The pastor of a North Texas church evicted in February from its building for trying to incite violence against the LGBT community is facing protests again after calling for gay people to be executed.
“What does God say is the answer, is the solution for the homosexual in 2022, here in the New Testament, here in the book of Romans? That they are worthy of death,” preacher Dillon Awes of Stedfast Baptist Church in Watauga said in a Sunday sermon.
“These people should be put to death,” Awes continued. “Every single homosexual in our country should be charged with a crime, the abomination of homosexuality that they have, they should be convicted in a lawful trial, they should be sentenced to death, they should be lined up against a wall and shot in the back of the head.”
The pastor isn't the only one in the congregation spewing this stuff:
Jonathan Shelley, another leader of Stedfast Baptist Church, two weeks ago went to an Arlington City Council meeting and said similarly that gays deserved to be killed. He advocated for enforcing an old Texas law outlawing “sodomy” that was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 2003 in the Lawrence V. Texas case and did not carry a death penalty.
“What these people do is filthy,” Shelley said at the council meeting during its public comment section.
He also called gay people pedophiles and used part of the time addressing the council to plug a homophobic political movie he directed and released in 2021.
The last straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back came this past Tuesday evening, June 7, 2022, when progressive and centrist signers and endorsers of the Protocol of Reconciliation and Grace Through Separation withdrew their support for it. They did so through publishing a website where they abandoned the hard work and hopes of so many. That didn’t prevent them, however, from picking and choosing where they think The United Methodist Church’s Book of Disciplineshould be followed and where it could be conveniently ignored. Their list even includes their take on how theologically conservative churches should be allowed to depart using the extremely expensive and punitive process enumerated in paragraph 2553. Their website was published within a few hours notice to the traditionalist organizations that endorsed and negotiated the Protocol, and there certainly was no consultation. This is duplicitous and done with bad faith. It also makes a mockery of the Book of Discipline, which is our connectional foundation.
The Wesleyan Covenant Association will not stand idly by as progressive and centrist bad actors work to further punish and harm theologically conservative United Methodist local churches who want nothing more than to live out the doctrinal stances that have been upheld by every single General Conference. Through this action, signers of the Protocol Response website including Protocol participants, Tom Berlin, Jun Equila, Jan Lawrence, David Meredith, and Randall Miller have shown their true colors. They believe that they should be able to violate the Discipline, but theological conservatives should be held to the extreme letter of the law. Organizations that have now withdrawn their support like UMCNext, Mainstream UMC, Affirmation, the Methodist Federation for Social Action, and Reconciling Ministries Network have made it clear that they prefer lawlessness and complete dysfunction. I’m reminded of the adage, “Rules for thee, but not for me.”
Again, what I hang on to as a wobbly Christian feeling my way back to a life of faith is my core certainty that with all this dross there must be such a thing as real gold.
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