But Koletas was different — in pretty much every way imaginable. BLM might have “lost” on the national optics on this particular protest action. She doesn’t see rec centers, or pools, or anything to keep kids occupied and out of trouble. For the last month, the various Grace Baptist–affiliated accounts, including McCashion’s, had been promoting the giveaway, tagging journalists and publications who’d covered the one in 2014. Baptist Extremist. You’re doing something right. Starting July 3, McCashion also started posting about Lukee Forbes. Koletas refers to Facebook as “Fake Book” and generally shuns social media. “Everyone here knows that this is our Westboro Baptist." The Democratic city council president referred to him as the city’s “resident funnyman” in his state-of-the-city address. The repeated suggestion: Here’s what BLM really is. We’re protesting this church.”, Posted on August 9, 2020, at 9:46 a.m. Videos of protesters yelling, “This is no house of God” went viral as the Black Lives Matter's protests reached the Grace Baptist Church in Troy, New York. When Gerencser was a pastor, he was told to do any promotion necessary in order to make the church stand out in some way, no matter, in his words, “how trollish.” And like Koletas, he loved to street-preach: “I can’t tell you how many times I came into conflict with the local police.”, Every year, Gerencser told me, the Catholics in town would hold a big garden party, and he and other members of his church would show up with signs and tracts. He bought the church for a dollar. And he was, according to his daughter, delighted. Reports surfaced that the group was triggered by the church’s gun giveaway. (Grace Baptist Church and its pastor declined multiple requests for an interview). Medina didn’t go in: She’s Muslim, and refused to “slap the ham” as required by the church before entrance. “I don’t want those scars to be brought up again, because everything I’m doing today — it’s because I didn’t save him back then. Bringing his name up, it’s like, What are you doing? The remaining church members wanted to give the building to another church, any church. There were no deacons, no overseers, no assistant pastors, no children’s pastors. He hadn’t gone to seminary. Getting criticized in the press, by former church members, all of it makes you more credible. The message of the coverage was a variation on the same theme: This is the real BLM, and they’re coming for your churches next. But that didn’t mean he didn’t borrow some of their tactics. “It’s wild that the national story is that there’s a bunch of Marxists attacking Christians in the street,” one local, who asked not to use her name because of her employment affiliation, told me. And within IFB, Koletas was stricter than anyone. As one former IFB member put it to me, “think Duggars plus Amish.”. His social media, where he employs a unique, almost haiku style of constant news commentary, became more combative, more conspiratorial, often interspersed with verses from the KJV Bible. He provided contact information so followers could email and call his employer. Over the past year, their shared tone was adopted by the church’s Facebook account, where video titles went from the provocative but somewhat opaque (“Nakedness Defined: Hellywood”) to boldly offensive clickbait (“Jungle, African Music Are Ruining Our Churches,” “Fat is SIN!”). The small worship service was underway when about ten or so protestors walked into the church and announced “black lives matter.” One masked protestor walked up to a man inside the church and showed her tattoo, saying “Look. The Black Lives Matter protesters were invited inside by the church’s pastor, John Koletas, a self-proclaimed “bigot” who has preached against interracial marriage, defends the use of the n-word, and believes that Black people, as descendants of Ham and Canaan, are cursed by God. They are incredibly cloistered. Over the last few years, McCashion’s demeanor and tactics began to turn darker. In person, Koletas is, as his daughter put it, a sort of Dr. Jekyll and Rev. They’d distribute flyers advertising free foods or gimmicks, like Koletas swallowing a live goldfish, as a form of spectacle. 1400 N. Market St. “I know the pain and the hurt that’s in your heart,” he told them. In the capital area, the Black Lives Matter movement had been brewing for years. But McCashion posts dozens of times a day — a habit he shares with Koletas’s son and presumed successor George, whose Twitter bio describes him as “Right-wing Libertarian. Forbes says that his team’s first goal was to get between the protesters and the church members and create some sort of barrier that would discourage a physical altercation. On my college campus, the local street preachers used to stand on the sidewalk outside the student union building, telling everyone who passed that they were damned. Christians are told to be in the world, but not of the world, and they take it to the extreme: Don’t watch TV and don’t listen to music, but also be afraid of Black people, and of the Other, and if anyone tries to infiltrate that world, be afraid of them, too.”. Koletas was the only one they could find. I won a great victory, but I look back on it now, and I ruined my ability to meaningfully affect other people — because why? Today, pastors like Koletas point to the manifestations of centuries of systemic racism — poverty, reduced life expectancy, drug use, gun violence — and interpret them as evidence of God’s enduring curse. Most IFB pastors grew up in the church. The official reason: budget cuts. The problem was getting them to stick around. It’s also different than the proselytizing practiced by Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses. At Gerencser’s church outside of Detroit, they’d run buses into the city to pick up Black kids. In 1990 — as in 2020 — the more coverage he received, the more righteous his message. On May 28, Grace Baptist tweeted for the first time: The church would be giving away another AR-15. “I am an individual in a group of individualists.” At the time, he called himself “a bit of a rabble-rouser,” but averred that his antics were “all in good fun.” He started a hashtag called #Troycrazy to draw attention to what he saw as governmental fuckup, overspending, and mismanagement. Anne Helen Petersen is a senior culture writer for BuzzFeed News and is based in Missoula, Montana. Amid nationwide riots following protests over the horrific police killing of George Floyd, Black Lives Matter activists harassed a Baptist church in Troy, N.Y., a suburb of Albany. The church didn’t respond to request for comment, WRGB reported. But maybe trying out new strategies of resistance and reform means periodically falling into traps like this one. He owned the church building. On the church’s website, he declared the raffle was meant to “honor hunters and gun owners who have been so viciously attacked by the antichristian socialist media and antichristian socialist politicians over the last few years.”. To the protesters, it felt like a provocation. This story has been shared 107,095 times. With megaphones and shouting, the protesters (a lot of whom are white) intimidated people who were simply coming … Other prominent pastors condemned the move. But listen, I have no illusions about actually getting that place shut down, or getting it closed.” Pelletier said that some people in the group are looking into potential code violations on the part of Grace Baptist, looking into nonprofit status, trying to find some way to compel the government to do something about them. In the week leading up to the giveaway, members of the church distributed the flyers in the neighborhood surrounding the church. The Outsiders’ job, as Forbes put it to me, is simple: “We go to each protest and we try and keep them safe.”. He got the AR-15 from Brian Olesen, the owner of five gun shops in the area, who said he wanted to “support and promote any kind of Second Amendment activity.” He invited local Assembly Member Steve McLaughlin, a harsh critic of the SAFE Act, to speak at the service. It would just take a few days to assemble it. Anyone who disagreed was either damned or, in IFB terms, “backsliding.” Other IFB churches think you’re too extreme? An invitation to attend Grace Baptist Church on Sunday, June 28, was paired with a blurry picture of an AR-15 and a promise that all winners would have to undergo a New York background check. “Every night there’s shootings, and they’re giving away an AR-15,” Medina told me. IFB believers don’t drink, do drugs, or gamble. “My dad’s parents, my mom’s parents, they just went along with it,” Koletas’s daughter said. But the more she thought about it, the more she thought, This isn’t right. “Here, there’s trash everywhere. The 2014 giveaway was in response to New York's SAFE Act and stricter gun laws, the Times Union said, adding that … Some of the protesters wear masks; others have pushed them down to yell. Andrew Cuomo had recently signed the SAFE Act, making it much more difficult for civilians to get their hands on semi-automatic weapons in the wake of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Another group, led by Forbes, had been invited by Koletas to enter the church. After the pastor of Mills Memorial died in 2006, the dwindling congregation struggled to cover the growing cost of repairs. In March 2014, he sent an email to his family members with a link to a USA Today article: “Ky. Pastors who street-preach pick locations specifically designed to reach the largest number of people possible, even if those are places where people will be most annoyed with their presence. John Koletas leaves Grace Baptist Church in Troy, N.Y., where he presides. The incident occurred at Grace Baptist Church early on Sunday where protesters tried to block the entrance to the church, which was giving away an AR-15 rifle, while holding bullhorns and shouting in the faces of congregants standing on the steps outside … “We’re protesting this church. Grace Baptist Church in Troy, New York was raffling off an AR-15 rifle. They could always get a few new people in the door. Grace Baptist Church has previously raffled off AR-15 rifles in 2017 and 2014, according to WRGB. 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