As Barton began his presentation, I slipped away to a parlor room at the back of the sanctuary. Connelly wanted me to meet three local pastors who stood for truth. Seated around a large, rectangular folding table were Connelly; Donald Eason, the pastor of Metro Church of Christ in Sterling Heights; Jeffrey Hall, the pastor of Community Faith Church in Holt; and Dominic Burkhard, who described himself as “a full-time missionary to the legislature in Lansing.”
Connelly opened by summarizing for his friends the conversations we’d been having about political activism tearing churches apart. Clearly expecting that they would back him up, Connelly announced that he’d seen no such thing in his tour of hundreds of churches around the country, and asked the pastors to weigh in.
“There’s definitely some political divisions here in Michigan churches,” said Hall.
Eason nodded. “Lots of political division.”
“Covid definitely drew some lines,” Hall continued. “I had people calling and emailing our church asking if we were open. They had come from churches that closed, and they wanted to know if we were taking a hard stance against the government. I never wanted to make a war with the government. We closed for about a month. I just wanted to honor God. But some people weren’t looking for that.”
I reminded Connelly of the story of FloodGate Church, which had made war with the government and increased its membership tenfold. The church’s expansive new campus was miles away from where we were sitting. Connelly gave me a far-off look that had become familiar by this point.
“He’s talking about Bill Bolin,” Eason chimed in.
I asked Eason how he knew about FloodGate’s pastor.
“Oh, I know about Bolin,” Eason said with an uneasy smile. “We all know about Bolin.”
Connelly claimed not to know about Bolin. So the others filled him in — the refusal to comply during Covid, the cries of martyrdom, the alliances with far-right politicians and…
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