PROJECT STRAIT GATE will soon hold vigil at your church.
April 18, 2007
Pastor John MacArthur
Grace Community Church
13248 Roscoe Blvd.
Sun Valley, CA 91352
Dear Pastor MacArthur:
Project Strait Gate will hold a Vigil for Peace With Justice outside your church on the morning of April 22, 2007. You may learn about our Vigils by touring our website www.whtt.org/straitgate. As you already know, we are not mass demonstrations, but are quiet and respectful and aim our information at your attendees, not at passing traffic.
Project Strait Gate s purpose is to influence fellow Christ-followers to oppose continued slaughter in the Middle East, and to hold churches responsible for their roll in enabling these false “wars.”  Americans are among the victims of the occupation every day.  Worse, from Christ s point of view, we now know our professional military has been trained in the art of many un-Christ-like acts.  These “Wars” are better described as mass execution; virtually without defense to our attacks …there is no need to detail the annihilation here.  And can anyone doubt that the military like slaughters at Columbine high and Virginia Tech U. are related to training young people to kill other humans without remorse?  Even video games depict the murder of Arabs.
Worse, if possible, than torture and mass executions, leaders of churches…including Grace Community Church, are undeniable tacit enablers, if not overt supporters, of Israel’s 59-year occupations of Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon.
The most ungodly damage done by mass execution is the destructive effect on Christianity itself, making “Christian” a laughing stock religion word worldwide…a religion of the Warmakers.  The war-enabling church is an apostasy and we think it is an insult to the name of Christ.  Jesus is the peacemaker.  He bombs no one.
I would welcome dialog with you personally and invite you to call me, as other pastors have done.  I would like to know your personal views and if you are in any way rethinking your interpretations of “end times” prophesy and the state of Israel?   The defining questions are:
1) Is Israel a fulfillment of Biblical prophecy?
2) (Assuming “yes”) is there anything that Israel could do to its neighbors that would cause you to change your mind about supporting it?
A former Marine, a Promise Keepers volunteer at an extravaganza in Arizona, told me that whatever the Israelis do to the “Philistines” is justified by the Biblical accounts in the Old Testament where “God told the Israelis to spare no one to cleanse the land of all living things.” This man means spare no Arab, and he firmly believes (or rationalizes) that “End Times” Bible prophesies justify his own military act in Iraq. He told me, he was part of the armored battalion called Desert Storm. We know they slaughtered an entire entrapped army of Iraq s youth in a few days. Then they plowed the evidence, including live men, under the sands of Kuwait with specially built snowplows mounted on tanks. As an excuse for this brutality this Marine tried to tell me the Muslims practice is to use their children as shields. I had to tell him he was lying to me…that he was willing to exaggerate the truth and invent enemies to cover his conscience, as the sands covered the plowed under the bodies, but will not cover them in his mind. This Marine (and those who commanded him) needs forgiveness, not justification for their acts.
Pastor McArthur, you are well aware this is not our first vigil at your church. I do not think any of our volunteers have ever been impolite, loud, or threatening, yet on each of three occasion your security forces have found excuses to detain or arrest a volunteer. On one occasion you handcuff and forcibly detaining a man. Your security guards handcuffed and retrained a pubic schoolteacher holding him against his will inside your building next to where your choir practices, and attempted to prosecute him because he parked on you lot. He is also a former pastor and former attendee at your church.
On anther occasion your agents surrounded and threatened a 22 year old professional woman, took her keys against her will and threatened to prosecute her because she made the mistake of parking her car on your friendly parking lot while she stood in from with a sign reading “Innocent Blood on our hands, Iraq, Palestine.  These items are on the public record.
On the third occasion your guards surround and threatened a middle age lady who made the mistake of taking a short cut across your parking lot on the way to her car, which parked in the street on the far side of your lot.  None of these people harmed you yet each one is guiltier than the Iraqis, Afghans, and Philistines who are dieing every day as a result of your acts.  The did not even walk across your parking lot, and you would aid in killing and maiming them.
Pastor McArthur, a wise man told me in my youth that the acts of the man at the bottom reflect the thoughts of the man at the top.  Our own military’s unconceivable act of brutality and cowards such as the torture Guantanamo and the murder and rape at Abu-Grahb are a refection of the will and desire of our leaders at the top.  And it is also true that the acts of your parking lot attendants reflect the attitude of Dr. John McArthur.
Perhaps now you will understand why we are back at your church.  It is not that we want to get even with you… no to the contrary we are a little frightened of you and those you tutor at your church.  Your callous and aggressive attitude toward those who challenge your theology tells me you probably have the same callous attitude toward the starving people of Gaza and the desperate and homeless people of Iraq.  Those who go to your church need to be told something is very wrong there.  If a think is wrong one should act like its wrong.  Do you agree?
Race hatred in church starts with End Time prophecy.  It is the ungodly notion that God holds Israelis (or any Jew) to be more precious in his sight than the rest of us, especially Muslims.
You cannot teach that God granted the Philistine s land to present day political Israel without causing belief that Israelis have a right to kill Palestinians, destroy their homes, and drive them out.  Richard L. Land stated this awful apostasy: “its God s way or the highway.”
Israel’s progressive assassination has finally resulted in killing a 68-year old Palestinian grandmother to prevent her from delivering a human bomb.  This woman s son was previously shot to death; another son crippled and in a wheel chair; the families’ home deliberately destroyed, and finally the mother.  The previous week, Israelis in tanks shelled and killed four women (wounding many) who were surrounding a Mosque inside Jambalaya camp in Gaza to protect those inside.
Do you know what a flechette round, full of steel darts, does to the body of a child or a woman?  These acts are not flukes, or accidents, the Israelis routinely shoot children who throw rocks.  Over 500 women and children are prisoners held without charge in Israel.  Pastor McArthur, Israel could not get away with one of these acts without the unequivocal support of churches like yours!  You are personally responsible.  You may not have known this would when you started the church as a young man, but you must know it now.
Scripturally there is no more reason to support Israeli Jews than Muslim Arabs. They are, according to a missionary named Paul, “all are one in Christ Jesus and heirs to the promise,” if and when each one believes.  Jesus is the fulfillment of the promise to Abram, not a political State of Israel created by man in 1947.  As long as you deny this you will be an enabler of death and destruction.
Churches like Grace Community must turn, or “burn” in the scriptural sense.  In the last election the first signs of “turning” came through loud and clear. Evangelical leaders stood by the “Bush family war” in lock step; but in spite of their leaders, a very substantial percentage of Evangelical laymen turned against the war in November. This change was enough to account for the overwhelming swing in the election.  We covered these results in our story, Post election query: Is the Christian Right seeking the Way? (Note 3)
Pastor McArthur, we want to be on the strait path together, but Grace Community Church cannot be a peacemaker church unless you change.  The purpose of Project Strait Gate is not to change your congregation, but to call out to those whom God has already changed, and who think they are alone inside Grace Community Church.  Many are already there; they will awaken with or without you.   I once felt alone in my church before I walked out.  I want to convince you to change before the brightest and best in your congregation abandons it as, one by one, they awaken.
I would welcome dialog with you personally and invite you to call me, as other pastors have done.  I would like to know your personal views.
Toward the Strait Gate,
Charles E. Carlson

Endnote 1) Vigils in Motion:

“Successful Vigil at Promise Keepers ‘UNLEASHED'” – https://whtt.org/successful-vigil-at-promise-keepers-unleashed/

Endnote 2) “Why stand for Israel,” Jack Hayford – http://www.jackhayford.org/teaching/articles/why-stand-with-israel-today/

Endnote 3) Post Election Query: Is the Christian Right seeking the Way? – https://whtt.org/post-election-query-is-the-christian-right-seeking-the-way/

“Haggard s Apostasy, More Destructive than his Personal Life” – https://whtt.org/haggards-apostasy-more-destructive-than-his-personal-life/

“God’s Fearsome Law that Judeo-Christians Break” – https://whtt.org/god-fearsome-law-that-judeo-christians-break/