Security Guards?

‘Nasty perv’: Trump-loving televangelist reportedly facing FBI probe for inappropriate sexual behavior https://t.co/sDQPvddeNR

— Raw Story (@RawStory) January 3, 2022

I didn't really care about the headline; this was what caught my attention:

The publication noted that as Stone was recently confronted while giving a sermon at his church. Stone was speaking to his congregation about people who've walked away from the church when a woman stood up and spoke out.

"Probably because you keep touching them, you nasty perv," she yelled. "Why don't you tell them the real reason why they left? Because you kept touching them."

Stone responded by threatening to have the woman arrested.

 

"Ma'am, I'll have you arrested, and I'll bring a lawsuit against you for making statements like that," he said before security guards removed the woman. "You've talked to people who told 16 lies on my wife and I! That's who you've been talking to."

I grew up in a church with elders and deacons, officials of the church elected by the congregation to set terms.  One of them might have acted as a "security guard" to remove or quiet an unruly member/visitor, if such a thing had ever happened.

Congregations are full of interesting people.  In my first church there was a member whose husband, if memory serves, was a "colorful" character who didn't like being told what to do and who liked to let people know it.  That's how I remember him; not a trouble maker, but with a bit of a chip on his shoulder.  He was married to another church member who was in the "inner circle" of the man who fancied himself the true leader of the church.  The husband was a bit quarrelsome, but I got along with him, and he never disrupted services like the woman in this story.  Still, the "leader" of the church, for reasons lost to me now (and never that sound then), approached me one day to have this man "barred" from the church.

I told him I couldn't do that.  I had no guards to post at the door to exclude him from the building, and I had no desire to ban anyone from church services.  I thought, and still think, that even disruptive persons should be allowed, and it's up to the congregation to calm them or ask them to leave, if necessary.  "Security guards"?  Seems antithetical to the idea of a church or a congregation, to me.

I didn't last at that church a year.  The "leader" and his "inner circle" had definite ideas about how the church should operate (like a business, basically, with me as the main attraction that would draw spectators to fill the pews. They thought that's how I should be paid, too; basically on commission.). The church, not surprisingly, didn't last long after I left; but it was not because I left, either.

Interesting concept of "church," where you have security guards to decide who belongs and who doesn't; or rather, who is allowed and who isn't.  By order of the pastor.

Actually, that would have been kinda nice....