PA Dems Patron Anti-Gay Christian Group Through Local Coffee Shop

LOCK HAVEN, PENNSYLVANIA — A transgender activist in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania is blowing the whistle on an alleged Christian hate group, the Christian and Missionary Alliance (CMA). The CMA is a longstanding anti-gay Christian group which has contributed millions to the National Christian Foundation, a nationwide network of anti-LGBT fundraising and lobbying.

According to a source, the TwoCare Center Against Religious Extremism, CMA has given approximately $7,985,346 to the NCF from 2001–2013. The link can be found here, and a screenshot is below.

Right from the beginning, I knew this story was big. CMA is part of the College of Prayer, which facilitated anti-gay legislation in Uganda, the infamous “kill the gays” bill. My source, a CMA survivor who wishes not to be named, is actively trying to warn everyone in her Lock Haven community about what CMA is doing. One of the things she accuses the CMA of doing is owning and operating businesses within Lock Haven, and marketing their businesses as cool hang out spots to lure in women and LGBT people.

Why? To attract new members to their failing, dwindling congregation, my source claims, and probably to draw LGBT members into the “conversion therapy” that CMA funds through the NCF. But my voice is not the only one that must be listened to; read her words. “Below is inculpatory evidence that the local coffee shop, Avenue 209, and The Commonplace Church are owned by the Christian and Missionary Alliance and not their pastor, Josh Grimes, or anyone locally.”

“I learned this as a CMA pastor’s kid: None of the assets involved in ministry are ever owned by the pastor or the congregation. The Regional Office and National Office have final say and ownership over all church assets. This is why when they closed the old church to open this one, everyone but one parishioner left. The congregation got no say when the decision was made by leadership. The National Office can override the parishioners no matter how much time or money they’ve got personally invested in the ministry.”

“This is not local people in control of a local ministry,” my source says. “This is an outside denomination operating through proxies in our community and exploiting people to further their ministerial agenda, which includes extremely bigoted views on the the LGBT community. Below are resources and various sources used to qualify my statements.”

“CMA opposes marriage equality”

“Bigoted views on sexuality”

“CMA relationship to funding and supporting anti-gay hate overseas through the College of Prayer”

“Tried to get the paper to publish this,” she says. “They refused three times.” So what did this woman, this victim of the church, have to survive? Why is her story important? “I went into YWAM (Youth With a Mission). But I grew up all my life in the CMA, kind of like a military brat with churches. YWAM taught me to infiltrate a foreign communist country as an English teacher to set up a business under that model to gain community influence and then spread out with ministry to the the seven pillars of that society. Because it didn’t end with teaching English. That was just to get us in the country. The message also carries with it a right wing political message for that pillar to be taken. Sound familiar?”

“I left YWAM behind in Florida. It’s the common model I’m pointing out. Dominionism isn’t one structured group of religious people. It is a philosophy they share in growing desperation to save their fading cultural privilege. This guerrilla evangelism, that’s my term, is a sign of the growing radicalization of the evangelical movement to infringe more and more on the public spaces dishonestly to try and fish for emotionally vulnerable people to exploit. Same model, only using a different business. Economics is what they use to exploit.”

“You can easily do the math on how that works. Most right wing missionaries are exactly that, knowing it or not. Their very presence is a destabilizing factor, based on their ideology alone. Most of them are so high on Jesus, they don’t know up from down. If you’re saving people from the fires of Hell, and you actually believe that, you’ll rationalize quite a bit to justify ‘saving’ someone.”

“Most missionaries are just brainwashed religious kids who are abuse victims themselves; the right wing ones, anyway. The dominionists are all right wing. Capitalism is their real god. I ran into an ex-Navy Seal smuggling weapons for Franklin Graham’s Samaritan’s Purse in Creel, Mexico. Trafficking of border children, you know, simple stuff.”

“This is an economically depressed area. That coffee shop does help add to the community…with a price; one that they don’t tell you you’re paying.” What coffee shop is she referring to? Avenue 209 in Lock Haven, run by CMA pastor Josh Grimes. “They are an evangelical denomination of christianity,” she says. “They are Dominionists.”

CMA was, “…the denomination I was raised in.” she told me. “The pastor’s (Josh Grimes’) father went to seminary with my dad at Toccoa Falls in Georgia. They also have a school in Nyack, New York. I moved here in 2010, I came out as an atheist shortly before that. I was on my out of all those closets.”

“I recognized Josh, the pastor, when I was in the coffee shop one day myself. I was still partially brainwashed and talking to my family at the time, so I introduced myself and he remembered me from a local church camp at Mahaffey, PA. As I started to go through therapy and remember everything that happened to me, I stopped talking to my family and I realized what these people were. I also recognized the Dominionist model of their business.”

When she started trying to blow the whistle on the CMA and what they were doing, things started to get dicey. According to her, the CMA never threatened her or tried to silence her, but they tried to discredit her by presenting themselves as a harmless member of the community. “I think they were hoping I never got wise, but now they know I know what’s up, so they just spread rumor because that’s all they can do. What they believe is in black and white.”

“That’s what’s so frustrating. Minimal scrutiny would uncover this, but the community resists because it’s a cornerstone business in the community now. I’m building a slow awareness, but everyone is reluctant to put their neighbors out of business.”

Who has my source attempted to contact, who has she tried to warn? Community women’s organizations, LGBT groups, “Spark”, a local progressive group, and the local Democrats, led by a woman named Rose Reeder. My source’s reception by these groups has not been totally supportive, mostly she has received blockades from the local Dems.

“Rose Reeder is the Democratic Party leader”, she says. “She is the one who told me that there was nothing they could do, and this wasn’t a priority now, when this group (CMA) did what I warned about over a year ago, and started targeting LGBTQIA+ people. I blew the whistle almost two years ago. People in the local democratic party have been outright hostile to me over this, in defense of the anti-gay church, with a handful of exceptions.”

“Rose has tried to walk the fence, but she is enabling the bigotry by refusing to condemn it, and equating the sides to each other instead of seeing these people as the religious predators they are. She compared it to shopping at Walmart…I cannot believe the lack of outrage. I found out the support meetings were being held there (in a CMA-controlled business).”

Why would Rose Reeder defend the CMA? “She didn’t see the imminent danger this poses to vulnerable LGBTQIA people. I don’t think it’s sinking in that this is all true. I think she thinks I might be exaggerating or something, but I definitely don’t get the vibe that she sees the urgency to protect the gay community.”

“They let the wolves right in,” my source said. “She’s not committed to any action, so I don’t count on her to do anything. The best I’m hoping for is they stay out of the way so this can be exposed. They can be unwitting accomplices or knowing ones. That’s up to them now that I’m revealing the truth about who this church is.”

“She got nasty,” my source claims. “She threatened me, like I was going to have to worry about dealing with her as the local democratic party leader.” My source showed me screenshots of emails she exchanged with Rose Reeder. I cannot show these emails due to Pennsylvania’s “two party consent” privacy laws, but in my opinion, Rose seems detached from my source’s plight, unwilling to help expose the CMA because of their economic presence in Lock Haven.

“…Liberals are gatekeeping it in many communities because of the economic factor,” my source says. Reeder’s aloof response to the emails she received from my source is in essence giving legitimacy to my source’s opinion that the local Dems are putting money over the safety of Lock Haven’s LGBT community and women. “Until I started to make them realize that this is coming out, with or without them.”

“I tried a couple years ago, and again a year ago to warn people, but it cost my friend one of his closest friends, standing by me to defend me…They’ve opened a burger shop in town now, too (Odd Fella’s). They’re expanding into the economic infrastructure (of Lock Haven). Reaching people for Jesus includes beliefs that identify homosexuality as an abomination,” she said.

“The intent is to stay in the coffee shop since it defines a place of gathering for so many, and is strategic in its location and ministry, that’s key.” she said. “They are putting themselves into the safe space deliberately.”

According to my source, by posing as a cool, liberal business like the Avenue 209 coffee shop, the CMA is basically lying in wait, effectively ambushing liberal and LGBT patrons. My source says that the CMA is encouraging women’s groups and LGBT groups to hold meeting in businesses owned and run by the CMA, like Avenue 209. which was started by Pastor Josh Grimes, or Odd Fella’s, which is co-owned and operated by Josh and his wife, Sarah.

But as we now know, according to CMA doctrines in their operations manual, Sarah and Josh’s business isn’t really owned by them. It’s owned by the CMA, and it would stand to reason that at least some profit at Odd Fella’s probably goes into the CMA. This is potentially dangerous because if my source is correct, then the CMA is effectively using liberalism, or the appearance of such, as a weapon against the liberal public.

If all of this is true, then that means that the CMA is hiding in plain sight, just like white supremacists getting into prisons and police departments. “Yep. You can bet this is happening elsewhere,” she told me. “The assholes handed me the perfect narrative by trying to infiltrate my safe space,” she said. “I think they (the local Dems) are concerned because they’ve taken part in enabling this…I can’t believe this hasn’t been previously exposed anywhere.”

When she heard that the CMA was buying up businesses in town and running them, getting into the community to feed their dying congregations with new parishioners (and more importantly, more money), my source started making waves, waves that have caused more than a few problems in my source’s personal life, but she has had some success.

Did anyone believe her? Thankfully, other groups are more amenable to my source’s warnings. “The more progressive people moved instantly, but I had to push the Democrats. I’ve convinced a few, but they’re afraid of backlash. Yeah, the party leader to some extent, and the local leader of Spark, they moved their near meetings,” she said. “The women’s center moved instantly.”

But it was not so easy, because my source isn’t just combatting a church and local businesses, she is combating public opinion. And she says that a lot of people don’t want to rock the boat. “Yeah, they stopped meeting there, but several people went out of their way to let me know they disagreed,” she said.

“One guy said he voted to move the meetings but would still buy coffee there, with a sarcastic smirk. They resented me for it. I don’t know the guy’s name, I only know the leaders. And they reluctantly support me. I’ve put them in a tough spot, because some of them still go there.” Did any of these leaders say that they would still patron the CMA coffee shop? “They defended others who did,” she said.

“They (the CMA) used to be a beat up old church on its last breath. They used this model to grow economic roots and now that they are behind two businesses in town they have a lot of influence, to the point that the local paper refuses to let me print a letter to make people aware. Both local papers refuse to go after a business who might advertise.”

“I even went to the Lock Haven Express and showed their editorial staff all the evidence, and they gaslit me because the publisher is friends with the pastor. They won’t print it. I’ve submitted three different letters. I made fliers and spread them through town, that’s what I’ve been reduced to.”

Who is this publisher? “Bob Rolley. He said he was worried about printing a story that would impact five families. In other words, the economic privilege of the bigots was his priority, not the safety of the gay community.”

Her parents were ordained in the CMA. When I asked if the CMA trained her parents, she said, “My dad was, yeah. My mom left bible school to marry him, and be the pastor’s wife.” My source then sent me a link. “That’s another story of what happens when a local church tried to accept a gay couple. The national office took their church.”

My source recounted to me only pieces of what I could tell was a horrible story of physical and sexual abuse. “Beatings at home. I was raped in the hallway of a CMA church while the board met. Emotional abuse, bullying at churches and religious summer camps. I was denied access to proper medical care even though my parents had insurance. But, basically if I acted too much like a girl or had an ADHD moment, they would just hit me over and over.”

When I asked if she knew of other children in the CMA being abused, she said, “Yeah, I remember lots of other fucked up pastor’s kids and church kids who were abused. I even remember multiple cases of abuse my dad helped cover up, for the church. One was in Nanty Glo, PA. They shuffled an old pastor who was touching girls and moved him to another church in PA.”

Being a victim of sexual abuse in my childhood, this story horrified me, and was hard to listen to. “No one reported anything to the authorities, even though four women came forward in the church. Some of them were underage at the time. They covered it up, just like the Catholic church.”

“It’s more common than you want to know in fundamentalist churches. Another church pastor my parents knew was assaulting women in counseling sessions. I forget where that was, but I remember they just moved him like the other pastor. And we never talked about them again after that.”

“My parents did it to me at home. I don’t know how they handled it for other kids. I think they network with outside ministries. Or they disciple in house.” When I asked her if the CMA targets LGBT people, she said: “Gay people aren’t exactly knocking down their door, so it’s more their own kids who end up being prey if they are like me.”

“Or the vulnerable people they can exploit with stuff like this. I was told they have gay people in their church. That’s frightening.” When I asked if she was aware of any “gay conversion therapy” taking place within CMA, which we now know is physical and psychological torture, she said, “I don’t know any of that, I’ve been away.” My source escaped her church some years ago.

Imagine that, having gone through years of abuse, seeing other people go through it as well. To be raped in the church, to know that other women were raped in the church, and to watch members of the church leadership, including your father, cover it up. What would you do to seek justice? I would be in a raging bloodlust if this happened to me.

“And now they’re targeting gay support groups, by advertising themselves as a community safe space for their women’s center; they have signs for businesses. They want to be in the middle of our spaces by misrepresenting who they are, so they can pick off the vulnerable.”

How many groups exist like this? “Thousands; they’re everywhere. It’s called ‘third room evangelism’. It’s how the church is trying to infiltrate public spaces to grow their dying numbers.”

“It’s not even a battle, I’m a lone voice that they’re all trying to ignore into silence,” she said. “Two years, and no one will help me.”

And this is the reason why I’m trying to help her tell her story and spread it around, because people need to know. “This is the same county that gave you Sandusky; what do you expect?”