Over the weekend, a Tennessee-based church pastored by controversial Pastor Greg Locke was vandalized with several spray-painted messages by an unknown individual.
Early Sunday morning, Locke, who leads Global Vision in Mt. Juliet, posted to Facebook detailing what had transpired.
"Our church was vandalized again last night," he wrote. "Security chased him off about 2:30 am, and it was all caught on our surveillance cameras. He did quite a bit of damage before he was spotted."
"Kudos to some of our peeps getting there and beginning to clean at 3:00 am this morning," he added.
Accompanied with Locke's post were two pictures of the vandalism. On the pulpit, the perpetrator spray-painted the message "FU." On a wall, the message "Your lies cost lives" was also painted.
"Of all the things they do, painting my pulpit not only grieves me the most, it fires me up to want to fight more. WE WILL NOT BACK DOWN. WE WILL NOT BE INTIMIDATED," Locke asserted.
Last month, as WSMV reported, Locke made headlines when he said that attendees would be kicked out of his church if they chose to wear a mask to protect themselves against COVID-19.
"We will escort you to the door," Locke said at the time.
"We are a place of faith, not a place of fear," the pastor continued. "I'm digging my heels in, and I'm not changing my mind."
In an Aug. 7 tweet, Locke tweeted a photo of a banner placed outside his church with the following message: "This is a MASK FREE church campus. Kindly remove them or stay in your car. We celebrate FAITH over FEAR."
"Yes, this is what you'll see when you visit our church. Don't like it, don't come. I'm not playing the Democrat games," he wrote.
During the height of the pandemic last year, Locke asserted that he would never impose a mask mandate at his church as he dismissed their efficacy and wrote them off as "idols" that have divided churches.
"We call them safety precautions. No, what these are, these are gags, ladies and gentlemen," he said in a video rant posted to Facebook.
"These have become idols. These don't do anything whatsoever. They are the dumbest thing to have ever been created by humanity," the pastor argued. "They are scientifically proven to do Jack sprat! But I'll tell you, religiously what they've done, they've divided the body of the Lord Jesus Christ. These things are so dumb."
In a separate yet similar incident, a church in Louisiana was recently vandalized by spray-painted messages after a sign was posted encouraging people to get vaccinated against COVID-19.
Photo courtesy: Markus Spiske/Unsplash
Milton Quintanilla is a freelance writer and content creator. He is a contributing writer for CrosswalkHeadlines and the host of the For Your Soul Podcast, a podcast devoted to sound doctrine and biblical truth. He holds a Masters of Divinity from Alliance Theological Seminary.
