Via – LA Times
The shimmering Christmas trees flanked the eight-person band as they belted out a soft-rock version of “Joy to the World.”
Some of the hundreds in the crowd stretched out an arm and swayed with the hymns on Sunday at Riverside’s Harvest Christian Fellowship, the flagship of a booming Southern California evangelical church.
Guests shuffled to their seats. Ushers collected tithes. Then Pastor Greg Laurie — beamed in via video feed — was met with applause after he announced the church saw 19,000 professions of faith last year.
“Our country needs help right now,” Laurie later told the crowd. “I believe that America needs a spiritual awakening.”
For the next hour, there was nary a remark about the divided House of Representatives vote last week to impeach President Trump, or a scathing editorial published Thursday by a prominent evangelical magazine that advocated ousting him from office for such “grossly immoral character.”
“That he should be removed, we believe, is not a matter of partisan loyalties but loyalty to the Creator of the Ten Commandments,” wrote the author, Mark Galli.
The editorial set off a furor among conservatives. Franklin Graham, son of the late Rev. Billy Graham who founded the magazine, said the editorial falsely invoked his father’s name to bash Trump. “For me as a Christian, the fact that he is the most pro-life president in modern history is extremely important — and Christianity Today wants us to ignore that, to say it doesn’t count?” Graham wrote.
Trump quickly denigrated Galli’s publication as a failing “progressive” outlet that preferred “a Radical Left nonbeliever, who wants to take your religion & your guns.”
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