Image – “Christ Cleansing the Temple” by El Greco
The actions of three individuals arrested for protesting ICE activities during a worship service at Cities Church (Southern Baptist Convention) in the Minneapolis area early this year (2026) quickly became a topic of debate among Christians. The protesters chose this church, at least in part, because one of its bi-vocational ministers also leads an ICE field office. According to an AP account, the leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention has voiced one side in the debate over the propriety of protesting in a church during a worship service. According to them, “compassion for migrant families cannot justify violating a sacred space during worship.”
I have devoted my professional career, my vocation, to the proposition that the Bible can and should serve as the vital and vibrant source of Christian faith and living when interpreted and understood rightly, but that it can also represent a dangerous and destructive factor when read and treated incorrectly (see The Curse of Ham: An Admonitory Case-Study in Misreading Scripture and the series on the Ethical Interpretation of the Bible published February through April, 2025). With respect to voices raised in opposition to the mistreatment of “the least of these,” the SBC leadership seems to have engaged in what I would call “selective interpretation” of scripture – the foundation of their faith tradition – which suggests, rather, that protest can be prophetic, even when conducted in the sanctuary.
Amos 7:12-17 records the admonition of Amaziah, the priest at the sanctuary in Bethel, for Amos to cease protesting/prophesying against Israel’s worship practices in the absence of justice and righteousness (Amos 5:21-24; cf. 4:4). Amos responded that he was only preaching the message God had given him to preach and that the fate awaiting Amaziah and Israel would be bleak. Over a century later, in his famous Temple Sermon (Jer 7 and 26), the prophet Jeremiah stood in the Temple on God’s instruction and denounced the Judeans for their unfaithfulness to God and their unethical treatment of one another (7:5-9) and for their unfounded confidence in their sacrificial piety (7:21-26). Their behavior belied their claims to be “saved” (7:10). Indeed, by their presence, they had turned the sanctuary into the gathering-place of criminals! Consequently, God warned them through Jeremiah, that, if they persisted in their misdeeds, the Jerusalem temple would suffer the same abandonment and destruction that once befell the sanctuary at Shiloh. Jeremiah 7 seems to focus on the content of the sermon; Jeremiah 26 apparently reports the audience response to it. The priests, prophets, and people seized (i.e. arrested) Jeremiah and charged him with treason (26:8-9, 10-11)!
Significantly, although they differ on chronological and other details, two of the Synoptic Gospels (Matt 21:12-13 and Luke 19:45-47; cf. John 2:14-16) draw direct parallels between Jesus’ act known as the “Cleansing of the Temple,” in which Jesus drove the money-changers from the Temple along with the animals (pigeons according to Matt; sheep and oxen according to Luke) on sale there for use in sacrifice, scattered their coins, and overturned their tables. According to both of the Synoptics, Jesus’ justified his actions with a statement combining the vision of a bright future found in Isaiah 56:7 (“for my house will be called a house of prayer for all nations”) and, tellingly, recasting the rhetorical question of Jeremiah 7:11 (“Has this house, which is called by name, become a den of thieves”) as the declaration, “but you make it/have made it a den of thieves.” It is equally telling that, as with Jeremiah, the religious leadership later interpreted Jesus’ attitude toward the temple as treasonous, even blasphemous (cf. Matt 26:57-66).
These three examples of many biblical instances of prophetic protest raised in a sanctuary setting (e.g. Ezek 8-11; Acts 4) suffice to demonstrate that voices of truth belong in the context of worship. Two ironies strike me. First, historically, baptists belong in the Protestant (“protesting”) branch of Christianity. Second, contemporaneously, many of those who decry this protest in a church do not decry immigration enforcement officers arresting worshipers.
May we have the courage to stand in the tradition of Amos, Jeremiah, and Jesus! May we have the understanding to distinguish between a false security in the structures and institutions, on the one hand, and a living faith that loves mercy and does justice (Mic 6:8).