Let’s talk about how Cities Church treats women

“David Easterwood is a pastor here. He is also the director of the Field Office for ICE in St. Paul. So someone who claims to worship God, teaching people in this church about God, is out there overseeing ICE agents,” civil rights lawyer Levy Armstrong declared to the congregation of Cities Church in Saint Paul, Minn. as protesters interrupted their Sunday morning service.

“Think about what we’ve experienced. The murder of Renee Good at the hands of ICE, a Venezuelan national shot by ICE, a six-month-old baby who almost died as a result of ICE unleashing military-grade weapons on our community. How dare you claim to be a pastor of God and you are involved in evil in our community!”

While those who lean toward the left have a variety of takes on the protest, conservatives are playing the persecution card by casting the pastors of Cities Church as poor, faithful victims.

“The unspeakably evil intrusion of a leftist mob into a Christian worship service today in Minneapolis must be called out for what it is — and federal authorities should be fast and effective in response,” Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President Al Mohler said. “May God bless this steadfast pastor, this faithful gospel church, and the members who were traumatized, including children and youth. This was nothing less than the desecration of Christian worship.”

“The actions of protesters yesterday at Cities Church in St. Paul, Minneapolis were utterly shameful,” Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary President Danny Akin added. “Please join Charlotte and me in praying for their pastor and Southeastern alumnus Jonathan Parnell, that he would continue to lead with boldness. Pray for Cities Church, that they would remain steadfast in the face of opposition.”

But are words like “steadfast,” “faithful” and “bold” really the best words to describe Jonathan Parnell and the other pastors at Cities Church, one of whom is a director for ICE? When we take a closer look into who these men really are, we’ll realize they are anything but steadfast, faithful and bold. To the contrary, they are insecure little sexist and racist power-mongers who desire to be God.

John Piper’s glory hierarchy

To understand how abusive the pastors of Cities Church are, we need to examine where they came from, and how they view authority, submission, gender and punishment.

They’re part of a network of church planters connected to John Piper’s Calvinistic complementarian Desiring God ministries and Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis.

Piper views all reality as a hierarchy, with an ego-obsessed God at the top controlling everything below including the movement of dust particles for self-glory, and creating humans to find their satisfaction in putting everyone in their place on the hierarchy. Of course, Piper makes it sound nicer than that by saying, “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.” And it feels freeing for many of us who grew up in fundamentalism to hear our satisfaction being valued rather than dismissed.

But because it’s a satisfaction situated in a glory hierarchy that requires male headship and female submission, it forms its followers to delight in women submitting to men and punishing those who won’t, like Renee Good.

“To the degree that a woman’s influence over a man — guidance of man, leadership of man — is personal and directive, it will generally offend a man’s good, God-given sense of responsibility and leadership, and thus controvert God’s created order,” Piper explains.

This extends beyond simply the husband and wife relationship to society at large, including law enforcement. For example, Piper suggests, “A woman who is a civil engineer might design a traffic pattern in a city so that she’s deciding which streets are one-way, and therefore she is influencing, indeed controlling in one sense, all the male drivers all day long. But this influence is so non-personal that it seems to me that the feminine/masculine dynamic is utterly negligible in this kind of relationship.”

So regarding roles such as police officers, drill instructors or simply managers at work, Piper declares, “If a woman’s job involves a good deal of directives toward men, they’ll need, in general I think, to be non-personal, or men and women won’t flourish, I don’t think, in the long run in that relationship without compromising profound biblical and psychological issues.”

Perhaps this is in part why these men are in such a panic over a Black woman like civil rights lawyer Levy Armstrong walking into their church and addressing them so authoritatively about their sin. Women aren’t supposed to do that, especially Black women, or these men will have psychological issues.

In an interview on the “Sons of Patriarchy” podcast, former Cities Church member Rachel Curtiss said at Cities Church, “Men are really elevated above women.”

“Women were not allowed to do things, like they weren’t allowed to come and give announcements on Sunday or pray on Sunday or anything like that,” Curtiss remembered. “They said outwardly, ‘We love women, they’re amazing.’ But how that played out was very opposite of that in how they treated women. … You’re pretty much good to go if you do what they say and kind of go along with the culture. … It’s very much the pastor’s way or the highway.”

Building and fighting for God’s glory

In my article last week, I highlighted Andy Naselli, pastor of Christ the King Church and professor at Bethlehem Seminary, who prayed on Sunday morning that God would smite the people of Minneapolis who didn’t submit to ICE.

After the protest at Cities Church, Naselli posted a photo on Facebook of Jonathan Parnell, lead pastor of Cities Church, laying his hands on Naselli for the commissioning of Christ the King Church.

Naselli appeared with former Cities Church pastor Joe Rigney, who currently is on staff with Doug Wilson in Moscow, Idaho, on the Center for Baptist Leadership podcast with William Wolfe this week to discuss the fallout from his prayer in light of the Renee Good shooting.

“We’re trying to build a civilization,” Rigney proclaimed.

Naselli added, “We’re building and fighting for God’s glory,” mentioning the possibility of flipping Minnesota red.

To do this, they’re ignoring sharing the gospel with anyone who might lean to the left and are focusing on MAGA Republicans. As Naselli put it, he’s not interested in reaching “liberal blue elite people,” but “non-Christian, red leaning people who are like Elon Musk” who “have common sense.”

One way they’re building their civilization is through the promotion of ICE. Wolfe said, “ICE might be one of the most critical government agencies in our nation right now. In many ways, they’re the heroes.”

He went on to say Jonathan Ross, the ICE officer who killed Renee Good, is an “All American hero.”

So why are we surprised one of the Cities Church pastors would be a director for ICE?

Naselli explained, “In my church, we’re pretty united there in that we believe Romans 13 that government exists to reward the good and punish the evil” — a claim conservatives conveniently make when someone they like is president.

For men like Naselli, their view of civilization has implications for both sex and race. According to Naselli, from 2018 to 2021, “I’d say the two issues that were the Trojan horses for progressive ideology were ethnicity and I’d say egalitarianism, feminism, Me Too, that whole thing.”

Naselli said after Charlie Kirk was murdered, he ascended into his pulpit and turned the attention to George Floyd, claiming, “George Floyd died of a drug overdose.” Then he clarified to Wolfe and Rigney, “I said it like that on purpose because that’s the truth.” Wolfe agreed with Naselli’s words about Floyd’s death and added that Michael Brown’s murder in Ferguson, Mo., “was justified.”

This is a conservative narrative against the entire Black Lives Matter movement that was sparked by the deaths of Floyd and Brown. Despite the fact the officer who knelt on Floyd’s neck for 9 minutes was convicted of murder by a jury. And despite the fact Brown’s death was part of a larger well-documented culture of police harassment of Black citizens in Ferguson, Mo.

Wolfe added that all immigration into the U.S. needs to stop. “The gospel seems to indigenize in every other nation on earth except for America, where it globalizes,” he lamented.

To Rigney, the true victim in all this is apparently white men. He said the focus on immigrants has led to “the forgotten man … because he’s not an appropriate object of compassion.”

The progressive gaze and weaponizing empathy

While they think conservatism considers white men appropriate objects of compassion, progressivism focuses on everyone else.

Rigney calls it “the progressive gaze.”

“According to Naselli, the progressive gaze leads to viewing the world like women do.”

According to Naselli, the progressive gaze leads to viewing the world like women do. He said, “When something like this happens, it’s like they start talking with the vocabulary and sensibility and feminine tendencies of the left.”

These men think these “feminine tendencies” of “the progressive gaze” explain why so many people are protesting what happened to Renee Good. According to Wolfe, the left is “overflowing with weaponized empathy particularly for Renee Good.”

At one point, Naselli even begins to tear up, suggesting: “I’ve never really been one to care deeply about what a whole bunch of other people think. I care what a small number of people think that I respect most highly.”

The problem, of course, is that the men Naselli respects most highly are men like Doug Wilson, John Piper and the abusive pastors of Cities Church who think everyone must submit to them.

Submitting to the leadership of abusive men

Two weeks ago, I responded to a piece written by The Gospel Coalition, another one of these toxic complementarian Calvinist ministries, that complained about women going to therapists rather than to their pastors.

The reason these men demonize women who eventually seek help elsewhere is due to the teaching of John Piper. Despite the teaching of Jesus to the contrary in Matthew 5:32 and 19:9, Piper says: “Does the Bible allow for divorce in the case of adultery? I don’t think so. I don’t think the Bible allows divorce and remarriage ever while the spouse is living. That’s my radical, crazy, conservative, narrow, hard-nosed, very needed view.”

“I don’t think the Bible allows divorce and remarriage ever while the spouse is living.”

He points to “how many bad marriages there were in the Old Testament and how none of them ended in divorce.”

Regarding husbands who physically abuse their wives, Piper said, “If it’s not requiring her to sin but simply hurting her, then I think she endures verbal abuse for a season, and she endures perhaps being smacked one night, and then she seeks help from the church.”

Years later, he clarified that women can call the police, but only because God also demands “a wife’s submission to the authority of civil law.”

During her interview on the “Sons of Patriarchy” podcast, former Cities Church member Rachel Curtiss shared the story of how the pastors of Cities Church responded to her crumbling marriage. For more than three years, she asked for their help due to her husband’s severe pornography use and lying.

“Joe (Rigney) told me he did not know what to do about my husband and his sin, that they hadn’t seen a case with pornography to this level,” she said. Curtiss said her husband’s pornography use had gotten so obsessive that he was fired from his job over it, which led to financial fallout and the loss of their family’s health insurance.

But because the Cities Church pastors follow the teaching of Piper, they required her to continue submitting to her husband.

“Joe and the pastors told me that I cannot know if my husband is repentant because I don’t live with him. But they didn’t live with him either. So I found that ironic,” she recalled.

Despite her husband being the one to cause harm in their relationship, the Cities Church pastors wanted him to lead their marriage through it due to their gender role hierarchy. Curtiss said they told her, “You can encourage him to lead in this without doing it for him.”

The brotherhood excommunicating women

After three years of this nonsense, Curtiss finally had enough and decided to attend another church that could offer her better help. But the pastors of Cities Church wouldn’t let her leave.

“He accused me of projecting my distrust of my husband onto the pastors,” she said of Rigney. “He said I needed to not run away from hard things, that leaving the church was my way of running away from hard things, and that I shouldn’t seek people to coddle me and that leaving could be a way that I’m seeking a free pass to sin because of the suffering in my marriage, which I never understood because I was never committing any sin.”

“There was no gentleness and humility in that. It was like attack, attack, attack toward me.”

“It was like laying down the hammer. He’s verbally coming down on me as if I was far beneath him, as if I was a child,” she said. “I needed to obey him. And it was very spiritually abusive. … There was no gentleness and humility in that. It was like attack, attack, attack toward me.”

According to Curtiss, “Jonathan Parnell, the lead pastor, said it was unprecedented to have one marriage person in one church and one in another one. And they wanted me to retain my membership at Cities. … Another pastor at the time who came to my house and spoke with me who only met with my ex-husband a couple of times and said, ‘He’s all good in the Brotherhood.’ And I was like, I don’t even know what that means.”

In the end, the pastors of Cities Church — you know, the ones Mohler and Burk are describing as steadfast, faithful and bold — publicly kicked Rachel Curtiss out of their church. “They explicitly said that I have sought divorce, which they believe I did not have biblical grounds to do so, and that due to my unwillingness to continue speaking with them I have a hardened heart. They said that they are affirming that I am not in Christ,” she said.

“The excommunication piece was a public statement to say, ‘If you go against what we say, here’s what’s going to happen to you. We’re going to punish you,’” Curtiss explained. But she reminds herself now, “God’s word nowhere says you’re in sin because you changed churches and didn’t keep talking to your pastors who spiritually abused you.”

A really good facade

On their website, Cities Church claims to be a group of “joyful disciples” who are “worshiping Jesus, loving one another, seeking the good of the Cities.”

But according to Curtiss, “They present a really good facade up front.”

And in the end, it’s killing women.

“Walking this road was one of the most painful roads to walk. The loss of my marriage. The loss of my hopes and dreams. The brokenness of my trust in someone I loved,” Curtiss said. “And being compounded with the church’s response to publicly humiliate me by falsely slandering me and accuse me of not being in Christ. Because that’s the one thing I care the most about is my relationship with Jesus. And to have people who claim to love me and care about me and to have my back not only betray me, but also stab me in the back, that was horrifying and traumatic for me and my children.”

And The Gospel Coalition wonders why more women are going to therapists rather than to their pastors?

Curtiss said: “I’d like to speak to Jonathan Parnell and I’d like to say that you are not above accountability. You try to leverage your spiritual authority to convince people to go along with your ways. And they are not God’s ways. You have acted evil and you have loved what makes you look good over what is right. You have elevated men above women to an abusive measure and you publicly spiritually abused me to make an example to other women that if they don’t obey you, they too will be punished.”

Now these insecure little sexist and racist power-mongers are taking their hierarchy to the streets. So listen once more to the words of Civil Rights leader Levy Armstrong as she addressed their congregation: “How dare you claim to be a pastor of God and you are involved in evil in our community!”

 

Rick Pidcock is a 2004 graduate of Bob Jones University, with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Bible. He’s a freelance writer based in South Carolina and a former Clemons Fellow with BNG. He completed a Master of Arts degree in worship from Northern Seminary. He is a stay-at-home father of five children and produces music under the artist name Provoke Wonder. Follow his blog at www.rickpidcock.com.

 

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