Government tyranny continues to suppress many during the current COVID-19 pandemic.

In Canada now, the forced lockdown regulations have forced a church underground. The Pastor of GraceLife church in Alberta, Canada, was arrested when refusing to close their doors during yet another lockdown order, despite no cases of COVID-19 being traced to the church in the months they’ve been open.

After Pastor James Coates’ release, officers set up a fence barricading the church to ensure that members could not gather to worship. This begs the question, are our religious freedoms at risk?

Church members and other concerned Canadians showed up outside the church on Sunday to worship together and protest government overreach and religious persecution. Some people who were not members of the church tried to tear down the fence.

On Sunday morning, Pastor John MacArthur of Grace Community Church in California shared this update about the church:

This morning, GraceLife Church up in Alberta, Canada, is meeting somewhere—we don’t know where.
James Coates said at this point it’s not for the public to know.
It is amazing to think of an underground church in Canada.
This is because the government of Alberta triple-fenced the church in and locked it so people couldn’t go there.
There’s no legitimate reason to do what they did to this church, especially at this point.
I think the latest statistics I’ve seen are that two thousand people have died through the months of Covid, eighty percent of them in senior homes. The remaining ones had some kind of co-morbidity out of the millions of people who live in Alberta. So there’s no legitimate reason to do what they did to this church, especially at this point.
But they did, and this is a first for the Western world, to have the government lock out believers from church—and that after imprisoning James Coates, who’s a graduate of the Master’s Seminary, in maximum security prison. They led him away in chains and he was there for about thirty-five days.
Many of you have been praying for GraceLife Church, and the scene is changing. There is massive outcry against the government for doing this.
I’m praying along with you that this will draw attention to that church, to him, and to the Gospel. And it’s already beginning to do that.

We need to be praying for GraceLife Church in Canada and for the rest of our brothers and sisters in Canada. Religious persecution is on the rise and sadly, many are using the pandemic as an excuse to unfairly target Christians and to restrict various freedoms.

Thanks for your prayers.