Churches mustn’t bow to COVID rules restricting worship, pastor advises

A Canadian pastor whose church was fined many times for breaking COVID rules, Pastor Henry Hildebrandt of the Church of God in Aylmer, Ontario, has advised faith leaders not to bow to oppressive rules limiting their right to worship.

Hildebrandt said that he was not always a follower of Christ, but that when he gave his life to God to preach, he left it in his hands to guide him in his life.

“God knows the motive. God knows why we were born for a time such as this,” Hildebrandt said.

The Christian Fight for Freedom event was hosted by the Democracy Fund and featured Canadian pastors opposed to jab mandates and lockdowns. Alberta Pastor Artur Pawlowski, who was jailed for defying COVID rules, joined the event virtually.

The event was hosted by Dr. Julie Ponesse, who was fired from the Huron University College of Western University in September for resisting her university’s COVID injection mandate. She recently joined The Democracy Fund as the “Pandemic Ethics Scholar focusing on educating the public on civil liberties.”

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Ponesse recently said about the COVID crisis that “fear has settled into society in a mass hysterical way.”

In total since the start of the COVID crisis and the draconian lockdowns rules that ensured, the Church of God has racked up $274,000 in fines.

In May 2021, an Ontario judge ordered the doors locked to the Church of God because it kept defying provincial COVID lockdown rules.

Hildebrandt in his speech recounted how when police came to padlock his church in the spring of 2021, he could see that they were “shaking in their boots because when you mess with God, when you poke God in the eye, that’s no small matter.”

“I stand before you tonight, God is my witness, I bear no hatred, I have no ill feeling against any of them. I want every single officer, I want the sheriff … I told him, “Sir, this is ‘nothing personal, nothing personal against you’ because I love his soul and I want his soul to make it,” Hildebrandt said.

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He recounted how when a CTV news reporter told him that his breaking COVID rules did not look very “Godly,” he fired back, saying Jesus himself kicked “over those tables.”

During Hildebrandt’s passionate speech, he said that shortly after the first “two weeks to flatten the curve” it became “very obvious right away that this (COVID and lockdowns) was an agenda.”

“Oh, we cooperated the first two weeks, flatten that curve, but I’ll tell you what, in my passion I got it flat in the first two weeks, I needed no 16 days after that, I said there is an agenda behind this whole thing, we will gather and we wave never gathered as much as we’ve gathered this year,” Hildebrandt said.

“And listen, we needed one another. We needed one another more than ever before. And like the old-timers used to say, no devil in hell can convince us otherwise.”

Although Hildebrandt was fined rather than jailed for defying COVID rules, in other provinces such as Alberta and Manitoba, pastors who defied COVID rules were placed behind bars.

Pastor Tobias Tissen of the Church of God Restoration, located in Steinbach, Manitoba, was released from jail in late October after he was incarcerated for allegedly violating Manitoba’s COVID rules months ago.

Many Canadians consider vaccine mandates an indefensible assault on individual freedoms given COVID-19’s high survivability among most groups, minimal risk of asymptomatic spread, and research indicating that post-infection natural immunity is equally protective against reinfection.