In 2008 Anne and I relocated to Springfield, Massachusetts, with the intention of leaving the culture-war battlefield on LGBT issues to launch a more traditional inner-city mission to serve the bottom strata of society in one of the most depressed and decrepit population centers in the country. Springfield was identified by Forbes Magazine that year as "one of the 10 fastest-dying cities in America." To further this mission I founded a new church under the name Redemption Gate Mission Society, bought and moved into a fixer-upper former crack house in the heart of the worst neighborhood as our personal residence, and acquired an historic building across from the truly historic Springfield Armory (established by George Washington during the Revolutionary War) for our church and ministry operations center.
God – working through my adversaries – had other plans regarding my role in the culture war ("Just when I tried to get out they dragged me back in!") But we personally led that mission for seven years (one Shemitah cycle, for those who know the biblical time-keeping system) and then turned it over to my ministry partner, Pastor C.S. Cooley, who kept it going for another seven years. I'm writing a book about that amazing ministry right now, under the working title "To Redeem a City."
Important to this story is the fact that Redemption Gate's expressly stated mission was to re-Christianize this post-Christian city. I had prayed for the Lord to give me a city to reclaim for Him as we were nearing the end of a foreign mission on that theme, and He sent us to Springfield. Important to the achievement of the mission objective was the choice of the city whether to allow itself to be re-Christianized. And important to that choice was the fact that on April 25, 2011, our Redemption Gate ministry team began circulating a petition in Springfield to have the national motto "In God We Trust" added to the pediment of Springfield City Hall.
Summer 2011 was exactly halfway through our first seven years, and it was at that biblically significant three-and-a-half year mark that a powerful supernatural event occurred, one I will share publicly for the very first time today.
On June 1, 2011, I was taking an early morning prayer walk in downtown Springfield, the high point of the experience being the path through Court Square (originally the town common), described on Wikipedia as "the City of Springfield's only topographical constant since its founding in 1636 …" which features "a scenic pedestrian-only walkway from the courthouse toward Springfield's historic Old First Church."
Court Square is the symbolic and spiritual heart of the city. It was therefore greatly disturbing to me when I reached the end of the path at Main Street and discovered an official "Gay Pride" banner hanging from the lamppost in the same place and manner as the annual Christmas banners. I was deeply vexed in my spirit, because this was to my knowledge the very first time Springfield had allowed such a display – indicating that the historically Catholic city had succumbed to the LGBT Borg and had chosen the path of defilement instead of Christian redemption.
At 4:30 p.m. that very day a massive tornado touched down in Westfield (where Anne and I had lived the first couple of months after our arrival) and carved a 39 mile path of destruction through West Springfield, South Springfield and several towns eastward. It barely missed the Old First Church, but ripped through the rest of Court Square right where the offending banner had hung. The way I see it, God tore down that particular flag Himself.
Significantly to us, the tornado came right to the edge of our designated "Redemption Zone," turned south along its western border, then continued east along its southern border. There was damage only at the far southwest corner of our prayer-covered mission territory. One of our ministry staff standing on the back porch of the third floor of our church building actually watched the monster bear down directly at him from the west and then turn away south and then east.
That tornado was just the first of three nature-based wakeup calls for Springfield that year. On Aug. 23 it suffered a 5.9 earthquake that literally rocked City Hall (overlooking Court Square from its northern edge). Then a week later, on Aug. 29, Hurricane Irene tore through Springfield and all of Western Mass causing massive flooding and storm damage.
No one but our pastoral staff raised the obvious spiritual questions about this sequence of disasters.
As we would learn later, 2011 was the year that Massachusetts passed "the Expanded Gaming Act ... and gambling was legalized in the Commonwealth" ... culminating in the creation of the state's first gambling casino (MGM) in Springfield. The casino went up precisely where the tornado had torn its path through the Italian south end (site of the Mafia hit on the local Don, "Big Al" Bruno, in front of the Our Lady of Carmel Social Club a few years previously), suggesting that the legislation was proposed and passed in consequence of the tornado (though we don't know the specific timeline).
During the Springfield City Council's deliberation process about whether to approve the casino, I personally led a group of Christians to offer public comment against it, and to present our "In God We Trust" petition, bearing a little over 500 signatures. I appealed to the council to turn back to God as the means of restoring the health and prosperity of the city. But Springfield chose the Mob instead of Christ.
I spent some time a while back trying to document the city's "Pride" program for 2011 but found nothing online. But I know what I saw with my own eyes. And I know in my spirit there was a connection between that banner's symbolic declaration of allegiance to the LGBT agenda and the advent of the tornado. Pat Robertson once got in a lot of trouble with the leftist media making a similar connection between LGBT advocacy in New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina before backing down under the onslaught. I suppose my knowing that might have played a part in not telling this story back when it happened. But that was before my long ordeal at the hands of the Massachusetts LGBT activists (which, coincidentally, also began in 2011) hardened me against coercion. Now I simply don't care what the world thinks about anything I say or do.
So this is my testimony about Springfield's Gay Pride and God's response – and my explanation for why Springfield never was re-Christianized as a city (so far), despite all the powerful influence our mission had and continues to have on the individuals to whom we still minister within the boundaries of the Redemption Zone.
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