DALLAS -- Stedfast Baptist Church, which was forced to leave two locations in Tarrant County last year and recently bought a building in Cedar Hill, was the subject of protests Wednesday.
The church was founded in Fort Worth in 2014 and is led by pastor Jonathan Shelley, who advocated for “capital punishment” for gay people at an Arlington City Council meeting last year and, in a sermon, doubted that the Nazis killed six million Jews. In February 2022, the church was evicted from its location in Hurst for violating lease terms that forbade violence and threats.
Since that eviction, the church has doubled down on its extreme language. In June 2022, pastor Dillon Awes said “Every single homosexual in our country should be ... sentenced to death” and “they should be lined up against a wall and shot in the back of the head.” This June, the church posted an anti-LGBTQ video to its Twitter account for each day of Pride month.
R. David Weaver, a lawyer who represents the church, responded to a request for comment Thursday. “This firm represents the Church in pending litigation that does not involve the subject of any protests,” he wrote.
Stedfast Baptist Church did not respond to multiple requests for comment Thursday.
In December, the church was kicked out of a building in Watauga and by January had found a new home at a DoubleTree Hilton in Arlington, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported. Shelley told his congregation that “the reality is nobody wants to lease to us,” according to the Star-Telegram.
The church bought its current location from Cedar Hill’s New Life Apostolic Church, which recently moved to a new building. Pastor John Denmon said he did not know who his congregation was selling their building to. “I do not agree with their positions on the Jews, on the trans community, [LGBTQ] — I do not agree with any of that.
“I just found out who bought the church when the protests and the emails and phone calls started coming in,” he added, sharing that he held a church meeting to address controversy over the sale.
Stedfast Baptist Church has been protested in North Texas for years, primarily by the group No Hate in Texas, started in Hurst in 2021 as No Hate in Hurst. On Wednesday, about 20 protesters gathered outside the church’s new location.
The group was protesting both the church’s presence in Cedar Hill and its decision to host speaker Steven L. Anderson at its Wednesday service. Anderson leads the network of churches that the Stedfast Baptist Church is a part of and founded the New Independent Fundamentalist Baptist movement.
He is banned from over 30 countries, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Anderson has drawn criticism for his 37-minute Holocaust denial video called Did The Holocaust Really Happen? and his celebration of the deaths of LGBTQ people in the 2016 Pulse massacre, among other things.
On Wednesday, protesters outside the church described the danger they believed was posed by Anderson’s group of churches. “People don’t understand the danger — that this is not just one little church, it’s a network of churches all over the country,” said Lynette Sharp, who has been protesting the group for almost a year and a half.
Sharp has been protesting outside the church’s services since it moved to Watauga. “When I found them, they came from Hurst and the lady that had been doing [protests] was exhausted. And she, you know, she stayed with it for a while, but then she needed to tap out,” Sharp said. Now, after months of protests in her area, she said it’s “time to pass the torch; Cedar Hill needs to pick this up.”
Sharp was joined Wednesday by several people connected to Cedar Hill. Crystal Ramirez owns a salon in Cedar Hill and considers her business “a safe place for everyone, including the LGBTQ community. It’s really upsetting to find out that this [church] is so close to home,” she said.
“I’ve always seen Cedar Hill as a super diverse area to live in,” Ramirez added.
Samantha Ledbetter, another protester, said she grew up in Cedar Hill and that Wednesday’s event was her first protest. “They’re not welcome here, and I’m gonna do everything I can to help them not feel welcome, because they’re very hateful.”
Edward Sebesta, who writes a newsletter called Dallas Gay Liberation and has tracked the movements of Stedfast Baptist Church, said he hopes protests against the church will continue at its new location. “If we don’t protest it, it means we’re sort of accepting it. It sets a level for the rest of the community, straight and gay, [of] what’s acceptable.”
