Grace Community Church Senior Pastor John MacArthur appeared on Tucker Carlson’s top-rated show to discuss his decision to open for service on Sunday and defy California’s church ban by having a packed house.
When asked why he believes he should re-open, Pastor Macarthur said:
First of all, and foremost, it’s a first amendment right. This is United States of America and the government can’t intrude in worship. We stand on that amendment. The second thing that makes this so sensible, is in the state of California there are 40,000,000 people, 8500 of them have died with COVID. That’s 0.002. So in California you have a 99.99% chance to survive COVID, so why would you shut down the entire state, and particularly when people are frightened and sometimes terrified that they’re going to die- shut down the church where most of the intense relationships in our society exist in the life of the church. It’s multi-generational.
We’ve had 21 weeks with no ministry to a thousand little children, to a thousand university students, to junior high students, high school students, senior adults. We’ve had no funerals, no weddings. I can’t go to the hospital, I’ve had to talk on the phone to dying people at the hospital.And finally, I started preaching to an empty auditorium. I did it two weeks, three weeks, and the people without us saying anything started coming back. They didn’t buy the narrative. They didn’t buy it, and they started coming back. By the way, we’re the original protesters. We go back 500 years to the protestant reformation. We’re still protesting lies and deception for the sake of the truth, so they started coming back, and they kept coming back, and last Sunday 3000 of them came back. And they rejoiced and they hugged each other and they didn’t wear masks and they sang songs, and they understand the reality of it. I haven’t’ had to say anything. We finally put out a document which you probably read, which affirms why this is right and why this is critical for our society.
