Morris, senior pastor at Gateway Church in Southlake, Texas, who returned to the pulpit in August following complications from hernia surgery, talked about the importance of spiritual warfare at the opening session of Gateway Conference 2018. | (Screenshot: Gateway Church)Īlthough he was initially angry at God for allowing him to suffer through a life-threatening medical emergency, Pastor Robert Morris says he later realized that God's mission for his life is to get as many people to Heaven as possible. Others claimed to see it - golden auras or gold dust or feathers of angels drifting down.Pastor Robert Morris speaks at Gateway Church in Southlake, Texas, June 2, 2018. Others said they felt it - a sensation of warm hands pressing, or of knowing that someone has entered the room even when your eyes are closed. Theirs was the spirit of a knowable Christian God, a tangible force they believed could be drawn in through the brown roof, through the cement walls, along the gray-carpeted hallways and in through the double doors of the sanctuary where they could literally breathe it into their bodies. The lighting technician asked the Lord to guide the 24 professional-grade spotlights with colors named “good green” and “good red.” Pacing up and down the aisles were the ushers, the parking attendants, the security guards, the greeters, the camera operators, the dancers, the intercessors, all of them praying, whispering, speaking in tongues, inviting into the room what they believed to be the Holy Spirit - not in any metaphorical sense, and not in some vague sense of oneness with an incomprehensible universe.
PASTOR ROBERT MORRIS SPIRITUAL WARFARE PROFESSIONAL
The sound technician prayed over the board controlling stacks of D&B Audiotechnik professional speakers. It is a world in which demons are real, miracles are real, and the ultimate mission is not just transforming individual lives but also turning civilization itself into their version of God’s Kingdom: one with two genders, no abortion, a free-market economy, Bible-based education, church-based social programs and laws such as the ones curtailing LGBTQ rights now moving through statehouses around the country.
PASTOR ROBERT MORRIS SPIRITUAL WARFARE TV
Its most successful leaders are considered apostles and prophets, including some with followings in the hundreds of thousands, publishing empires, TV shows, vast prayer networks, podcasts, spiritual academies, and branding in the form of T-shirts, bumper stickers and even flags.
It includes some of the largest congregations in the nation, housed in the husks of old Baptist churches, former big-box stores and sprawling multimillion-dollar buildings with private security to direct traffic on Sundays. The church is called Mercy Culture, and it is part of a growing Christian movement that is nondenominational, openly political and has become an engine of former president Donald Trump’s Republican Party.
And when the pastor cued the band, the candidate, a Guatemalan American businessman, stood along with the rest of the congregation as spotlights flashed on faces that were young and old, rich and poor, White and various shades of Brown - a church that had grown so large since its founding in 2019 that there were now three services every Sunday totaling some 4,500 people, a growing Saturday service in Spanish and plans for expansion to other parts of the country.
It bore the name of a church elder who was running for mayor of Fort Worth. Now he stood in front of the glowing map, a 38-year-old White man in skinny jeans telling a congregation of some 1,500 people what he said the Lord had told him: that Fort Worth was in thrall to four “high-ranking demonic forces.” That all of America was in the grip of “an anti-Christ spirit.” That the Lord had told him that 2021 was going to be the “Year of the Supernatural,” a time when believers would rise up and wage “spiritual warfare” to advance God’s Kingdom, which was one reason for the bright-red T-shirt he was wearing.
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