Megachurch helps California school board blur church-state divide
Bible verses, calls to accept Jesus and the promise of eternal life can be heard in two disparate places in a southeastern suburb of Los Angeles: the Calvary Chapel Chino Hills megachurch and the Chino Valley Unified School District Board of Education.
Three of the five school board members worship at the evangelical church on Sundays; two of them continue praying and preaching during the board meetings on Thursdays.
“Our lives begin in the hospital and end in the church,” then-board President James Na said during a meeting in January 2014, according to avideo of the meeting. He urged onlookers to surrender themselves to God and, to “everyone who does not know Jesus Christ, go find him.”
Some parents in the district say such proselytizing belongs at church, not at the school board. Parents first raised concerns about the prayers in September 2013 – a few months before Na encouraged people to find Jesus – contacting the Freedom From Religion Foundation, a Wisconsin nonprofit atheist group that opposes entanglements of church and state. The group sent board members a letter notifying them that they were violating federal laws.
That didn’t stop the public praying.
“For the past week, I’ve been hearing in my mind: ‘I can only imagine seeing the glory of God and dancing with Jesus,’ ” Andrew Cruz, currently the board’s vice president, said from the dais during an October 2013 meeting, a month after the atheist group’s letter landed. He drove that point home with a quote from 1 Corinthians: “Christ died for our sins, according to the Scripture, and he was buried and he was raised on the third day, according to the Scripture.”
From fights over how to legally teach the Bible in public schools to bills allowing prayers in the classroom, school boards in pockets of the country still are grappling with where to draw the line when it comes to religion in public education. The Chino Valley school board now is embroiled in a lawsuit that promises to be a flashpoint in the nation’s divide over religion.
The fight has set the group of parents against the school board and the celebrity pastor of Chino Hills’ 10,000-member Calvary Chapel, which is dedicated to breaking the church-state barrier.
“Whether people like it or not, religion is part of the fiber of America,” Pastor Jack Hibbs told Reveal. “And we encourage our congregation to speak the truth in the public square.”
The U.S. Supreme Court first ruled against school-sponsored prayer in the landmark 1962 case Engel v. Vitale. Since then, courts have consistently banned classroom prayers or Bible readings organized by public schools. But last year, the high court ruled that city councils are allowed to open their meetings with Christian prayer, and past Supreme Court rulings have allowed state legislatures and the U.S. Congress to pray before sessions.
To Calvary Chapel – as to other conservative religious organizations Megachurch helps California school board blur church-state divide | Reveal: