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Feb. 8, 2021 - Epoch Times
28:23
California Churches Clash With State Shutdown Orders | Phil Hotsenpillar
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What is going on with churches right now in California?
There's a lot of questions that have come from every angle, meaning religious, non-religious side, should you be open, how can you justify being open, to we should have opened, we never should have closed.
So what's going to happen with these two groups?
I think it's already happening.
I think we are seeing a division And I think it's a tragedy that what's happened in America, especially in California.
Do you see the shutdowns?
Do you connect that to communism by any chance?
I saw firsthand what happens in a world where communism restricts controls, not just people speaking, but literature.
Religion, all facets of society, and I believe in many ways we're seeing some of that encroachment right now in America.
What is the outlook for the churches in California?
Find out how you can help your city become a better city.
And what that does is it builds that relationship so that when and if a crisis comes in your city, you have a good relationship, good working relationship.
I think there's a lot we can really do, but know the pulse of your people.
There's a scripture that says, know well the condition of your flock.
During the CCP virus pandemic, California's government ordered churches to close.
My guest today is Phil Hustempiller.
He's the pastor of Influence Church in Anaheim Hills and the author of One Nation Without Law.
Today he discusses the differences of opinion on reopening churches and the need to preserve the First Amendment.
Welcome to California Insider.
Phil, it's great to have you on.
Welcome.
Thank you.
So good to be with you and excited to talk about what's happening here in the United States, especially in California.
We want to talk to you about churches.
There's been a shutdown in California because of the CCP virus, which we call it CCP virus because we think CCP caused this pandemic by not telling the world about it.
Now, what is going on with churches right now in California?
Well, if I could just kind of take you back to March, I really think all the churches that I know of complied with the order.
Let's shut it down.
We don't know what we're dealing with here.
By April, there was a lot of discontentment with what's happening here.
Are we violating First Amendment rights?
And I gathered with probably 100 other pastors, and that became a national news piece that we were going to reopen on May 31st.
And that really kind of signaled a shift, I think, in California churches and how we were going to approach it.
So roughly, to my knowledge, there's about 3,000 churches open, meaning indoor services, okay, in California at this time.
That's out of about 30,000 to 35,000 churches.
So the percentage is not great.
And there's a lot of questions that have come from every angle, meaning religious, non-religious side, should you be open, how can you justify being open, to we should have opened, we never should have closed.
So I think the spectrum is very, very wide.
I'm friends with a number of pastors, some of whom have opened and some haven't, quite honestly.
But for us, it's been a really good thing to open because we now can minister to people, we can help people in ways you just can't do that with Zoom.
There's a disconnect that happens that way as we're seeing in every different area of whether it's education or church or other areas.
Now, are you guys concerned about the virus?
Very concerned in the sense that we want to be, let's say, accurate in the way that we approach it.
So we look at it and say, this is a virus with a survival rate of 99% plus.
So we're not dealing with something that is a 50% survival rate.
We should be a super spreader, by all words.
That is, we've gathered since May.
We have not seen that happen.
We've not seen any high cases or numbers of people with the virus.
We opened in stages.
We opened First Children's.
We did a survey of all the parents.
Would you be open to reopening for your kids?
That was probably in June.
We only had one parent who was hesitant, but they went ahead and opened with us.
So not only have we seen all of our kids come back, we've probably gone up in attendance Another 30% in kids and probably the same in adults.
And some people may argue, why indoors?
Could you do it outdoors?
Correct.
And what are your thoughts on that?
Yeah.
Well, first of all, we have people make reservations for indoors.
Those reservations fill up typically within five to six hours.
So no one has to go indoors.
They choose to go indoor.
We also offer an outdoor opportunity as well.
We've put up a pavilion that seats probably 600 people and you can sit outdoors.
And then we have online.
So I think it comes back to this basic principle of freedom of choice.
That I have a freedom that I can manage my health well.
And if I want to be in an in-service, in-person service, that I'm going to do that if that opportunity comes.
And that really almost becomes...
Kind of the welcoming wagon for a lot of people because they go, my church is completely closed down.
And I'm not getting any ministry.
I don't feel like what's happening online is anywhere coming close to what I got before.
And then there are some people that argue that churches want to open because of financial reasons.
Right.
What are your thoughts on that?
We actually would make more money if we were closed.
It's just the opposite.
Because you don't have to run programs.
You don't have to keep all your staff in place.
So it actually, for us, we're doing fine financially, but we would do better because the people, by and large, Have been very faithful in their giving.
They call that home.
But we would scale back.
We could close down a lot of, obviously, the ministries we wouldn't be having.
Kids ministries, children's ministries, young adult ministries, all of those things.
We'd probably drop our demand, our budget, 30-40%, and we'd probably only be down about 15% in giving.
So I don't think it's a good argument.
At least it's not from anybody I know.
I see.
And now you have, you mentioned there's two groups of churches, some that decided to open, and it's about 3,000 of you guys.
And then there's another, the total number of churches in California is 35,000?
I've heard numbers anywhere from the 32,000 to 35,000.
So what's going to happen with these two groups?
I think it's already happening.
I think we are seeing a division and from a perspective of we're going to conform to what's happening here in terms of, you know, let's say a mandate that comes from the governor.
We're going to conform to that and we're okay with bypassing First Amendment.
That's a big group of people.
I call those conforming churches.
Now, they wouldn't call themselves that.
This is a term I came up with.
And then there's another group, and this term, this group, I'm going to call believing churches.
And what I mean by that is we're just going to do what we've always done.
We're not going to let government mandates, unless they're reasonable, keep us from doing what we do.
As I said, all the churches that I know of, they closed from March 15th through the 31st of May.
So that was a pretty big window for a test.
And I don't believe the science was bearing out what they were telling us.
And so for us, we said we've got people that are—we deal with suicide.
We deal with abuse.
I mean, there's always abuse in our communities and our churches.
We deal with people that are struggling with— They're job loss now.
They need somebody to talk to, to minister to them, to pray with them.
And those avenues are closed off.
I mean, literally, you can drive by a church that once was thriving and people were there on a weekly, daily basis, and there's nothing happening.
It is just a closed event.
And I think it's a tragedy that what's happened in America, especially in California, What do you think happened to those people that were getting those services from those churches?
The ones that are not open?
Yeah, I think they're going to be surprised when they reopen, whenever that happens, at how much ground they've lost and how many people they've lost.
I know a lot of our growth has come from people who just said, I'm frustrated with my church not being open.
In a way, maybe it's the more risk-adverse people that go to the indoor service.
Maybe it's the more constitutionally driven people on the First Amendment that go to that service.
But that group of people is kind of setting a standard for what church is going to look like for them and for their family.
There is a division, as you mentioned, between the churches that are following the government mandate and the churches that are not.
How is this division working inside the church community and the pastors across the state?
I don't have a lot of interaction with a lot of pastors.
Most of the pastors that I know are open or want to open.
So they may want to open an outdoor venue.
They can't.
I do hear it and see it within my own congregation.
Because my congregation has grown, and it has grown from people outside of my congregation.
So they were at another church that didn't open, very frustrated on their side, very disappointed in their leadership.
So I think that is a discontentment that you see manifesting itself just on a one-on-one level, which is multiplied across the board.
Now, are the other pastors, have you had any interactions with other pastors that tell you, don't do this, don't open?
I haven't had a lot of that.
I hear it more from people.
Our facility where we're located, we also...
We have some retail space that we lease out.
And one of our leasees is the United States Post Office of all people.
And so a lot of people come through there and they'll express discontentment.
Why are you open?
You should close.
But it's not coming from a church leader or a church attendee.
It's coming from somebody outside looking in.
To what we're doing.
Had the outbreak would have been different, if you had seen different stats on it, if you have had an outbreak in your facility, would you have continued to be open?
I think it's a great question.
I think we were finding that long-term planning was about eight hours during the height of the COVID scare.
If we had an outbreak, we would take steps then to say, we need to close this down.
We need to solve this problem.
So yeah, I think had the stats been different, had the conditions been different, we would have been very proactive.
And we were very proactive, by the way, just in a lot of ways.
Still are.
I mean, we have additional cleaning staff there the entire time.
They're cleaning before, during, and after the service.
Every toy is disinfected before and after every service.
So there's a lot of things that we do that are very proactive from our perspective on trying to ensure that.
We don't enforce masks, but we do say they're suggested or recommended, but not mandatory.
So we say if you feel comfortable without a mask, we're comfortable having you.
If you feel more comfortable outside with or without a mask, Please be comfortable there.
If you'd rather be at home, I would say 30-40% of our congregation still has not returned.
I would say 20% are attending outdoors.
And then I would say our indoor congregation has grown by 30%.
And our live stream has probably grown by 150%.
So it's up to the people what they want to choose.
Yep.
Freedom.
And now you have spent a lot of time in different countries across the globe where churches are not allowed to operate, right?
Correct.
Tell me about that.
Yeah, I did some crusades and took a large group of people into Romania, so we had to fly into what was then Yugoslavia, Belgrade, and we took a bus into Romania.
That just happened to coincide with the 10-day war in Yugoslavia, so it didn't take me long to get into hot water there.
The interesting thing is before we left, they were still, even though Ceausescu was taken out on Christmas Day in 1989, we were there in April or June of 1990, we still had to smuggle Bibles in.
Bibles still were forbidden.
We had an interesting story that happened.
We were at the airport in Denver.
And we had literally put Bibles inside the lining of many of our suitcases just to smuggle them in.
I'm like an amateur Bible smuggler, alright?
And so we get up to check in, and the guy said, because we were going to Romania, and they checked the bags completely through, he said, I'm going to have to inspect your suitcase.
And, you know, my heart stopped.
I think, uh-oh, I'm in trouble here.
What's going to happen next?
Because they're going to find these Bibles, and I don't know, maybe I don't get to go, or they're definitely going to take the Bibles out.
And about that time, a supervisor came around the corner.
He said, I'll take care of these.
And he said, I'm going to go ahead and just send these straight through to Belgrade.
And he said, there's Bibles in there, aren't there?
And I said, there are.
And he said, I would do the same thing.
Thank you for what you're doing.
So we saw this kind of, you know, kind person sympathetic to what we were doing in an airport.
We got him to Belgrade.
We put him on the...
On the bus, we went into First Oradea, Timashora.
Timashora, of course, is where all the fireworks happened for the Communist Party.
And we started handing out Bibles.
Bibles were confiscated.
Cameras were confiscated at that time.
Same thing happened in Oradea.
Bibles were confiscated.
We had to be very, very careful because even though communism had technically fallen with the, you know, the bringing down of the wall in 89, it still was alive and well.
And it was still very, very restrictive on speech.
So we had to be careful what we said in the public square.
We couldn't hand out literature and we couldn't take pictures.
So I saw that.
Coming back into Belgrade, now the 10-day war is going on.
We were the last plane to leave out of Belgrade before all that really got hot.
We took the Bibles we had left.
We tried to go through the same routine again.
We probably distributed three to four hundred Bibles before another couple hundred were confiscated.
So I saw that firsthand.
Then kind of fast forward to early 90s.
I was starting to do crusades, speaking at different places in El Salvador or all around the country.
And that was now on the tail end of the Communist Party, the FMLN. And they were still working to get control, to disrupt the government.
Anything they could do.
So I'd been involved in a lot of times where we were tear-gassed, where I had a man next to me who was shot and killed in an event that I was at.
We had one FMLN guy who heckled us.
He was the Communist Party.
You could always identify him.
White t-shirt, red handkerchief, the beanie, and the boots and jeans.
And his name was Jose.
And Jose would come out and he would yell, try to disrupt it.
And then I'd go out and talk to him.
And then we were doing four a year, so he'd come to every one of them.
The next one he would come, he would heckle less.
Third one, he would heckle even less.
The fourth one, he became a person of faith.
And he started handing out Bibles and tracts with us.
I came back the next year, I didn't find Jose.
I went over to the, they had a stand there where you could go and get information from the FMLN. I said, hey, I'm looking for Jose.
And they said, oh, he's dead.
And I said, what do you mean he's dead?
What happened?
He said, oh, well, he became a Christian and we killed him.
So I saw firsthand what happens in a world where communism restricts controls, not just people speaking, but literature, religion, all facets of society.
And I believe in many ways we're seeing some of that encroachment right now in America.
Do you see the shutdowns?
Do you connect that to communism by any chance?
I connect it to that socialist, communistic ideology, absolutely.
And how do you see communism here?
I think communism takes more, in my mind, a form of socialism.
But that's the baby step into communism.
Most people agree on that.
I think the manifestation is that the rich should not have more money than somebody else, even if they worked hard to get it.
There needs to be an equalization across the board of the worth of a human.
You're worth this much money.
Why should you be worth more money?
Whereas capitalism...
Really, it kind of flips that.
Anybody can become as successful as they want to become based on hard work, initiative, education, whatever they have to do to get there.
And we've got a million rags-to-riches stories in America where someone might have even come from another country.
They found success here, and they love this country.
We have a large contingency of Romanian people in our church, and they said, we left Romania, and now we see the same thing happening here that was happening in Romania, restricting speech, trying to control religion.
All these things are coming along and creating almost a two-class system of everybody and then the upper escalon of leadership who have control, power, and privilege.
How is this ideology coming into the society?
Can you give me some examples?
I think definitely it's coming through our university education.
I hear the speech coming out.
I see a kid who goes to university and the first year he comes back and he partied and got D's and then he went back the next year and realized that his parents aren't going to pay for it anymore.
So he goes back.
Now he really drills down into it.
Now he's a second level student.
He comes back and he's a totally different kid.
His whole mindset, his worldview, even the way he views his parents, his church, his community has radically changed.
And if that only happened once or twice, I wouldn't think much about it.
But it's almost like I can guarantee that I'm going to get a different kid back and it's going to cost me $60,000 or $80,000 a year to get that kid back because that's my tuition I'm paying to get back.
Now a kid who doesn't believe in America, who doesn't know history, who has a twisted view of what's important in life.
And what happened?
I just wanted him to get a good education, get a good job.
That's all I was trying to do.
And how is that impacting the churches?
Because in communist countries, they're not allowed to practice, right?
Right.
I think the way it affects, I think it makes our work harder because, and it's okay to have harder work, I think it makes it harder to try to take some and help them understand Hey, you need to be able to think freely.
You need to be exposed to all this stuff.
But if it's not counterbalanced with some great resources, some great information, then you can't make a good decision.
You're getting swayed one way.
Now your parents are not smart anymore.
They were smart before.
They're no longer smart.
Right?
Now, America's history is blighted.
It's not true.
It's not good.
It's not right.
We find fault with everything.
Instead of realizing that in whatever generation we live in, most good people try to do the best they can in society to be a good citizen.
I really believe that's true in America.
Okay?
So if I go back 200 years, how do I know what the mindset was?
Wasn't he trying to do the best he could given what he had in that day?
I think so.
It's almost like you've got to give somebody a benefit of the doubt because some future generation will judge your ideologies, your philosophy, your viewpoints, and how will you be judged in a hundred years from today.
Is there other ways of communism, socialism coming?
Well, I think language itself is really on the chopping block, so to speak.
There is something called a linguistic de-evolution of words.
And what that means is that every language reaches a pinnacle in its ability to communicate a truth or a concept.
And over time, they de-evolve.
So for the English language, it reached a pinnacle in the time of Shakespeare, and the English language began to de-evolve.
So now what we find is that words are tending to have more usage than they have meaning.
So if we look at it from our Constitution, and we question the words they use, because we don't understand the words, because we don't use words that way today.
We're not worried about the meaning.
What did they mean?
What does a federalist mean?
What does a constitutionalist mean by those words?
So now words become anything you want them to be.
And I can now take and I can censor those words because words don't have meaning anymore.
They have usage.
And you're using words to describe me as a person that I'm offended by But I didn't mean that, but that's what you said.
So usage and meaning, there's a dichotomy that has happened.
And this is what's causing a lot of the conflict, is when words stop having meaning and they start having usage.
So, and how is that impacting the churches?
I think it impacts the church because it impacts society.
You might have somebody who says, well, we need to conform to this and we'll put like, I think it was the New Jersey governor, we didn't even think about the First Amendment or the Constitution when we made our decisions.
Well, that impacted churches in New Jersey because they said, we're not going to even honor the First Amendment during this season.
And so the churches are affected that way.
So you have church members or attendees who they hear that speech coming, let's say, from a news media, and they go, yeah, I agree with that.
We should not do that.
We should not be open.
Not thinking long-term, what does that mean for a constitutional right?
If the First Amendment is all that we think it is, then it should be preserved.
It should be understood and not just kind of relegated You know, to the back burner because it's inconvenient in this season in our life.
And does this ideology that kids get at schools that's connected to communism, that's somewhat the communist socialist, does this ideology clash with the church?
Oh, definitely.
I mean, what's the first thing that communism wants to do?
It wants to destroy the church.
Why?
Because it's public enemy number one.
What does it do?
Well, here in America, I can almost guarantee if you go to church and you're regular, you're probably going to be conservative.
In your outlook, in your political outlook.
You're probably going to have a family or want to have one.
You're going to be married or want to get married somewhere along the line.
You're going to probably have an entrepreneurial spirit or at least want to tie into a corporation that will honor you and allow you to thrive and move up through the ranks.
So those are public enemy number one for communism, all four of those things, because we can't control you If you can control your own financial destiny, then you don't need us.
And I think that's the key.
What is the outlook for the churches in California?
I think the number one thing that I would say that we did very early on, way before COVID, was become a friend of your city.
Find out how you can help your city become a better city.
And what that does is it builds that relationship so that when and if a crisis comes in your city, you have a good relationship, good working relationship.
So for us, City of Anaheim has been a great friend.
We have We've replaced flags of fallen soldiers because the budget wasn't there for the city.
I've been the moderator on two city council meetings.
I've been the moderator on a mayor debate.
We've hosted candidates at our church.
We've interviewed them from all perspectives to get an idea.
We've launched food distribution.
We feed the hungry.
So the city sees what we're doing.
So when it comes time for us to have a need, we typically don't even have to ask.
They're there for us.
So I think the first thing a church can do, start now, have a great relationship with your city, know who your people are.
Second thing is get people within your congregation elected to office.
Get them involved, whether it's on a school level, whether it's on a community level, whether it's on a political level, whatever role, get involved because one voice is really a whole bank of voters in a politician's mind.
And if they hear you saying that, know what's going on in legislation in California, and then know it before it's too late.
Know what's happening.
I know there was one bill, I think it was SB 145, it passed by one vote, and it was the pedophilia legislation.
Only one vote.
Well, that means that you mean to tell me if we could mobilize everybody in California, we couldn't convince one guy or two guys to vote in another direction?
So I think we can shift things.
We may not shift it radically conservative, but let's get this to where our society is good.
So I think that's another thing.
Get involved in legislation.
Make some calls.
Write some letters.
Send some emails.
Do those things that really, really do work.
And then I think find out.
Get a pulse on your church.
What do your people really want?
Not what you're going to do as a leader.
What do they want?
And try to find a way to make that work.
If outdoor works for you, it happens to work in Southern Cal, I'd hate to be in Northern Cal and doing it, because it's a lot colder and rainier, or in the Midwest, but find a way to make it work.
We've helped other churches get outdoor venues started.
We've helped navigate them through some of the legal things that you have to think about in this season.
So I think there's a lot we can really do, but know the pulse of your people.
There's a scripture that says, know well the condition of your flock.
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