Five years ago, a majority of the Western Church complied with government overreach without question.
Pastoral care went from being essential in a crisis to a non-essential extra.
The same health bureaucracy that banned Bible studies as a breach of public health orders, okayed binge watching, brothels, Bunnings, and Bottle-Os.
Selling alcohol, sex, saws, and being stuck on a couch were considered a public health necessity. Gathering to hear the Gospel was considered to be a public health liability.
Health bureaucrats who were fine with lockdowns keeping people on lounges, couldn’t care less about the care of souls.
When Churches were finally allowed to open, they subjected themselves to segregation, vaccine passports and QR Code check-ins.
Bullied by overbearing bureaucrats, many Church leaders loosely cited Romans 13, masked up and took the jab, not to save lives, but to save their jobs.
Very few gave a second thought to saving souls.
Those brave enough to see through COVID’s politically manufactured façade were sidelined as lunatics.
For the majority of the Church, their response wasn’t about loving our neighbour, it was about the “tax-exempt,” fearing the State, and falling in line.
Ever since, there has been very little in the way of dissecting why the Church allowed the State to force closures, fine pastors, and fold so quickly.
That is until now.
The Church’s “Romans 13 response” will be the subject of fresh scrutiny in September, when pro-freedom, COVID critics meet to discuss the “impact of COVID on the church community.”
Hosted by Health and Truth and held in Portadown, Northern Ireland, the event brings back Scottish Baptist pastor John-William Noble.
In 2021, Noble launched one of that era’s most impressive and thunderous takedowns of the Church’s questionable compliance with COVID mandates. (See here).
In sum, he determined that by “fulfilling the dubious expectations of the state,” the Church had forgotten its “moral obligation to God.”
Commenting on the September conference, Noble recalled the 2021 reaction to his speech.
For “several months, he kept receiving emails from Christians from all over the world with a very similar issue.”
“Their church and leaders had abandoned them over Covid, leaving so many sheep feeling confused and betrayed.”
Keen to revisit the subject, Noble asked: “Did the church repent and learn from the drastic mistakes that were made?
“Is the church ready for what is coming?”
While the 2021 Health and Truth conference challenged the State, the 2025, and 3rd ever conference of its type, will challenge the Church.
Both doctors and Christian leaders will discuss the “Romans 13 response,” asking whether or not the use of Romans 13 was a biblical response to the crisis.
Marking five years since the UK’s first lockdown, Health and Truth said, the anniversary was “a good opportunity to examine whether the church’s actions aligned with biblical principles.”
“Or whether they veered into what some might consider to be ‘unbiblical.’”
Lockdowns were a “seismic shift in Britain,” they added.
“Public worship had not been halted in Britain on such a scale since the Magna Carta, enduring through plagues, wars, and other crises.”
Up for discussion is the perception that church leaders gave in too easily to state overreach.
“Particularly when worship was deemed ‘non-essential’ whilst secular activities—like shopping—continued.”
This lack of resistance, Health and Truth argued, was seen by many as “a capitulation that undermined the church’s role as a prophetic witness.”
Such as Acts 5:29, where Peter declares, “We ought to obey God rather than men.
“The fact that some congregations later held clandestine services—meeting in barns or bookshops—underscores [this] tension.”
Health and Truth “the mainstream church’s compliance” needs to be questioned.
“Was it a betrayal of its calling to gather, preach, and administer sacraments, regardless of circumstance?
“It’s hard to deny,” they said, that there was a “genuine intent to protect life.
“Yet, the precedent set by yielding to restrictions that sidelined both the clear commands in scripture and the people’s spiritual needs” cannot be ignored.
The heart of the issue is really about the State shutting down churches.
Within the “muted pushback from [Christian leaders], there was a failure to robustly assert the church’s indispensable role in a time of despair.”
“Did the church, in seeking to do good, unintentionally forfeit something vital to its witness?”
This is what Health and Truth’s third conference on COVID will seek to define.
Marking the anniversary of the West’s descent into therapeutic tyranny by way of safetyism, they concluded, “invites not just reflection, but a reckoning with how faith meets future trials.”
