Evangelist Bevelyn Beatty has spoken out openly and issued a stern warning to the modern American church, to stop “virtue signaling” and avoid conflict over cultural issues.
She said it was time for believers to actively “terrorize the Devil,” Beatty said and take an example of history’s most controversial, counter-cultural figure: Jesus Christ.
“You see it playing in the world, but it started with a lot of Christians who wanted to virtue signal and make an image of God,” Beatty said, playfully mocking the idea that in order to be Christ-like, one must “run in meadows and rainbows and jump around the lily pads.”
“That is not what Christians are. Christians stand on truth. Christians are bold. Christians are loyal. Christians will love you even when you’re dead wrong,” she said. “But they’ll love you enough to pull you out of the fire.”
On July 18, Beatty went viral on social media when she was captured on video dumping and smearing black paint on a Black Lives Matter street mural created outside Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan by order of Democratic New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. She had pulled an “all-nighter” in order to do the same to two other murals in the city.
Beatty’s ministry partner, Chavannes said June 20 that the two were intent on mobilizing against the Black Lives Matter movement’s divisive political rhetoric and calls for American atonement over racial sin.
“What is the shame that you’re doing, that you are kneeling for? Because BLM is demanding total allegiance and it’s demanding that we bow,” Chavannes said. “You only kneel to Jesus. You only repent to Jesus.”
#bevelynbeatty is our hero pic.twitter.com/Mp7oBAifrz
— (@RealDealAxelrod) July 18, 2020
The two went viral again after they were seen on video preaching the gospel and calling out BLM inside Seattle’s Capitol Hill Occupied Protest, which has since been dismantled by law enforcement due to numerous violent criminal incidents.
They were also arrested while ministering to pregnant women in crisis outside a Manhattan Planned Parenthood earlier that month for alleged violations of New York City’s social distancing guidelines.
Beatty and Chavannes said that their suffering is nothing because Jesus too had suffered for speaking truth to cultural power, she said, from the cleansing of the temple in Jerusalem to the very message of his ministry.
“If you want to be more active if you want to get involved,” Beatty said, “stop thinking about yourself and get out there and think about the greater good, the greater cause — which is the people in our country, which is the innocent babies, which is the lost souls that are out there looting and killing people, that are headed to Hell. We are called to go and save their lives and give them the gospel.”
“Jesus is who I am here for no one else.” pic.twitter.com/MMniGxNrPC
— Katie Daviscourt (@KatieDaviscourt) June 15, 2020
Beatty wouldn’t have conceived herself preaching boldly before because she met Jesus only after a radical 2013 conversion experience that took place during a seven-day stint in jail, where Beatty was living a self-centered life of drinking, smoking, and partying.
She came in contact with faith mentors following her conversion, however, Beatty quickly gave her life to ministry. She spent time reading the Bible and with a solid Christian community, she now urges lapsed believers and secular folks alike on to every time she gets the chance. “I died to self, OK? For a long time in my life, everything revolved around Bevelyn,” Beatty said.
“If Bevelyn had it her way, Bevelyn would be sitting at home watching a good movie, eating popcorn and sipping on some champagne or something.”
“So, let’s be very clear: If I was serving myself, I would probably be just like one of those Christians who sit at home, watch someone else do something, think it’s not really Christ-like and then click off and just go back to living my own life,” she added.
“That is selfish. Christians have to stop being selfish.”
