As we reported last April, on April 23, 2021, English street preacher John Sherwood was very roughly arrested and held overnight in jail. Pastor Sherwood, of the Penn Free Methodist Church in north London, was arrested essentially for quoting Scripture in public.
The passage in question was Genesis 1:27-28, which apparently some listener or listeners found homophobic:
27 So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. 28 God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”
The bobbies told Sherwood that they had received three complaints about his preaching, and accused him of causing “alarm and distress” to members of the public. At the time, one officer spoke to Elder Sherwood’s preaching partner, Pastor Peter Simpson, and ordered him not to offend people who identify as gay by quoting from the Bible.
In September of last year, Sherwood was charged under Section 5 of the Public Order Act, which outlaws “threatening or abusive words or behavior likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress.”
Almost a year later, two weeks ago on April 7, the trial finally took place. We are happy to report that Elder Sherwood has been acquitted of the charges.
“The trial was quite remarkable in that there was so much Scripture quoted in it. Pastor Sherwood was determined to impress upon the prosecution that everything that he ever preaches upon is grounded in the final authority of God’s word, the Bible,” said Pastor Peter Simpson.
“The public gallery was full with Christians showing their support for a man of God who is willing to stand up for the truths of Scripture in the public realm, despite the prevailing anti-Christian spirit of the age and the blatant promotion of the doctrines of cultural Marxism in all our major national institutions,” wrote Pastor Simpson at a blog called “conservativewoman.UK.”
After the trial, Sherwood and his supporters offered prayers of thanksgiving for the acquittal, and sang the hymn, “To God be the glory, Great things he hath done.”
Simpson reported that Article 10 of the 1998 Human Rights Act played an important role in the acquittal. The Act states:
“Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority.”
Simpson seemed happy about this, but considering that England gave us Magna Carta, and that the English-speaking peoples have for centuries enjoyed a great measure of freedom of speech and of religion, the fact that Pastor Sherwood was reduced to depending on some gaseous, vaguely worded, 24-year-old statute from the Blair era is almost too demoralizing to contemplate.
In emphasizing the importance of the English street-preaching tradition, Simpson noted the widely-held theory that Wesleyan preaching during the 18th Century saved Britain, which had a harsh and rigid class system similar to France’s, from suffering a violent revolution similar to the French Revolution:
“ . . . our police forces need some basic education in the history of this nation. Open-air preaching is a longstanding feature of the British scene, and of our Christianity-based culture and love of freedom. For example, vigorous open-air ministry in the 18th century was a major factor in helping to save this country from a violent political and social revolution such as occurred in France in 1789. This is not a fanciful notion, for there is plain historical documentation of it; see here, for example.
I had heard of this theory before, probably from my brilliant college history professor, Erwin Sicher. It is important to note that the public, open-air preaching of the pure gospel, most notably by John and Charles Wesley and George Whitefield, not only made the lower classes more virtuous and hence more socially mobile, but also influenced the upper classes to be more merciful and responsible toward the poor, a point worth emphasizing in light of the remorseless war currently being waged by our post-Christian elites on the middle and lower classes of the Western nations.
This marks the second time in recent months that a Christian in Europe has been tried criminally essentially just for quoting Scripture in public. Although acquittals were won in both cases, it is very troubling that two such cases were prosecuted all the way to and through a criminal trial. The process is the punishment, and being put through that sort of an ordeal is a heavy deterrent, and very likely to impose self-censorship on people lacking the courage of a John Sherwood.