — a prestigious award which is basically the Christian version of the Grammy Awards.
Now, Daigle is making waves again as she performed a star role in Mormonism’s high-profile Christmas program, Christmas Under the Stars, which aired on BYUtv on December 6.
According to Deseret, Daigle said her team’s goal has been to “extend the tent pegs and reach…
The Democratic Georgia Senate candidate embroiled in a bloody battle for control of the US Senate has continued to demonstrate his poverty of spirit and riches of hell by describing Jesus as a ‘poor Palestinian Prophet.’
It’s so hard to discover and hear an authentic vision and voice of authentic spirituality that gives voice to the least of these, that when it shows up people describe it as some strange ideology rather than the vision of that poor Palestinian prophet who said that the ‘spirit of the Lord is upon me because God has appointed me to preach good news to the poor..’
To be fair, it’s not the worst thing the heretic has said and done. The Kyle J Howard approved impastor is openly, aggressively, and unapologetically pro-choice, with lesser pro-LGBT and pro-marxism vices.
But hey, these kinds of views are what all the #BigEva and TGC folk wanted when they either openly ordered or gave their approval to vote for the Democrats. To them, there’s nothing wrong with this candidate, and they would love nothing more for him to win and take control of the senate.
