by John Bickley, Daily Wire:

A little over a month after the state imposed stringent “lockdown” policies in the name of combating COVID-19 — and after multiple failed attempts to get Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom to respond to requests for guidance — Pastor Jack Hibbs decided the best thing he could do in this time of national crisis was to give people in his community access to the most “essential” of institutions: the church.

On May 21, Hibbs and more than 1,200 other pastors in the state notified Newsom of their plan to reopen the doors of their churches by the end of the month. On May 31, Hibbs’ Calvary Chapel Chino Hills, along with hundreds of other churches in the deep blue state, did something that had somehow become an act of defiance — they offered people from the community a chance to worship together. The doors of Hibbs’ sizeable church have remained open since, with thousands of believers flocking to the place of worship every weekend. The outcome, Hibbs told me in a raw and revealing interview, has been the opposite of what state officials warned would occur. Reopening has resulted in countless lives saved — physically, financially, emotionally, and spiritually.

When we first sat down for our recent hour-long discussion, it quickly became clear that Pastor Hibbs fears no question — in fact, he jumps at the chance to tackle the thorny issues, and he isn’t interested in soft-pedaling or platitudes. This is a time for direct speech and — particularly in the year of COVID-19 and widespread unrest — a time to embrace with even more vigor the biblical mandate to “cast out fear.”

The country in general and California in particular, Pastor Hibbs said, is at a “tipping point.” But rather than despair and the instinct to retreat which has overwhelmed so many, he explained, his Judeo-Christian worldview, grounded in Scripture, gives him a sense of hope. And that hope and action are being justified in real time.

Hibbs says he’s witnessed people seeking God in numbers he hasn’t seen in his community before, and he’s also seeing new levels of political engagement. “When you look around and see what I call the ‘catastrophe of everything,’ I have never seen interest like we do now,” he told me.

Asked about the accusation that it’s “anti-Christian” to hold worship services amid the pandemic, Hibbs pushed back.

“Christians will cite Romans 13; we are to obey the laws of the land. That is correct,” he explained. “If you want to read Romans carefully, it says that the authorities that are in power have been placed in power by God so that they may be ministers of what is good.”

“When Donald Trump asked for 15 days, we gave him 15 days. We submitted to the government,” he said. “We didn’t know what we had. We didn’t know what was going on. When Trump asked for another 15 days, we gave him another 15 days. For 30 days our doors were shut. When jurisdiction went to the governor, he refused to lead and would not give us the answers. We offered to even help him with the plan for the churches of California. He refused that offer.”

The various restrictions became “such a clear partisan thing” that it didn’t make any sense, said Hibbs. Meanwhile, people’s lives were on the line.

“We’re the ones dealing not with the politics but the fallout,” he said. His team couldn’t afford to miss “a single day of work — because we are the ones fielding calls from people in a panic.” Since his church has the financial means, “we kept people in their homes when they couldn’t make their payments.”

In a video he directed at the governor, Hibbs said he was inviting other churches in the state to join him in reopening “because the level of suicide, the level of counseling was higher than it’s ever been in 30 years for us.”

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