Posted on 01/21/2026 8:44:07 PM PST by Morgana
(RNS) — Leaders of Cities Church, the Minneapolis congregation whose worship service was disrupted by anti-ICE protesters, are considering legal action against the activists, saying the group that invaded the church on Sunday (Jan. 18) “jarringly disrupted our worship gathering.”
In a statement issued Tuesday, the church leaders said the protesters “accosted members of our congregation, frightened children, and created a scene marked by intimidation and threat. Such conduct is shameful, unlawful, and will not be tolerated. Invading a church service to disrupt the worship of Jesus — or any other act of worship — is protected by neither the Christian Scriptures nor the laws of this nation.”
The church also called on federal officials to protect all houses of worship from similar protests.
Nekima Levy Armstrong, a minister, lawyer and activist, told The Washington Post that activists were protesting against David Easterwood, a lay pastor and elder at the Southern Baptist church who also works for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Armstrong said she was angered at seeing a video of Easterwood defending his work with ICE.
“I don’t understand how as a pastor he thinks that that’s acceptable,” Levy Armstrong told the Post.
Easterwood is one of several ICE officials, including Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, named in a federal lawsuit filed by protesters in Minnesota who have accused federal officials of trying to suppress their free speech. “They have pepper-sprayed, violently subdued, and aimed assault rifles at protesters and observers, and even followed observers home to scare them in a tactic lifted straight from the mafia,” the lawsuit alleges.
Easterwood, the acting field director of an ICE office in St. Paul, has denied the allegations.
Videos of the protest were shared widely on social media over the weekend, leading to outrage from Southern Baptist and other evangelical Christian leaders. SBC President Clint Pressley, in an interview with Religion News Service, said the scene was “just unbelievable.”
Pressley said he was thankful the protest ended peacefully, given how recent shootings and acts of violence at houses of worship have put congregations on edge. “It scared me to death to think about what might happen in a church if you had intruders like that,” he said.
No matter what people think about ICE, he said, disrupting a church service is wrong.
In a message on the Cities Church website, pastor Jonathan Parnell wrote, “Rejoice in the trial. See God’s blessing. Keep doing good.”
Cities Church was planted by Parnell in 2015 and worships in a former Episcopal church known as St. Paul’s on the Hill. An article on the church’s website notes that the church is “neither a gym nor a theater,” unlike many modern evangelical churches. Through the SBC’s North American Mission Board, church leaders declined a request for an interview.
The congregation has a more formal liturgy than many SBC churches, including a weekly confession of sin and “assurance of pardon,” as well as Communion at every service. The church also has ties to Bethlehem College and Seminary, a school started by John Piper, a bestselling author and pastor, and Joe Rigney, also a well-known author and pastor.
On X on Monday, Rigney called himself a founding pastor of Cities Church. He is now a pastor at Christ Church DC, where Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth attends, a congregation “which faces weekly protests by vile leftwing activists.”
The U.S. Department of Justice is investigating Sunday’s protest for possible civil liberty violations or violations of the 1994 Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, which protects access to both abortion clinics and houses of worship. The FACE Act also bans protesters from intentionally “injuring, intimidating, or interfering with, or attempting to injure, intimidate, or interfere, any person by force, threat of force, or physical obstruction.”
John Greil, a law professor at the University of Texas who co-teaches a religion and law clinic, said that the protesters had claimed they wanted to disrupt a worship service and that videos of the incident seem to show that at least some activists appear to have intimidated worshippers.
“There’s a pretty touching image of a child who’s being consoled by her parents, and at least some of those individuals who went into the church were going into people’s faces, shouting,” he said. “I think that that satisfies the ‘intimidate or interfere with worship.’”
Greil also said that one protester appeared to threaten a worshipper who asked him to leave.
Though protesters could invoke a First Amendment right to protest at the church, Greil said, that would hold true only if the protest had taken place on the sidewalk or in another public forum. In a 2011 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed a $5 million award for damages against members of Westboro Baptist Church who had been sued for protesting at a veteran’s funeral, ruling that the church members had protested from the sidewalk outside the funeral, not on private property.
A protest on private property is different from a public setting, Greil said.
“I think we could very easily imagine the real harms that would happen if Black churches were interrupted by white supremacists just to chant public slogans, if Jewish services were interrupted, if Muslim prayer services were interrupted,” he said. “I think it’d be a pretty scary world to imagine.”
Greil said the church could sue protesters for trespassing on its property.
The St. Paul Police Department is also investigating the incident, in which 30 to 40 protesters entered the church, though most of them had left the building and were walking away when the officers arrived about 10:40 a.m. local time.
“This incident is an active & ongoing disorderly conduct investigation,” public information officer Alyssa Arcand told RNS in an email. “Because this is an open investigation, no additional public information is available at this time.”
The Baptist Joint Committee, a pro-religious freedom group, declined to comment specifically on the protest but issued a statement on Tuesday criticizing the Trump administration for undermining religious liberty in its immigration policies. “In Minneapolis and across the country, the threats to the religious freedom of all people are not the people standing up for and participating in civic life but the people who wield state power in a manner that undermines it,” the statement read.
The statement also called on officials to “respect places of worship as spaces of conscience and community.”
Trey Turner, executive director of the Minnesota-Wisconsin Baptist Convention, said Baptist churches in both states have been struggling to respond to ICE enforcement and the issue of immigration. Many of the churches in the convention, he said, including about a third of those in the Twin Cities, serve immigrant congregations.
“There are Hispanic churches that are not meeting right now because they are afraid of what’s happening in our part of the world, in part, because of the interaction between the federal government and the state government,” said Turner.
Even church members who have legal status fear that ICE could raid churches, he said, causing a great deal of concern in the immigrant community. He said churches in the convention don’t all agree on how best to deal with the issue of immigrants. This week, Turner hopes to meet with Baptist leaders from the Southeast Asian Hmong community to talk about ways that SBC churches in Minnesota can work together to support one another.
Turner cautioned that not all Southern Baptists hold the same view on immigration but that many other pastors in the area had reached out to offer their support. Turner said his first thought after hearing about the protest was, “How can I serve this congregation going through this trauma?”
“Because they’re going to try to get together this coming Sunday, and what will be the response?” he said.
He said Sunday’s protest felt like something sacred had been violated. People go to church to seek sanctuary from the outside world, he said. They don’t expect the kind of chaos and disruption that occurred on Sunday.
“It’s shocking to us,” he said.
Dear FRiends,
We need your continuing support to keep FR funded. Your donations are our sole source of funding. No sugar daddies, no advertisers, no paid memberships, no commercial sales, no gimmicks, no tax subsidies. No spam, no pop-ups, no ad trackers.
If you enjoy using FR and agree it's a worthwhile endeavor, please consider making a contribution today:
Click here: to donate by Credit Card
Or here: to donate by PayPal
Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794
Thank you very much and God bless you,
Jim
They need to.
Otherwise, this will just escalate as it ALWAYS does when the right rolls over and exposes their jugular.
If we don't stop this as a Nation, and ALLOW it to continue without arrests and prosecution, it will be only a matter of time and we will see it happen wide scale!
PRAYING much these days!
So do I.
It will quickly escalate to what the moslems are doing to Christians in Nigeria.
The muslims try it in Texas and that will be the last thing they ever do. Remember that Texas church shooting a few years ago? Remember how that ended? All the church members were packing heat. Even the neighbors who heard the shooting that I only recall the names “Pa and Ruth” came over with guns to help out.
Agreed.
I’m afraid there will be copycats all over the country this coming Sunday.
Hope I’m wrong but it would have been good if there had been some arrests this week.
Best defense is offense...for their souls...go out and preach Jesus to these colorful miserable bull dike children of God.
“In a statement issued Tuesday, the church leaders said the protesters “accosted members of our congregation, frightened children, and created a scene marked by intimidation and threat“
They don’t seem to have done much about it while it was happening.
I just can’t imagine this sort of thing going on in a church. Now every two-bit criminal may see this & decide it’s the way to go. I have heard that some churches already have armed(secret) guards. It’s a shame this has to be done.
Yes, sue Waltz, Ellison, Frey, Omar and the Minnesota DFL Party...
They thought they were safe from insane leftists—but the crazies came for them anyway.
The left requires affirmative chanting of their slogans and obedience.
Anything else and you are a Nazi.
Virtue signaling and calling other people Nazis will not save you.
The church leaders were totally cowed and intimidated.
This is why the left is winning and we are losing—on the streets.
That is why Walz, Ellison etal need to be put in chains and hauled off to Gitmo.
They have created an environment where leftist Red Guards have free run of the Minneapolis metro area—and the normies cower in fear of them.
These idiots who this they have a First Amendment right to disrupt church need to learn to read. Only the first five words is all they need. “Congress shall make no law.”
1A limits government and only government. A church is not congress, especially if you also believe in the separation of church and state argument (which is non-existent in the Constitution)
I hope that these people are all jailed and financially destroyed.
Most of the south and east will be inundated by snow and actual ice on Sunday and the north has brutally cold temps. God is blessing large swaths of the country by making it so most churches will close due to weather. The idiots will be onto the next outrage by then.
My church has armed and earpieced men.
No arrests. pam bondi goes there, and does nothing. This is a pretty good example of Anarcho-tyranny. They can terrorize and disrupt church, and nothing happens. No arrests, no handcuffs, no perp walk, no jail. Wait and see what happens to you and your security team if you attempt to forcefully prevent them from entering your church. The entire weight and force of govt will crush you. Jail, financial ruin. There is an ongoing civil war and only one side is actually fighting.
They're not children of God.
Not yet.
We have security at our church and have for years, but you’d never know it.
I just know some of who is packing and he doesn’t stand out.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.