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Fanatical Pastor Doesn’t Care If Flock Dies

Pentecostal Pied Piper: For true Christians, 'death is a welcome friend'
Screen Shot 2020-04-08 at 6.48.12 PM

I have beyond had it with the Rev. Tony Spell, the showboating Pentecostal pastor in Baton Rouge, who is making a name for himself by defying the governor’s order for large groups not to meet. Before I tell you what he’s done now, let me point out something I didn’t know, but which will be meaningful to theologically engaged Christians among this blog’s readers: the guy and his congregation are straight-up heretics. They deny the doctrine of the Trinity. From the church’s website:

 

Well. Tony Spell gave an interview to TMZ. Watch this 2:30 clip:

In it, Spell says that if people die by coming to services at his church, that’s fine. For truly religious people, he says,”Death looks to them like a welcome friend.”

Spell goes on:

“True Christians do not mind dying. They fear living in fear, cowardice of their convictions. … People that can prefer disgrace to danger are headed for a master and deserve one. People that prefer tyranny over freedom do not deserve freedom.”

Said people have been locked in their homes for 23 days now, like prisoners. “the only vent they have to their emotion is coming to the house of God and worshiping, like free people.”

Why can’t they do it on Zoom? asks the interviewer. If God is everywhere, doesn’t that work?

“It does not work,” says Spell. “If it worked, then why did America spend billions and billions of dollars on churches.”

If one of his parishioners dies of coronavirus, asks the interviewer, what would the Rev. Spell have to say to the surviving family members?

“I have to say they died like free people, fighting for their convictions,” says Spell, who goes on to say that people in his church die from all kinds of things.

But this is preventable, objects the interviewer.

Spell: “Who knows what is preventable?”

Interviewer: “Scientists do.”

Spell: “And scientists need to know that God gave us a strong immune system, and the only way we’re gonna destroy this virus is for — they say everybody’s gonna get it, well if everybody’s gonna get it, then let’s get on with life.”

Look, I am sure the sheriff and the governor don’t want to make a martyr of this nut by arresting him and shutting down his church — he’s boasting that he’s planning to have Easter services — but I wish they would. He’s taunting people who don’t go to church in this pandemic, calling them servile cowards. He is willing to lead his congregation to dying a horrible death, like fools — and not fools for Christ.

I want you to understand exactly what he is doing here. This church has a “bus ministry” in which they bus in needy children for the Sunday service. From the website:

An average of almost 700 children every week! From this photo from the church’s website, these kids are almost all black children:

Perhaps you have heard that black Americans have disproportionately high deaths from this disease. Imagine how quickly the disease would pass through those kids. Imagine those kids taking the disease back to their homes, especially to the older people in their homes. This Pentecostal Pied Piper is potentially making those children vectors of infection. And for what? What is he trying to prove?

This is cult leader behavior.

Today the CDC highlighted a paper showing that 16 coronavirus cases, including three deaths, are linked to two Chicago family gatherings. Tony Spell told TMZ that death would be a “welcome friend” to the faithful, and that risking death by a viral plague by coming to church is what “free people” do. Do you see why I say he doesn’t care if his flock dies? Obviously I don’t think Spell wants people to die, but I do think he’s really excited about all the attention he’s getting.

As a Christian, I hope the sheriff will arrest this man and padlock his church for the duration of the pandemic. He does not have the moral right to do this to the rest of this community. Today was the biggest day of deaths here in Louisiana, but the number of covid hospitalizations is down, which indicates that the lockdown and social distancing are working. We need them to be effective, so we can get past this danger and get back to work, and to church.

But don’t ever forget what these selfish Pentecostals did during the crisis: risked the lives of others in their community and mocked Christians who stayed home in obedience to the legitimate order of the magistrate, to crush a deadly pandemic.

You non-Christians who read, please know: what Spell and his flock are doing is not true Christianity in a theological sense, or any other sense. Being willing to give your life for Christ, or to lay down your life for another person, is a holy deed. Being willing to make others die — including possibly little children, who have no choice about whether or not to be in that church — so you can live out your religious convictions is wicked.

UPDATE: I should point out that I call this guy a “Pentecostal,” because that is his worship tradition (speaking in tongues, baptism of the Holy Spirit, etc.), but let me caution readers not to think that all Pentecostals are like this man and his congregation. I looked on the church’s website to see which larger Pentecostal denomination with which they are affiliated, and couldn’t find one. If I’m missing something, please, one of you let me know. It seems like this is a total freelance family business. Spell’s grandfather started the church, handed it down to his father, and now the grandson is the pastor.

UPDATE.2: Dr. William Tighe, the church historian, writes to say that Spell is a “Oneness Pentecostal. More:

You can easily find lots more (although most mostly polemical) by googling up “oneness Pentecostalism.”
The fact is, anti-Trinitarian Pentecostalism goes right back to the beginnings of Pentecostalism ca.1906, although — since I would say that most of the early Pentecostalist preachers and revivalists were enthusiasts ignorant of Biblical languages and ignorant of all Church History — it wasn’t until about 1912 or 13 that some of them began to attack Trinitarianism as “unScriptural” and as a “corruption of Biblical Christianity,” and, almost simultaneously, to reject baptism “in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost” in favor of “in the Name of Jesus,” and (most of them) to rebaptize those who had been “wrongly” baptized.
Thanks, Dr. Tighe. I’m learning something here.
UPDATE.3: A reader writes to say that Pastor Spell’s denomination is United Pentecostal. The reader is a member of the denomination, but asks me to summarize his letter, not to quote him directly. This is important.
The reader says that the United Pentecostal Church is not hierarchical. There is an enormous amount of autonomy in the local congregation. The reader says that a strong majority of Louisiana’s UPC pastors are opposed to what Pastor Spell is doing, but won’t say anything because they don’t want to have a denominational fight in the media, and they feel that Spell is going to do whatever he wants to do, no matter what they say. There are no good options, as they see it, other than to pray that Spell comes to his senses.
I appreciate the background, especially because I don’t know that world at all. It helps me understand how non-Catholics must have seen the Catholic sex abuse scandal from the outside, wondering why priests didn’t speak out about the situation, criticizing other priests. From inside the Catholic Church (as I was for the first four years of the scandal), it frustrated me, but I understood why priests stayed quiet, even if they hated what was happening. But I’m sure that to people outside, it looked like pure cowardice, or something like it. It’s interesting now to hear a UPC layman explain how and why other pastors in the denomination are keeping silent. I’m not saying that it’s right, mind you, but it’s interesting to hear from the inside why things are happening like they are.
Those pastors should know, though, that their silence means that outsiders will think that they agree with Pastor Spell. It might not be as bad as I think. I didn’t know that Spell was part of the United Pentecostal Church until this reader wrote to explain this. But my guess is that outsiders might make unwarranted negative assumptions about all Pentecostals, or even all Christians, based on the behavior of this out-of-control Baton Rouge pastor. It’s not fair, but it’s likely to happen.
UPDATE.4: To respond to a couple of readers’ comments, I agree that I probably shouldn’t have brought up the anti-Trinitarian heresy of this pastor and congregation. What they’re doing with the coronavirus has nothing to do with their views on the Trinity. It would be no better if they were completely orthodox on Trinitarian theology.
UPDATE.5: I just received this from an official at the United Pentecostal Church International:

Tony Spell is part of the World Pentecostal Fellowship. Per their website, he is on their General Council. https://www.worldwidepf.com/leadership/#general-council. He has never been part of the United Pentecostal Church International.

The United Pentecostal Church International (UPCI) has consistently stated throughout the present pandemic that churches should follow the guidance of the proper civic and medical authorities. See several issues of the General Superintendent’s News Bulletin, posted on www.upci.org, on official and personal Facebook pages, and emailed to all credentialed UPCI ministers and interested persons who have signed up for the news bulletin.

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