“Our message to the gay community is the same as it is to the straight community,” he said.
The commissioner, Olive said, did not seem to appreciate his message.
“He pointed at me and said, ‘Listen, you better not have a church down there,” Olive told me.
By the strangest of coincidences, a code enforcement officer showed up for a Sunday service on Feb. 8. He was wearing a hoodie and was armed with a concealed video camera, according to the letter Liberty Counsel sent to the city.
It’s pretty shocking stuff for a city that prides itself on being a tolerant, multicultural city. But as we all know – tolerance and diversity do not extend to Christians.
“It was pretty shocking,” Pastor Olive said. “We had no prior warning.”
The following Sunday a city employee showed up again and told the church it had one week to vacate the building. They were accused of operating a church in a business rental property without a Lake Worth business license.
***snip***
William Waters, the city’s community sustainability director, told me they have nothing against the church – they were simply responding to a complaint.
(My note...Gee, I wonder WHO complained?)
“We had a complaint that a gathering of people was taking place there in the form of a church,” he said. “We investigated that and determined that, yes, there were people gathered there.”
***snip***
“We have to treat everybody the same,” Waters said. “We couldn’t give preferential treatment to churches versus other businesses.”
And in the city’s opinion, a church is, in fact, a business – just like grocery store, a Waffle House or an adult novelty shop.
***snip***
Waters said any church that refuses to comply could be shut down by the fire department.
“There’s a variety of things that could happen if you don’t comply with the use and occupancy requirement,” he said.
As for Pastor Olive – his church will no longer meet in its church-owned coffee house. Instead, it is taking its congregation “underground” until the issue is resolved.
“We just want to urge the city – don’t allow God and our faith to be zoned out of downtown,” the pastor said.
Any coffee clatch can now parade as a “church”, deserving of special privilege?
Somehow, speaking for myself, I bet there is more to this sob story.
Churches like to skirt the law and for most, I don’t have sympathy.
Back to the catacombs.
Exhibit A for "waste of taxpayer dollars."
I would love to see the job description for this position.
"One-Adam-12: Ministry in progress at downtown coffee shop. See the man in the hoodie..."
Gay Mafia? What would Bishop Peter Paul Jesep say?
why didn’t they make it a private club?
Licensing of churches and preachers has an ugly history in America; probably no uglier in any Colony than the persecutions that were perpetrated in the Commonwealth of Virginia.
As a young Christian lawyer, Patrick Henry rode in to Culpeper, Virginia in March of 1775, where he was witness to the brutal public flogging of a Baptist preacher. Tied to a whipping post in the middle of the town square, the preacher’s back was laid bloody and bare, with the bones of his ribs showing. He had been scourged mercilessly with a leather whip laced with metal.
The preacher’s only crime was that he had refused to take a license from the British Crown (Church of England). Three days later, the man was again flogged, this me to death. And he was not the only preacher who suffered this fate.
This incident is was one of the motivations for Patrick Henry’s “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death” speech. This incident, and others like it, were also the primary reasons for the strong protections of religious liberties written in to the 1776 Virginia Declaration of Rights, which itself was the model for the Bill of Rights added to the United States Constitution.
Religious liberty for any church or person who agrees with Emperor Obama’s government.
What’s wrong with being anti-gay?
Bump