This is what God’s Love and Reconciliation Look Like… but keep Praying

Last week, you may have seen the story on the news about an ongoing ‘relationship’ between the owner, strippers and employees at The Foxhole and the pastor and congregation at New Beginnings Ministry in Warsaw, Ohio. Just in case you didn’t, here is a synopsis of what things have looked like the past four years:

Ohio strip club dancers in bikinis protest at church that has been picketing them for 4 years.
The owner of an Ohio strip club and some of his dancers started protesting the church a couple weekends ago.
Women in bikinis sat in camp chairs Sunday outside the New Beginnings Ministries church to protest and greet the congregation as they arrived for woship.
Tommy George owns the Foxhole strip club in nearby Newcastle. He says he and his employees decided to start coming to the church because they were fed up.
Bill Dunfee, and his congregation have come with bullhorns, signs and video cameras for posting customers’ license plate numbers online.

Here is a video to give you a visual of the situation.

For those of us involved in the front line work of reaching out to the sex industry, when we see a story like this, we pay attention. As a pastor, I am paying attention to the pastor in the situation thinking, ‘ok, Bro… you now have the spotlight… and the nation is watching. Show them Jesus.’ It seemed, however, that I was going to have to pray harder to see Jesus’ love shown through the Church to those in the strip-club.

So… we pray.

Late last week, a dear friend, Maria sent me a message about some of the women she works with in a ministry called JC’s Girls out of The Rock Church in San Diego were going to head to Ohio to reach out to the people involved, and make sure that the strippers from The Fox Hole knew that they had a precious place in Jesus’ heart. (Find JC’s Girls on Facebook)

So… we pray.

Texts from Sheri and Annie started coming in on Saturday about the atmosphere on the ground from Warsaw, which needless to say was lacking in love between the Church and the people from the Fox Hole.

So… we pray.

JC’s Girls loved on the women and owners of the Fox Hole, and lives were opened and touched for Jesus. We were praising God for the power of His Love. And then a text came through that said that Sheri and Annie were able to spend some time with Pastor Dunfee and members of his congregation during their protest of the strip club on Saturday night. JC’s Girls offered the Christian some pizza and began sharing with them the reason that they came from California to Ohio. What happened next was miraculous.

Pastor Dunfee invited Sheri and Annie to come speak to the congregation the following morning during the church service.

So we pray…

I’ll just let you see what happened next: