Kenn Dixon, Vice President of the Texas Conference for Communication & Public Relations, has good news and bad news. The good news is that there will be no mask mandates in Texas Conference schools and churches. The Bad news is that the Conference will not be providing any religious exemptions:
Texas Conference VP for Communications and PR: “There are no exemptions.”
He states that if you want an exemption, the only option you have is through your medical provider.
This is disinformation.
First, if you listened to the Berrien Springs Village Church seminar, you heard two different lawyers, Jonathan Zirkle and Mat Staver, both state that a religious exemption is a personal thing that is yours alone, not your pastor’s, not your local church’s, and not the conference’s. If you have a religious objection to putting something into your body—e.g., an objection to the use of aborted fetal tissue, or an objection to tampering with the genetic function of your body temple, which may have deleterious effects on your created immune system, etc.—that is yours alone. It does not belong to your church, nor is it a dispensation within the gift of your bishop. The courts adopted that stance because they will not make themselves judges and determiners of what a given religious denomination believes. That is not their role. Your conscience is your own.
Second, the fact is that several pastors, including pastors in the Texas Conference, are writing letters on behalf of individual members stating that the member has a conscientious objection to taking the vaccine. Whether the pastor believes his parishioner has a genuine conscientious objection is between the pastor and his parishioner, and the courts will not interpose themselves into that relationship and second-guess the pastor. Again, courts are not interested in trying to umpire your conscience.
We are at a loss as to why the Texas Conference wants to discourage members from asserting conscientious objections to this vaccine, and from asking a local pastor for help with a letter asserting a religious exemption, but legally it is none of their business.
The conference structure exists solely to be the “storehouse” for the tithe, which means that it can take money from large, established churches and use it for evangelism and church-planting so that the denomination will grow much faster and farther than it would if each church retained its own tithe. It has no other reason for existence. Since the conferences are failing miserably at that core function, and adding bureaucratic bloat in the process—almost 100 people work at the Texas Conference—they’ve decided to branch out into public health tyranny and become minions and water carriers for the Left.