In 2008, my wife and I moved to inner-city Springfield, Massachusetts, to start a Christian mission to serve the poor. We bought an abandoned former crack house in a really bad neighborhood to set a personal example of "redemptive living." We transformed that house into a show-piece and then sold it seven years later at cost to a charity home for troubled children next door. By then the whole neighborhood had also been transformed. All glory to God!
There was a gang shooting on our corner the day we moved in and about a dozen local murders followed that year. The neighborhood was so dangerous that residents were shocked to see us passing out Gospel tracts and praying with people in the evenings. One black gentleman gave us a stern warning when we gave him a tract and said, "God bless you," but with a tone that meant "you're crazy."
Early on I befriended Pastor Constant "Steve" Cooley, who truly was a "constant" symbol of stability and strength in the black community, and together we formed Redemption Gate Mission Society and its storefront church, "Holy Grounds Coffee House." We recruited missionary-minded Christians from the Greater Springfield area with a vision to re-Christianize that "post-Christian city." Holy Grounds became the most racially diverse and harmonious church around, and an incubator for numerous Christian ministries.
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God used our tiny mission as a staging area for culture-changing ministry. Teams of evangelists roamed the streets, hundreds of inner-city families flocked to our annual Family Day in city parks, and thousands of believers from all over joined us for an annual March for Jesus that ended every year at City Hall. The high point was the 2010 March for Jesus when 22 pastors prayed one after another, in English, Spanish, Russian and Hebrew, while an airplane circled above with a banner exhorting "Trust Jesus."
Our "redemptive living" model proved that the love of Jesus Christ in the hearts of its residents could conquer racism, even in heavily segregated Springfield.
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The hard left is extremely powerful in Massachusetts, and its leaders, activists and media organs were angered by my arrival there because of prior work against the the LGBT political agenda. I was informed that a task force was created to strategize how to drive me away.
Three doors down from Holy Grounds was Arise for Social Justice, Springfield's version of ACORN. ACORN was the Obama-associated Marxist street activist network forced to disband after James O'Keefe of Project Veritas published videos featuring ACORN workers advising him how to run brothels using underage girl sex slaves. ACORN affiliates just formed new coalitions, and are presumably the core of the current Black Lives Matter and Antifa partnership.
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While Holy Grounds was transforming lives through the love of Christ, Arise was constantly fostering racial resentment and pushing Marxism. It added anti-Lively activism to its agenda and conducted numerous protests of our church, distributed anti-Lively hate literature and (I suspect) was behind the smashing of our front window. Meanwhile, Arise's allies in the Springfield media continually painted me as a vicious homophobe, omitting any mention of our stunning victory over racism.
We were nearly forced to close when an ex-convict child molester posing as a Christian evangelist wormed his way into our church with stories of his family's desperate need for shelter, then was featured as the centerpiece of a malicious plot to paint Holy Grounds as a nest of pedophiles. It started with a front page anti-Lively hit piece in the Boston Globe, followed by a pair of local newspaper attacks: the first accusing us of urging high school students to skip school and stay at Holy Grounds, a false and bizarre accusation that baffled us until the knockout punch "gotcha" article (featuring the ex-convict) showed us the scheme was almost certainly orchestrated by the anti-Lively task force. It was my own "Russian Collusion Hoax" on a smaller scale. By the grace of God, we won that battle, which actually triggered a powerful new (and ongoing) teen outreach that became our most fruitful ministry and greatly blessed hundreds of students.
That failed plot was followed by a second effort, a major six and a half year federal lawsuit accusing me of "crimes against humanity" for exposing the globalists' LGBT agenda in Uganda. That lawsuit was driven by a Manhattan-based Marxist firm, employing a team of 14 lawyers including the former law clerk of the far-left federal judge who wrongly kept that bogus case alive (just like Gen. Michael Flynn's judge has done). Thanks to the Lord and His servants at Liberty Counsel, we not only won that battle, but the lead plaintiff accepted Christ, repented from lesbianism and apologized to me.
Importantly, the lawsuit's implicit racist premise was that the minds and will of black Ugandan legislators were so overpowered by my (falsely alleged) arguments that I (and not this body of duly elected leaders) was actually responsible for an anti-homosexuality law they passed.
I offer this testimony to demonstrate my hard-earned personal knowledge of the Marxist tactics and strategies behind Black Lives Matter, Antifa, ACORN, the Democratic Party, the Obama team and the lying "mainstream" media. They don't care about racism. They don't care one whit about blacks who disagree with them. They can't be appeased. This is and has always been about burning down Judeo-Christian civilization so they can build their "utopia" on the ashes.
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Racism truly is harming inner-city blacks, but it's the racism of virtue-signaling self-defensive whites, unwilling to admit that the true victims of BLM's violent anarchy are the vast majority of blacks who dare not speak out against the thugs and bullies. The inner cities have their own Mafia-style "Omerta" code called "snitches get stitches," and the true reason the Marxist Dem leaders are withdrawing the police is to give the BLM brute squads total power over Black neighborhoods so no one can refute the racist lie that they speak for all blacks.
Still, the miracle cure for racism is the Love of Jesus Christ, and I pray that the black churches rise up to offer that truth as the antidote to BLM's Marxist poison.