Having long been known as ‘Pastor Appreciation Month’, October has been a time when churchgoers have celebrated the risks that their shepherds have taken in guarding them from societal wolves that herded them away from Heaven.
It was during this celebrated month of harvest that an article appeared in the Coeur d’Alene Press regarding a husband and wife team of pastors who had run their wedding chapel business for decades. It had been affectionately named ‘The Hitching Post’. When asked if they would perform weddings for homosexuals, they admitted that they would not do so based upon their religious beliefs, which were Christian.
They faced a dire choice. If laws in Idaho were passed allowing same sex marriages, then the Hitching Post would be forced to perform them. Should they have chosen to ignore the law and not perform weddings for homosexuals, they would have faced fines or revocation of their business license by state authorities. Effectively, this created the potential of putting the Hitching Post out of business. Rather than close its doors to what it felt was an issue of bullying by homosexuals, they agreed to allow a Christian attorney firm to represent them if taken to court.
At greatest concern was the issue of the state being used as a bully pulpit, the enforcer for an agenda of ‘special protection’ for those who felt they had been victimized by those who attacked their lifestyle(s). This seemed pretty one-sided. Where were the badge and the gun protecting the Christians?
Additionally, the men behind the badge had lost the ability to choose between facing God at judgment and collecting a pension check. How many of them had been regular ‘sheeple’, or former pastors?
For the churchgoers the threat of spiritual death reached beyond the homosexual activists’ desire to shut down the Hitching Post and promote their lifestyle beyond the borders of the bedroom. These business-focused Christians felt that they were being held hostage, both privately and publicly, as the state was being used to arrest their freedom of thought and worship.
Christians became disgusted that their children were being held hostage at school assemblies on ‘fisting’ for Kindergartners. Where were the pastors? Who would defend this attack on their children’s spirits? Who would fulfill his/her obligation as a ‘pastor’ to have spoken ONLY the truth to the flock without fear? Who had defiled the spiritual commission to not allow demonic forces the ability to push Moses aside in order to prevent the waves of truth from parting? It had become biblical treason.
Freedom of speech and protecting their greatest, unblemished children had become the rallying cry for the churchgoers of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.
Churchgoers, though members of the public, have volunteered to participate in church services. Therefore, they have not been held hostage to the messages that pastors dared preach. Therein, they could not become victims of ‘hate speech’. Yet, they were labeled by homosexuals as ‘hate speech promoters’.
As churchgoers throughout the United States of America sat in silence regarding the militant homosexual agenda, they became inactive participants in the conspiracy ‘to allow evil to flourish’.
As I interpreted it, the issue was not homosexuality. The issue was the underlying spiritual warfare against one’s brothers and sisters.
Some pastors had sat sheepishly silent while allowing their dens of worship to be attacked. This had been allowed through guilt and ‘tolerance’ due to their non-welcoming of homosexuals. Whether done out of fear or due to having had so many skeletons in their behavioral closets, these sheepherders had become easily blackmailed into taking part in Clergy Response Teams spawned by the U.S. Government.
The goal of the response teams had been to threaten pastors into remaining silent on homosexual lifestyles in trade for not ending their tax-exempt 501© (3) protected status as ‘churches’. Once the law was in place, the homosexuals could demand that the government enforce the new law(s) and the government would be required to act.
Additionally, the development of the Clergy Response Teams had been to get churchgoers to remain docile and compliant regarding taking on the U.S. or World Government in any way. This was specifically done through the use of one Bible scripture, Romans 13:1-7.
“Let every soul be subject to the higher authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are ordained by God. Therefore whoever resists the authority resists the ordinance of God, and those who resist will receive judgment on themselves. For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to evil. Do you want to be unafraid of the authority? Do what is good, and you will have praise from the same. For he is God’s minister to you for good. But if you do evil, be afraid; for he does not bear the sword in vain; for he is God’s minister, an avenger to execute wrath on him who practices evil. Therefore it is necessary to be subject, not only because of wrath but also because of conscience. For because of this you also pay taxes, for they are God’s ministers attending continually to this very thing. Render therefore to all their due: taxes to whom taxes are due, customs to whom customs, fear to whom fear, honor to whom honor.”
Source: http://www.a-voice.org/main/clergy.htm
Translated: ‘You shall have sat in the pews like good sheep, having awaited your slaughter by the wolves, because God had pre-ordained it. Having gone to your deaths in obedience to God as a sacrifice to His will, you shall have forgotten your ability to defend yourselves or to stop the wolves from killing you.’
The fears from both sides were:
Homosexuals believed that religious pastors (brain scrubbers) preached a message against homosexual lifestyle in order to have discriminated against them and condemn their actions in public. The church became a hotbed for indoctrinating members to believe that homosexuals were dangerous and out to have converted their children to the homosexual lifestyle. They believed that homosexuals carried and promulgated physical diseases and spiritual death upon the innocent public. This was allied with Satan. They faced possibly going to hell for eternity.
Heterosexuals believed that the homosexuals had become militant in forcing change, rather than having worked on the guilt which church members felt for not having helped them in having avoided the gates of Hell and not having helped them save their souls.
Since pastors became the mouthpieces for indoctrinating their membership, militant homosexuals believed that their speech should have been monitored; thus, they would have prevented ‘discrimination’.
A person once told me that there were differences between Communism and living in community.
If a person volunteered to become a member of a group of people living in community, then that person had the freedom to think for himself or herself and to have chosen to leave the community at any time.
If a person had been forced to involuntarily become a member of a group of people living in community, then that person’s freedom of choice had been taken away, most often at the point of a gun. Ways of thinking were forced onto others at gunpoint. The victim became a hostage to someone else’s indoctrination program.
Once the sheep-herders (pastor-scrubbers) had been removed, the ‘sheeple’ scattered and became sacrificial victims for the wolves.
Once there were no more shepherds or wolves, Christ had been eradicated from the Earth.
The choice belonged to the Hitching Post, the cops, the brain scrubbers, and the free-lifestylists.
They had just not learned to change their diets to wolf.