The Justice Department, under Attorney General Pam Bondi, charged more than thirty people in connection with the church disruption, among them activist Nekima Levy Armstrong, Chauntyll Allen, William Kelly, former CNN anchor Don Lemon, and independent journalist Georgia Fort. Prosecutors allege the defendants conspired against the right of religious freedom and violated the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, a 1994 law originally written to protect abortion clinics and, since amended, houses of worship as well. Two federal judges have since ordered several of the defendants released ahead of trial, finding they posed no danger to public safety.
The case has moved through several turns since. On June 3, St. Paul City Attorney Irene Kao announced her office would not pursue state charges, saying a review of video and investigative reports did not produce sufficient evidence. The federal case continued, and on June 24 attorneys representing thirty-three of the defendants filed a joint motion asking a federal judge to dismiss the indictment outright. Their filing argues that "nowhere in those 19 pages does the indictment allege a single fact that any defendant used physical force against another person, issued a threat of violence to anyone, or fully blocked ingress to or egress from the church," and insists the protesters' intent was to demonstrate against ICE policy, not to harm or intimidate worshippers. A ruling on that motion has not yet come down.
What a church is for
Set the politics of the matter to one side for a moment, my friend, and think about what actually happened that Sunday. A congregation gathered to sing, to pray, to hear the word of God opened up and preached, and strangers walked in and turned the hour into a shouting match. Whatever grievance drove them there, and grief over a life lost is a real thing, that hour did not belong to them. It belonged to God and to the people who had come to meet Him.
Scripture does not treat the gathering of the saints as incidental. It calls it holy ground of a kind, a place where heaven and earth are meant to draw near to one another in quiet, in song, in the reading of the word. Paul told the church at Corinth plainly what worship is supposed to sound like:
"For God is not the author of confusion, but of peace, as in all churches of the saints." (1 Corinthians 14:33)
That verse was written to settle disorder inside the church itself, but it says something true about every gathering of believers everywhere. Confusion is not God's signature. Peace is. When a service is broken up, whatever the cause, something has been stolen from people who had every right to that hour of peace.
This does not mean grievances have no place, or that the people who lost sleep over Renee Good's death felt nothing real. Grief is not a sin, and anger at a death is not automatically wickedness. But the answer to a wrong is never to manufacture another one, and there are a thousand doors in this country for protest, petition, and public outcry that do not require walking down the center aisle of a sanctuary. The writer of Hebrews urged believers "not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is; but exhorting one another" (Hebrews 10:25), because he understood that the gathered church is fragile and precious and worth guarding, not just from persecution abroad, but from disruption at home.
The Lord Himself, when He walked the earth, drove merchants from the temple courts because He would not have His Father's house turned into something it was never meant to be. He loved the sinner and the tax collector and the woman caught in shame, and He also loved the sanctity of the place where His Father was worshipped. Both things were true in Him at once, and both things ought to be true in us. Love the person standing in the aisle with a grievance. Guard the hour that belongs to God. Those are not contradictions. They are the whole of what it means to walk in the way of Christ, who was gentle with the brokenhearted and unbending about what worship is for.