California pastor defies coronavirus church orders and says he’ll run for governor
Pastor Greg Fairrington had a lot to say during a pair of fiery sermons the first two Sundays of July.
Addressing his south Placer County congregation as well as leaders of other churches, Fairrington called for fewer coronavirus-related restrictions on places of worship; told viewers watching his service via internet livestream it was “time to come back” and pray in person; bashed the “fake media” for its coverage of the pandemic; criticized Gov. Gavin Newsom’s response to the health crisis; and announced, briefly, that he himself plans to run for governor of California.
After having said all that from the pulpit at Destiny Christian Church, it wasn’t too much of a surprise when Fairrington, lead pastor of the large Pentecostal church in Rocklin, declared Monday on social media that he has no intention of obeying Newsom’s order telling places of worship across most of the state that they must once again cease all indoor activities due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, which has been worsening since June.
“I told you before, we are not shutting down the church. We will be having church on Sunday,” Fairrington said in a Facebook video. “I believe my mandate as a pastor is to obey the word of God.”
Destiny Christian shared the pastor’s video Monday afternoon, hours after Newsom announced the biggest rollback yet in the reopening process. The governor ordered bars, indoor dining, movie theaters, zoos, card rooms and other entertainment centers to immediately close statewide. Shopping malls, gyms, nail salons and indoor church worship were also required to close in the now more than 30 counties on the state health department’s watch list, which as of Wednesday morning encompassed more than 80 percent of California by population, including Placer County.
The new closures came in response to surging coronavirus activity across the majority of California that has continued for about a month. The number of COVID-19-positive patients in hospitals statewide has soared from about 3,100 in mid-June to more than 6,700 as of Tuesday’s update from the California Department of Public Health.
Since the pandemic started, California has recorded more than 335,000 confirmed cases and close to 7,100 deaths from the highly contagious respiratory disease, state health officials reported Tuesday. Placer County has recorded 11 deaths from COVID-19. Nearby Yolo and Sacramento counties have combined for another 120 fatalities and are also on the state watch list.
In the video released Monday, Fairrington said, “Do not let the fear the media’s driving, the fear of what’s out there, affect us as a church. We must pull together.”
Like many other churches across California, Destiny has been holding hybrid services, in-person and online, for the past few weeks. Places of worship in late May were permitted to resume in-person services, but with a state-set capacity restriction of 100 people or 25 percent of their usual limit — whichever is lower — and a number of other rules to keep social distance between people.
Many churches with congregations numbering thousands, like Destiny Christian, set up online reservation systems so that parishioners could lock up those limited seats in advance. As they did so, most churches continued to offer services on an internet livestream basis for those who could not or chose not to attend in person.
This past Sunday, the day before Newsom’s latest closure order, Fairrington said it was time to instead reopen churches, and he asked those watching him online to come back in person.
“If you’re watching from the safety of your home, it is time to come back to church,” Fairrington said, throwing both arms in the air on the word “safety.”
“Pastors, it’s time to open your doors. We cannot allow this moment to redefine the church … We cannot allow the ‘no’ in the atmosphere to be greater than the ‘yes.’ ”
He’d called on other pastors to reopen their doors a week earlier, during a July 5 sermon in which he also accused Newsom of using the pandemic to mount an attack on churches.
“It is time for pastors to open up their doors and let people come to church again,” the pastor said, raising his voice to a shout, as he does often. “With all due respect, if you think our governor is going to relent — if you think he’s going to be nice to church someday, you are fooling yourself. This is just the beginning of where he wants to take the church.”
Fairrington wore a blue suit and a bright red tie that morning to mark Independence Day weekend. At the top of the sermon, he told his parish he got dressed up to announce his “candidacy for governor.”
He didn’t expand much further on his plans for a 2022 gubernatorial campaign, but added that he’s been tired of the “political correctness” he’s heard lately, particularly in discussions about the pandemic.
“People have more faith in a virus spreading than they do the power of God,” he said in this past Sunday’s sermon. “They have more faith in the false prophet of our day — the fake media — than they do in the spirit of Elijah.”
In an emailed response sent shortly after publication of this story to The Bee’s earlier requests for comment, a Destiny Christian spokesperson linked to a news release posted to the church’s website Wednesday morning.
The written statement doubles down on the reopening, calls Fairrington’s decision “courageous” and cites remarks by President Donald Trump in May calling for places of worship to reopen.
“We believe that the local church serves a critical mental health, spiritual, and community outreach role in our communities, as affirmed by our justice department and executive branch of government,” the news release continued.
In the statement, Fairrington and the church said they will continue to follow CDC guidelines on “social distancing, mask wearing, temperature taking, and sanitation,” and encouraged those “at-risk, sick, or uncomfortable” to stay home.
Rocklin spokesman Michael Young in an email to The Bee said the city “has reached out to Destiny Church and together we are working toward a solution where their services can be held and adhere to recently updated California safety requirements designed to slow the spread of COVID-19.”
Churches pushing back on Newsom’s latest shutdown order
Fairrington is far from alone in lashing out at the Newsom administration’s restrictions on churches.
Jonathan Keller, president of the conservative California Family Council, said Newsom’s latest order shows that the governor “trusts big box stores like Costco and Target more than churches and synagogues.”
Dean Broyles, chief counsel and president of the National Center for Law and Policy, said Newsom’s authority “stops at the church house door.”
“We strongly encourage pastors and religious leaders to follow the teachings of holy scripture and the guidance of their conscience regarding whether and how they worship God, rather than the arbitrary edicts of the state,” Broyles said in a statement.
In early May, a federal judge rejected a request by Cross Culture Christian Center, a Lodi church, to override the state and San Joaquin County health orders. The judge ruled that stay-at-home health orders are “not unconstitutional” and are “permissible exercises of emergency police powers, especially given the extraordinary public health emergency facing the state.”
Other lawsuits and legal challenges to Newsom’s order also failed in court, but furor subsided as the state gradually let churches reopen with a set of social distancing guidelines imposed.
More rules followed as coronavirus activity started to spike again, after having stayed relatively stable from late April through mid-June. On June 18, Newsom and the state health department made it mandatory, with very limited exceptions, for everyone in the state to wear masks in most indoor public and shared spaces, including inside most businesses and churches. On July 1, Newsom and the state introduced a ban on indoor singing or chanting at places of worship.
A number of Sacramento-area churches said they wouldn’t abide by the singing ban. Destiny also went forward with singing in its two most recent services, archived videos of each show. Of dozens who can be seen in the videos — from Fairrington to the church band to the congregants briefly appearing on camera in the first few rows — none appear to be wearing masks.
“2000 years ago when the Church was born, it was born without a vaccine,” Fairrington tweeted Tuesday. “Christians were dying, not from the flu, but from stones, lions and crosses.”
Destiny is among the biggest Sacramento-area places of worship so far to outright defy Newsom’s closure orders and the state’s coronavirus-related restrictions.
A spokesperson for Bayside Church, whose huge Adventure campus in Roseville is about a mile up the road from Destiny Christian, said that while there’s “disappointment” in the shutdown order, Bayside plans to follow it. Three of Bayside’s nine churches in Northern California are located in Placer County: the Adventure campus, the Blue Oaks campus in Roseville and its Granite Bay church.
Note: A previous version of this story stated that Fairrington had called upon places of worship to reopen in “full capacity” prior to this week’s closure order. The story has been updated to reflect that Fairrington had called for pandemic-related church restrictions such as social distancing and capacity protocols to be loosened rather than eliminated entirely.
This story was originally published July 15, 2020 at 10:29 AM.
