I sent a text message to Pastor Artur Pawlowski this afternoon.
It has been a year since June 27, 2021, when I was able to host him for a talk that he gave. So much has happened over the last year that it feels more like ten years.
Pawlowski taught me a new version of authority that has meant a great deal to me — when Canadian officials entered his church uninvited, and he demanded they leave. It was captured on video and went viral.
In that video of perhaps five minutes or less — the legal, met the social, and both met the spiritual. Watching it was perhaps the first time this joining of those three took place so powerfully in my life.
He asked them to leave his church.
When that did not work he took it further.
He told them to leave his church.
He used reason.
He invoked the law.
He appealed to basic human dignity.
He shamed them.
He used historical references to explain their behavior to them — calling them Gestapo and Nazi.
He recorded it all on his phone.
He kept moving his body toward them.
He kept raising his voice.
He did not relent until they were off his property and gone.
All of that was so very beautiful, but there was something that I think struck me most about it: the way he would not let them speak even a word to him. He gave no room for their lies to be spoken. He gave no room for the intruders to have space to spread their lies.
When he did that, he showed his congregation and he showed the viewing audience how one is to speak to someone taken by a spirit that means to do you harm.
When the Ides of March 2020 came, I could not find a pastor I knew who would stand up — not in my hometown, not in the city I now reside in, and not from my good and close clergy friends as far afield as Tucson, Arizona or Muskegon, Michigan.
To see that, stung me badly.
Because I knew that I had misunderstood how bold the clergy was and how bold the church as an institution was. Many of you reading this may have seen it coming, but I can tell you it blindsided me.
I knew the Covid demographic outcomes even before there were published studies. I knew before the lockdowns arrived that there were lockdowns coming. I was criticizing the developing narrative, publicly and in writing, by February 2020. I was on ahead of so much of the developing narrative, but the voluntary closing of churches caught me off-guard.
And make no mistake — when you accept an order from a bureaucrat and do not at least take it to court to address the issue, you are voluntarily complying with a government official that has no authority over you.
Though it has no authority, you voluntarily give that official that power over you and over that segment of your life.
Which is the exact opposite of what Artur Pawlowski did in that video.
One year ago in 2021, I got to introduce him when he came to speak; this Saturday I was working through political strategy with a notable politician; today I was able to work through a different strategy for getting the unmasked into hospitals; I am driving forward Project Accountability and working on other endeavors.
Through it all, I have kept writing, because I know writing has a special way of inspiring people today. And it does not escape me that it also has a way of inspiring people 300 years from now, as it establishes a record of what is taking place and what the greatest battles of our day are like.
Help my team and me continue to do exactly that work. Tap here to visit our donation page and leave a gift, because that work is important.
Allan Stevo
Growing up in a very conservative church and being taught to never back down to evil I was also staggered at the lack of resistance from the clergy. My brother is a pastor and had no clear answer when I asked him why.