Virginia Pastor Could Spend Year in Jail for Having 16 in 300-Person Church on Palm Sunday
On Palm Sunday, the Reverend
Kevin Wilson's theme of the day was how people feted Christ as a King at
the beginning of the week only to have the mob recast him as a criminal
by the end.
Wilson would
never put himself on the same plane as his Savior, but he is beginning
to understand the criminal part all too well.
Before
his Palm Sunday service, a local police officer entered the Lighthouse
Fellowship Church in Chincoteague Island, Va., and announced to the few
assembled that they must be seated six feet apart with no more
than ten people inside the 300-seat church. The officer didn't ask to
see Wilson, who wasn't in the room at the time.
By
the end of the service, in which 16 worshipers were widely separated in
the 300-seat sanctuary, two officers wearing masks and gloves entered
the church and issued a criminal citation to the pastor for defying
Governor Ralph Northam's edict that where more than ten are gathered
there is a crime. (Yes, that Ralph Northam.)
Lighthouse Fellowship helps keep people free of drug addiction, brokenness, mental illness, poverty, and prostitution. Many of the members do not have driver’s licenses and are dependent on the church family for rides to get food, supplies, and go to medical appointments and personal care services like haircuts. Many attendees are on limited income obtained from government assistance -- whether disability or social security, Medicare or Medicaid. The church has helped various members with electric or gas bills, rent, groceries, physical labor and transportation for moving, donating time, expertise and resources for repairing and renovating houses and travel trailers, cooking meals, helping people to apply for disability benefits, providing rides to medical appointments, clothes, and wood for stoves, fuel for cars, and cutting grass. The church also offers a blanket ministry, prayer ministry, discipleship programs, and counseling services.
It sure sounds like an essential business to me.
Another egregious:
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