John MacArthur Update | Grace Community Church Lawsuit Covid & What a LAPD Sergeant Asked MacArthur

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Articles Referenced:
www.dailynews.com/2021/08/26/la-county-looks-to-settle-lawsuit-with-sun-valley-church-over-coronavirus-rules/

www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/la-county-could-pay-400000-settlement-to-church-that-fought-covid-19-mandates/ar-AANOg7x

www.lareviewofbooks.org/article/how-the-pandemic-radicalized-evangelicals/

www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-08-26/covid-19-cases-spike-in-lapd-as-officials-hash-out-vaxx-rules-church-offers-exemptions

#JohnMacArthurUpdate #Gracecommunitychurch #PastorJohnMacArthur


SINCE THE start of the COVID-19 pandemic, evangelical Christians have been among the most polarizing voices in a divided nation struggling to respond to a grave public health emergency. From the moment authorities began addressing the crisis last year, evangelicals have protested government-ordered lockdowns, resisted measures such as mask-wearing, defied restrictions on indoor worship services, and fought public health officials all the way to the Supreme Court.

More recently, white evangelicals have emerged as the demographic group most resistant to getting vaccinated against COVID-19. Their embrace of conspiracy theories and overall pandemic denialism contributed to their avid participation in the January 6 insurrection at the United States Capitol. A religious group that prides itself on its patriotism has become a major impediment to advancing the United States’s goals.

The pandemic brought to the surface self-defeating forces that had been churning for years inside the United States’s most politically powerful faith community. One evangelical church in particular both illustrates and helped to drive this phenomenon. Of all the evangelical organizations that defied pandemic health orders and fought the government during this crisis, none was more prominent or influential than Grace Community Church in Los Angeles. Grace is a 65-year-old megachurch in the San Fernando Valley led by a low-key, theologically conservative pastor named John MacArthur. Since August 2020, the church has been locked in a highly publicized legal battle with Los Angeles County over restrictions on in-person worship. The church defied a county prohibition against large indoor gatherings beginning last summer and worked with a lawyer from Trump’s reelection campaign to fight the county in court. MacArthur, who is among the most widely known evangelical pastors in the United States, appeared multiple times on Fox News, and his court case became a rallying cry for evangelicals worldwide. A graduate of a seminary he founded on the Grace Church campus was arrested in January after persuading his own church in Canada to disobey official health orders. MacArthur portrayed his fight against the government in epochal terms. “Christ, not Caesar, is the head of the church,” he proclaimed in July.

MacArthur merits special scrutiny because, unlike many other evangelicals, he cannot be dismissed as a partisan Donald Trump supporter. Until last year, MacArthur studiously avoided politics. He voted for Trump grudgingly (“I’m voting for an ideology that is closer to Scripture,” he told a church leadership magazine in 2016) and rarely preached about political issues.

Pastor at Grace since 1969, MacArthur, 82, is regarded by evangelicals as a Christian elder statesman. His Bible studies and other books have been translated into more than two dozen languages, and his sermons are broadcast in English and Spanish throughout the United States and in 23 countries in Europe and Latin America. Graduates of The Master’s Seminary, founded on the Grace campus in 1986, lead churches around the world. MacArthur’s stature as a conservative biblical expositor, not a political activist, demands a different, subtler, more telling explanation for his and other evangelicals’ pandemic defiance.

Though Grace initially closed its doors in compliance with a statewide lockdown order, MacArthur changed course four months later, reopening his church’s 3,500-seat sanctuary to indoor worship, defying mask mandates. It was a remarkable change in posture. In a livestreamed conversation in April, MacArthur had spoken of Grace members who were hospitalized with the virus and said one of a pastor’s most sacred duties is protecting his congregation. “If we defy this and if we say we’re going to meet anyway, we run the risk of exposing people to this illness needlessly,” MacArthur said. “And why would we want to do that?”

John MacArthur Update | Grace Community Church Lawsuit Covid & What a LAPD Sergeant Asked MacArthur