When Protest Comes Into the Sanctuary & Why It Should Hurt Us All

By David Foster, Director of the Pastor’s Common

Last Sunday, a worship service at Cities Church was interrupted by demonstrators protesting certain immigration policies, in addition to one of the lay elders of Cities Church serving as Field Director for the Federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement.(1) I personally think Cities Church handled the situation about as well as any church could, even though the disruption itself was unsettling. Since the inception of Christianity, worship services have been a place of prayer, confession, and quiet reflection before God. In its purest form, worship molds our reality around things of eternal significance. It invites us to reflect upward, but also inward before we venture outward. Worship forces us to ask the real questions, such as: Where did I come from? What is my purpose?

For those reasons, worship services must remain sacred so that all people can speak honestly before God. This is why I find it wrong to turn a worship service into a place of political activism. Why is that? Because protesting injustice in church actually risks cheapening both the gospel and the injustice.
But why do people protest?

In Letters from a Birmingham Jail, Dr. Martin Luther King explained that people resort to such actions when society has “failed to hear” their legitimate grievances and the “promises of freedom and justice have not been met” through established means. Still, this does not justify disrupting the worship of any faith, but it does provide a charitable understanding as to why protesters disrupted a church service.(2)

Since Sunday, the protest and interruption at Cities Church has evoked a myriad of emotions. Reasonable minds are not surprised by that. But what has been intriguing is the little concern for the suffering that provoked the service interruption in the first place.

I do not know the full scope of Cities Church ministry to immigrants or throughout the Twin Cities, and I would never presume to. What if this moment, however, raises a broader question that churches must always be willing to ask. Wouldn’t it be painfully ironic for any church named after its city to appear largely disengaged from the woundsof its own surrounding community? To love a city is not merely to gather people within it for worship, but also be burdened by what happens to its people the rest of the week. Seeking the good of the city is to ask uncomfortable questions about power, proximity, and responsibility. It is not faithfulness for a church to preserve order in its sanctuary while avoiding responsibility in its streets.

The gospel actually stands in conflict against such neat compartmentalization. It insists that worship and justice are not rivals. Not only that, if we are trying to live a life in accordance with the Bible, the concept and call to justice are inescapable. Doing justice includes not only the righting of wrongs but generosity and social concern, especially toward the marginalized. By all means, we should be reverent in worship and our orthodoxy. But orthodoxy that never risks discomfort hardens into self-protection. Going even further, the gospel reminds us that worship detached from loving our neighbors isn’t really worship.

This does not mean every church must adopt the same political posture, theology, or even do justice in identical ways. However, when churches choose silence while benefiting from proximity to power, that silence speaks loudly to those on the margins. If we turn our attention to both the Old and New Testaments, we see how avoidance and neglect of neighbors is actually an attempted form of righteousness devoid of justice, which means we are far from centered on the gospel. For example, the prophet Amos reminds us that God rejects songs and sacrifices when they coexist with crushed neighbors. And in the Parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus exposes how easily religious order makes it to bypass suffering rather than be interrupted by it. In fact, let’s be reminded that it was the religious elite that Amos was condemning to stop practicing a form of worship that steps over the wounded on its way to the altar. Jesus was talking primarily to a mosaic scholar among a Jewish crowd about how the gospel redefines what it means to be a neighbor, as well as wrestling with the question: Who is my neighbor? My point is this: if we aren’t careful, we risk becoming more pharisaical and less faithful to the theology we claim to embody.

I don’t like it when worship is interrupted at all. That being said, I also want to submit that perhaps there are times when worship warrants disruption, especially when the church is marked by a certain numbness to mercy and injustice. I just don’t believe injustice can be ignored if we are truly pursuing righteousness. If we are quicker to prioritize having order in our services while we simultaneously neglect our neighbors, then we only succeed in silently losing our witness.

If a church finds itself more unsettled by interruptions than the agony among its neighbors, perhaps they should sit with that holy unease. At times, the interruption we need most is not in our liturgy, but in our personal pursuit of holiness. After all, one of the greatest threats to the church has never been disruption or even protests, but the quiet comfort of being untroubled by the cries of its own city.

Finally, I don’t pretend to know the exact way forward, but I do believe the pathway involves asking questions. So, here are a few pastoral questions to kick around:

● Who is missing from our church because they no longer feel safe or welcome?
● What voices are shaping our understanding of immigration, and who are we not listening to?
● Where do our partnerships help immigrants in tangible ways, not just symbolic ones?
● What societal domains is the gospel not present in my city, neighborhood, and community?

(1) Khaleda Rahman, “Who Is David Easterwood? Protesters Say Pastor Is ICE Official,” Newsweek, January 20, 2026, updated January 20, 2026,
https://www.newsweek.com/who-is-david-easterwood-protesters-say-pastor-ice-official-11385962
(2) Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963, in Why We Can’t Wait (New York: Signet Classics, 2000), 84–85.

*The views expressed are those solely of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Pastor’s Common