HOLY MOLY

Los Angeles Sues Mega-Church That Won’t Stop Holding 7,000-Person Services

The city has finally had it with mega-church pastor John MacArthur.

Los Angeles has finally had it with mega-church pastor John MacArthur. After Grace Community Church held a service Sunday with hundreds of mostly mask-less parishioners tightly packed into pews, Los Angeles County filed a lawsuit on Thursday to stop MacArthur from holding “in-person, indoor worship in violation of the State and County public health orders.” Despite a federal court upholding California’s rules for indoor gatherings—which restrict gatherings to 100 people or 25 percent capacity, whichever is less—MacArthur opened the church’s doors in July and boasted that “people started slowly coming back... and they just kept coming until there were six or seven thousand.” California has the most coronavirus cases of any state and Los Angeles County is reporting 1,500-2,000 new cases a day—but MacArthur claimed none of his parishioners had contracted it. The county said it filed the lawsuit “reluctantly” after trying to get the church to comply with orders for weeks.