Grace Community Church

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Pastor John MacArthur and California church closings: Why isn't this a national story?

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One of the more interesting church-state fights during this COVID-19 crisis has been one involving Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, a suburb of Los Angeles. John MacArthur, its 81-year-old revered pastor, has become an unlikely government foe during this time, as he’s refused to close down his church all along.

Readers may recall that I wrote about him a year ago when he told noted Southern Baptist Bible study leader Beth Moore to “go home.”

Yes, that guy. Coverage has been spotty at best, although this is not necessarily reporters’ fault. The church isn’t known for answering media calls. When I tried contacting them this past summer, I got the cold shoulder as well.

That said, a lot more reporting is needed on why California has the strictest restrictions in the country against indoor church services — to the point that even the Catholics are rebelling. In September, San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone organized a “free the Mass” event involving three eucharistic processions that first went to city hall, then to the Cathedral of St. Mary of the Assumption where the archbishop held an outdoor Mass.

Indoor worship services are banned in California, a state of megachurches. You don’t have to be a religion expert to know that restriction wasn’t going to fly, especially when stores and other businesses had no similar restrictions. Outdoor rites? California may have more sunny weather than many other states, but it still gets cold there.

It’s been very confusing to figure out what's going on with this church, as the story resembles a large elephant that appears differently depending on the observer. For instance, the Christian Post says that Grace Community had been released of all restrictions.

Public health officials in Los Angeles have lifted all outbreak-related requirements and restrictions on Grace Community Church, which were put in place last month after three cases connected to the California church were confirmed.

“We are glad to announce that we received a notice from the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health … saying that we have been cleared of COVID-19 outbreak,” the church says on its website.


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Attention Sean Feucht and evangelical leaders: Hatred of the press is hurting your cause

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Theologian Karl Barth had the most wonderful advice for preachers back in the day: Teach with a Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other.

If only more conservative religious leaders would try that. I’ve been in journalism since I was 16 and I’ve never seen the hatred against the media that I see among today’s evangelical Protestants, and I suspect conservatives in other traditions aren’t far behind.

I ran into this as I was reporting on singer/politician Sean Feucht and his “worship protest” concerts for Politico for a piece that ran Oct. 25. Getting rebuffed whenever I tried to interview him got rather tiring when I noticed how he was tweeting his vexation with media coverage while planning a huge Christian concert on the Mall that day.

Note to public figures: When you continually refuse to give reporters access, don’t be surprised when their coverage isn’t what you’d like.

I first invited Feucht to be on a panel for the annual conference of the Religion News Association in late September. Even though he wasn’t on the road that week, his spokeswoman, Whitney Whitt, would not make him available. Here he had an amazing opportunity to tell his side of the story to 123 reporters and editors from around the country and he couldn’t be bothered.

Then I got an assignment from Politico to describe this man and why he was running around the country having these mask-less and non-socially distant concerts that were infuriating officials in a number of the cities in which he appeared. Whitt finally said I could have 10 minutes of his time. But when I called, he wasn’t there.

The spokesperson then said she’d messed up the time zones (he was on Central and I was on Pacific), so I reminded her that the ethical thing to do — when it’s their fault the interview didn’t happen — was to re-schedule as soon as possible. She ignored me from then on.

This guy had run for political office earlier this year. He’d showed up at the White House late last year and snagged a photo of himself with Vice President Mike Pence (shown with this blog post) and made it into a campaign poster. He then started getting major backing from Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley for his unorthodox open-air worship rallies.

Note to Feucht and evangelical/charismatics like him: If you’re going to run with the big boys, you need to ramp up your professionalism. I repeat: Any time you get involved in politics, you should expect to intelligently engage with liberal as well as conservative media. Refusing to answer their calls is an insane media strategy, one that is guaranteed to lead to one-sided coverage.


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Global COVID-19 parables: What responsibility do faith groups have to the larger society?

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I’m a great fan of a magical sense of awe, that heightened state of awareness during which the transcendent feels most palpable. However, I am decidedly not a fan of magical thinking that denies the seriousness of the coronavirus pandemic.

I consider the latter delusional at best. The pandemic will not end because some — particularly those in positions of authority — wish it away. It can only be tamed, I believe, by limiting its spread until medical researchers develop a dependable vaccine or cure.

Until then, our responsibility as members of a highly interdependent society is to protect ourselves and each other via responsible social distancing and by always wearing a mask when adequate distancing is impossible. Anything less, in my book — speaking as someone who due to age and preexisting medical conditions is at great risk — is selfish and irresponsible.

Nor do I care whether the deniers are bikers in South Dakota, frat boys on any number of university campuses who can’t resist a keg or political libertarians who insist that their individual choices are at least as, if not more, important than the communal good in a national health emergency.

Ditto for the most sincerely devout of fatalistic religious believers who think their faith will protect them and their co-religionists. Or who insist that government — any secular government — lacks the authority to limit their religious expression in any way.

My news feeds have been replete with such examples. Here are three that have particularly aroused my pique. I consider each a clear example of self-aggrandizing, potentially deadly religious entitlement.

One story is from Israel and concerns a group of ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jews who have insisted on making their annual Rosh Hashanah pilgrimage to a Ukrainian city where their deceased spiritual leader is buried. This, despite the probability that they’re likely to bring the pandemic with them.

A second from, South Korea, tells the tale of a megachurch that found itself at the center of a coronavirus cluster, which it blames on misleading figures released by government opponents.

The third involves the Rev. John MacArthur of Los Angeles’ Grace Community Church, who recently claimed that the number of American COVID-19 deaths is way below the generally accepted figures reported by mainstream news outlets. MacArthur claimed that there is no pandemic.


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