A Minnesota pastor is warning that the recent disruption of a Sunday worship service by left-wing agitators is not an isolated incident but a sign of a deepening spiritual and cultural crisis in the United States.
Joe Rigney, a founding pastor of Cities Church in St. Paul who now serves as an associate pastor at Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho, argued that the confrontation at his former congregation reveals a broader pattern of hostility toward ordinary Christians. According to Western Journal, Cities Church drew national attention earlier in January when a leftist mob stormed into the sanctuary, accusing one of the pastors of working for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and bringing the service to a halt.
Rigney, who lived for years in the Minneapolis area and helped plant Cities Church, stressed that the congregation is not a political operation or a culture-war project. This is not a political church. These are normal, Bible-believing evangelicals, he said, emphasizing that the worshipers were simply gathered for Sunday services when activists chose to invade their space.
And instead, this political chaos intrudes in the middle of a worship service and disrupted, Rigney observed, describing the incident as emblematic of a growing trend of intimidation against Christians. In an interview with Tucker Carlson, he warned of escalating violence on the left of normal Christian people, and I just want to underscore that piece of it, according to a transcript from The Christian Post.
For Rigney, the problem is not merely political polarization but a deeper moral decay that he believes only the Christian gospel can repair. He framed the confrontation as part of a larger pattern in which government authorities and cultural elites increasingly side with lawlessness while targeting those who seek to live by biblical convictions.
Theyre terrorizing normal, law-abiding citizens, and then theyre encouraging the lawless and the lawbreakers, Rigney said, criticizing officials who fail to punish those who disrupt peaceful religious gatherings. He argued that such selective enforcement of the law sends a clear message: faithful Christians are fair game, while radical activists are effectively shielded.
Rigney also placed the incident within a two-decade trajectory of conflict over sex, marriage, and religious liberty. When you think about the last 20 years and the escalating collisions weve seen in our country about, say, sex, sexuality, and people being harassed just because they wont make a cake or because they wont do flowers for a gay wedding and you see that kind of escalating collision as Christians just try to live faithful lives, Rigney said.
From his perspective, the nation is approaching a fork in the road. The two paths, he argued, are stark and mutually exclusive: Christ or chaos.
And because of that, its bubbling up. Its bubbling over, and its tragic. It really is tragic. And the only way out is for people to turn from their sins and to turn back to Christ. Thats the only hope this nation has. Thats the only hope for any of us, he insisted, portraying repentance and a return to Christian faith as the only viable remedy for Americas turmoil.
Rigney further warned that secular leftism, with its aggressive stance on sexuality and identity, is on an inevitable collision course with historic Christianity. When you think about the last 20 years and the escalating collisions weve seen in our country about, say, sex, sexuality, and people being harassed just because they wont make a cake or because they wont do flowers for a gay wedding and you see that kind of escalating collision as Christians just try to live faithful lives, he added, repeating the point to underscore the mounting pressure on believers.
Federal authorities, for their part, have signaled that they will pursue charges against those who disrupted the Cities Church service. Justice Department officials have pledged to use the FACE Act and federal civil rights statutes against the protesters, a rare acknowledgment that Christians right to worship peacefully must be protected even as cultural tensions intensify.
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