Repent Amarillo

So Amarillo, Texas, has a local group who call themselves Repent Amarillo who have dedicated their lives to tracking down sinners and calling them out and harassing their families and coworkers and bosses. Said sinners started out just being swingers, and has moved on to a host of other stuff. And their website is pretty freaking scary. Paramilitary scary. Odds are pretty high this will end in someone dead. Now, I think swinging is stupid, but I perfectly agree that you should have the right to swing if you want to, because of consenting adults and all that stuff. But as this article from the Texas Observer shows, they have moved beyond simple protesting to harassment:

At first, the swinger community was mystified by the attention. On the 60-some hours of surveillance footage the Meads have, a swinger can be heard telling a Repent member that the swingers haven’t done anything to bother them.“You’re going to hell, and it bothers me,” Grisham responds. “What bothers me is you’re going to hell.”
Perhaps the most insidious tactic Repent uses is trying to destroy the reputation of the swingers. In Amarillo, people can be ostracized over a whiff of impropriety. On one tape, Grisham directs followers to get the license-plate numbers in the Route 66 parking lot. “A new couple can be here three or four hours,” says Mac. “Whenever they leave, the Repent Amarillo group will call them by first and last name, know where they live, know where they work, just within a very few hours.”

Randall Sammons says he was fired from his job of 13 years in August after his boss learned Sammons was a swinger from another employee, a Repent member. He believes he’s now as good as blacklisted in Amarillo. “I’m screwed at finding a job,” Sammons says. Russell Grisham, David’s 20-year-old son who has a conviction on his record for hacking the computer system at his high school, has posted the names, photos and workplaces of swingers on the Internet, including one man whose wife works for a school district. (“Family-wise, it will kill both of us,” the man says.) In at least two instances, Repent members called swingers’ employers.

After all the swinging commotion is over, what will Repent Amarillo do?

What’s next for Repent? They’ve posted a “Warfare Map” on the group’s Web site. The map includes establishments like gay bars, strip clubs and porn shops, but also the Wildcat Bluff Nature Center. Repent believes the 600-acre prairie park’s Walmart-funded “Earth Circle,” used for lectures, is a Mecca for witches and pagans. Also on the list are The 806 coffeehouse (a hangout for artists and counterculture types), the Islamic Center of Amarillo (“Allah is a false god”), and “compromised churches” like Polk Street Methodist (gay-friendly).

Or as directly taken from their website:

1. Gay pride events.
2. Earth worship events such as “Earth Day”
3. Pro-abortion events or places such as Planned Parenthood
4. Breast cancer events such as “Race for the Cure” to illuminate the link between abortion and breast cancer.
5. Opening day of public schools to reach out to students.
6. Spring break events.
7. Demonically based concerts.
8. Halloween events.
9. Other events that may arise that the ministry feels called to confront

These knucklenuts are going to protest Breast Cancer events because of a faulty study linking it to abortion? And I would love to see what concerts are demonically based and which aren’t. Or maybe I wouldn’t. The compromised churches thing is also a laugh riot, way to sound just like Fred Phelps’s circus of horrors.

Their website is filled with paramilitary imagery and text (and annoying music and bullet sound effects!)

Repent Amarillo divides its troops into two groups:

1. Intercessory prayer group. This group will be a group of warriors called to intercessory prayer. They will at times be visible to the public and at other times ( depending upon the individual mission) they will be inconspicuous. They will provide prayer covering to the soldier group and will do battle within the spiritual realm to prepare the ground for the planting of God’s seeds, tear down demonic strongholds, and cast out demonic spirits that harass our efforts. Sometimes the intercessory prayer group will operate independently of the soldier group and at other times will work around them.

2. The Soldier group. The soldier group will consist of warriors dedicated to witnessing to groups of unbelievers or one-on-one witnessing. This group will be more visible to the public and will be comprised of bold believers willing to confront the world. This group will be schooled in the “Way of the Master” method of witnessing to the lost. This group will be the ones who plant God’s seeds in the ground that has been prepared by the intercessory prayer group. Believers who participate in this group will have to be bold but loving. Confrontational but composed. The individual members of these two groups are allowed and highly encouraged to move between the two groups based on the individual’s calling and the unique mission involved. In other words, no one is stuck to only one group. Soldiers can pray and intercessory members can witness.

Check out their action map of Amarillo Sin Havens:

Boy, Amarillo must be the unholiest place on Earth!

And don’t forget to friend Repent Amarillo on MySpace! One of their 39 friends is Jesus. Seriously. And let’s take a look at their MySpace blog…

I’m driving home from town with my family; listening to the Christian radio station. They are in commercial break and come on with their words of wisdom for the day; something for the listeners to ponder. The man says, “Matthew 7 says, Judge not lest ye be judged”. Then he says to the listening audience that we are “never to judge”; that “we are wrong when we judge”; that “what the world needs is forgiveness”. Everyone in my car sighed heavily. That kind of reaction unfortunately happens a lot. Not a day goes by when we don’t hear someone quoting the Bible and misinterpreting the context in which it is written. It makes our stomachs churn as believers to hear such things.

People take one verse out of the Bible and run with it. They don’t read anything else except that one verse and mash it in with all the pop clichés that they hear others verbalizing. They are not seeing the big scope of things that happen throughout the Bible that might help them to reconcile what the truth of the teaching is and what it is not. They would much rather fit in by espousing their peer’s mantra. It’s more comfortable there.

Ironies of ironies! Too bad they will never know…

Be intolerant, like Jesus was.

I hear a lot these days about tolerance. I hear, “ so-and-so is intolerant” etc.or, “stop being intolerant”. What is the true meaning of this word? What is itused for in our modern society? What is its true purpose?As I write this newsletter, there are protests going on in California.Homosexual activists are protesting that their side lost on Proposition 8 (thestate constitutional amendment defining marriage as only between one manand one woman). Some activists have taken to the streets peacefully butothers are disrupting church services, disrupting heterosexual weddingceremonies, and threatening violence against Christians. The web blogs areoverflowing with violent and hateful rhetoric towards heterosexuals andChristians. Some of the statements online are outright death threats. Today,there is a report of a Mormon Temple that burned down and arson is stronglysuspected.Pardon me if I’m misinformed but aren’t gays supposed to be tolerant? Isthat not what they preach?There is also a report in the news today about two pro-life women,participating in the 40 days for life prayer vigil outside of an abortion clinic,who were hospitalized for nausea and facial burns after they were poisonedby a chemical applied to the sidewalk where they had been praying. Ithought pro-choice people were tolerant. Is that not what they claim?While there have always been radicals in any movement, it seems it isgreatly on the increase since liberals won substantial victories in theNovember 4th election. There is a very good reason for this rapid increase.They are revealing the true color of their hearts… and it is dark.We Christians need to remember that those who support homosexualmarriage or abortion do not serve God. They serve a different master. InRomans it says that a man becomes a slave to whomever he chooses to obeywhether righteousness leading to life or sin leading to death. Those whoobey and serve Christ do not condone what He condemns. Christians serverighteousness and by extension, support it.Those who serve unrighteousness and sin also, by extension, support it.Jesus said in the Gospel of Matthew that you can tell a tree by its fruit. A badtree produces bad fruit and ,by extension, supports bad fruit. Abortion andhomosexuality are bad fruit, they are evil practices and those who supportthem support the father of evil, Satan.So, if those who support evil, serve evil, what is the purpose of preachingtolerance? It is a false truce.Until recently, those who supported abortion and homosexuality were verymuch in the minority in our nation. They mainly achieved their goalsthrough the courts rather than the democratic process because they wereoutnumbered and thus outvoted. However, their efforts to gain inroads intopublic opinion through infiltration of the mass media and the educationalsystem is starting to bear fruit…bad fruit.The recent successes they have had in this last election has emboldenedthem and allowed us a glimpse into the true nature of their character and thatcharacter is filled with the intents of the master they serve. They hate God’schildren.All this talk of “tolerance” was merely a false truce with which tospiritually disarm Christians until they had achieved a majority or sufficientpolitical power to deal with their adversaries. Mark my words, the momentthey achieve this goal they will drop all pretense of tolerance and their fangsand claws will be shown. They will then ruthlessly and mercilesslypersecute the children of God. “Tolerance” of these evil practices hasbought the time and space necessary for God’s adversaries to operate untilthey could gain the advantage. We are beginning to see the future here by thebehavior of these people now. Here is a quote by an anonymous author thatsums it up well.“ If we continue to teach our children about tolerance and intolerancerather than good and evil, we will end up with an entire generation thattolerates evil. Tolerance is the last virtue of a degenerate society”UnknownAmerican Christians, we are at a crucial time in our nation’s history. Wecan speak now or lose our freedom to speak. We can act now or facepersecution. There is one last thing I want to leave you with. It is a simplebut undeniable truth that every Christian needs to burn into their heart. It isthis; Christians are not called to be tolerant of evil but are called to exposethe darkness to the light of Jesus Christ. God willing, I will write you again.

I am sure we will hear from these guys again, when they kill someone. For Jesus.