Pastors In Missouri Urging Congregants To Receive COVID-19 Shot

by Seth Udinski
Pastors In Missouri Urging Congregants To Get COVID-19 Shot

Seth Udinski, FISM News

 

In some frustrating news from Missouri, many pastors are imploring their congregants to receive the COVID-19 experimental drug.  Religion News Service (RNS) ran a report on Thursday praising these pastors for coercing their flocks, whom they have been charged by God to lead and protect, to receive a drug that has already been responsible for thousands of deaths and has only been approved for emergency use by the FDA.

According to the report, over 200 pastors in Missouri have signed a statement heavily encouraging their flocks to receive the jab.  Some churches have even agreed to use their campuses and buildings as vaccine clinics.  The push has come as a result of increased reports of the virus (and viral variants) spreading throughout the state.

RNS’s report highlights Jeremy Johnson, pastor of North Point Church, an Assemblies of God congregation in Springfield.  Johnson defended his position with many of the same recycled arguments used by the state-run media, but tied up in “Christian” language:

I think there is a big influence of fear.  A fear of trusting something apart from scripture.  A fear of trusting something apart from a political party they’re more comfortable following. A fear of trusting in science. We hear that: ‘I trust in God, not science.’ But the truth is science and God are not something you have to choose between.

Johnson is right that faithful Christians do not need to chose between God and science, since God is the creator and sustainer of the natural world.  But to refer to an unproven and at times highly dangerous drug as “science” is utterly foolhardy and unbecoming for a man who is commissioned to shepherd the flock of God.

Hopefully, these pastors will repent of this and refocus their attention away from promoting medical opinions to preaching the Word of God and leading their congregations in Christlikeness.

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