The pastor of a Weed church who posted the message “homosexuality is still sin” on the sign in the front lawn is no longer employed there.
Justin Hoke was pastor of Trinity Bible Presbyterian Church when the message went up last month reading: “Bruce Jenner is still a man. Homosexuality is still sin. The culture may change. The Bible does not.”
The message has since been removed, according to two residents. It’s unclear whether Hoke stepped down or the church dismissed him.
Protest organizers say that’s not the outcome they wanted.
“I feel really bad about it,” said Charolette Kalayjian of Weed, who attended the church with her family three times several years ago. “I know he (Hoke) has a family and that’s his life’s work there. None of us wanted to get him fired.”
It is unclear how long Hoke has been a pastor at the church. Attempts to reach Hoke and church leaders for comment were unanswered on Thursday and Friday morning.
The controversy all started on New Year’s Eve when Hoke posted a photo of the sign on his personal Facebook account, and it started to get shared.
After seeing the photo, Kalayjian said she called the church and left a message on an answering machine, requesting church officials take down the sign. Neither Hoke nor anyone else at the church returned her call, she said.
Kalayjian then posted a comment on the church’s Facebook page requesting the sign be removed, she said.
She said the post was deleted.
That’s when Kalayjian said she and her friend Amelia Mallory of Weed decided to organize the Shastina Love Rally. An estimated 40 people showed up on Jan. 6 and and 50 last Sunday during service hours across the street.
“We wanted to let people in the LGBTQ community know that we love and support them, and the sign doesn’t speak for our community,” Kalayjian said.
Kalayjian said she thought both parties were civil. “I haven’t had anyone come up to me and tell me, ‘You’re wrong for doing that.’”
“We were trying to keep it (polite),” Mallory said. “We could shout across the street at each other all day long. That’s not really a productive dialog.”
But after the first protest Jan. 9, Hoke posted on his Facebook page that vandals had damaged the sign.
The next day, Hoke posted that he had restored the message to the sign.
Kalayjian said neither she nor other protesters damaged the sign. “We were all pretty upset about it. We were trying to promote love. Someone who is going in the dead of night to vandalize is not a loving person. We decided to take up a collection to fix the sign.”
During the second protest last Sunday, Kalayjian said she went up to an unnamed church elder with the donation who “said he appreciates that we would do that for them, but it was not necessary. At that time Justin (Hoke) was let go.”
That same day on Facebook, Hoke thanked people who had reached out to him to ask if he needed help.
The day before, or Jan 12, he had elaborated in a public post on Facebook he had been told all parishioners except one couple would leave the church if he stayed. He wrote he and church elders decided it would be best if he left.
But in an update to the post on Monday, Hoke wrote he didn’t want to leave his job and he hadn’t quit.
“That hit us completely out of left field,” Mallory said. “We all have families. We can all empathize with what they (Hoke’s family) are going to go through.”
Credit: redding.com