Covid NSW: Christ Embassy Church in west Sydney has to close as parishioners are again fined

A Protestant church in Covid-ridden west of Sydney was closed and a pastor was banned from preaching for at least a week after he “declared bans in the name of Jesus” during an illegal sermon.

NSW police shut down a Christian embassy service in Blacktown Sunday evening after neighbors reported 60 parishioners for illegal gatherings.

Initially, 30 people were fined a total of $ 35,000, but on Wednesday the detectives imposed an additional $ 14,000 in fines.

Twenty-seven guests were fined a second $ 500 each for not wearing or wearing a face mask.

In total, the guests were fined $ 1,500 each, while Christ Embassy was fined $ 5,000 for hosting the event.

A ban was sent to the pastor who hosted the event at around 6:00 a.m. on Wednesday banning him from preaching in front of his congregation members for the next seven days.

He was also fined another $ 500 for not wearing a face mask in a public place.

The Christ Embassy Blacktown will not be able to make at least two scheduled connections for the next seven days.

Blacktown is one of 12 local counties that are particularly tightly closed to control the spread of Covid.

Hours before the illegal gathering, Pastor Marvin Osaghae gave parishioners a spirited sermon in which he vowed to “reject any lockdown in our cities.”

“In the name of Jesus we reject any lockdown in our cities,” he said in a widely distributed recording of a sermon he delivered on Sunday.

“We declare in the name of Jesus that the barriers are over. In the cities of New South Wales, the lockdowns are over.

Police footage at the crime scene shows many of the parishioners without face masks, which are mandatory across NSW unless a person is exercising or at home.

Police also claim that there were no mandatory QR codes at the church entrance.

Additional officers were called to church to break up the meeting and obtain details from the participants. Many had come from other sealed-off suburbs, including the Canterbury-Bankstown and Fairfield LGAs.

Pastor Osaghae denied hosting the event in question, but admitted that he was there for “the party”.

Daily Mail Australia approached Christ Embassy Sydney for a comment.

Since it was founded in Nigeria in 1987, Christ Embassy, ​​under the direction of Pastor Chris Oyakhilome, has gathered more than 13 million followers on five continents.

The mega-church, its global television affiliates and oyakhilome have been repeatedly criticized for spreading dangerous and unfounded myths about the pandemic in the UK and Nigeria.

They were fined A $ 240,000 by the UK Communications Bureau in March after Christ Embassy’s Loveworld Television Network found it violated the broadcaster’s guidelines.

A 29-hour show called “The Global Day of Prayer” contained sermons with “potentially harmful” Covid claims when it aired in January, Ofcom found.

The sermons contained claims that the virus was “planned” and that vaccines were a “dark” way to “nanochips” and control people, “the regulator noted.

In the case of an earlier violation on the same channel, a moderator mistakenly linked the Covid pandemic to the expansion of the 5G telecommunications network.

“It’s not a coronavirus, it’s cell poisoning. Remember, 5G started in China. Wuhan is one of the provinces where 5G has been introduced, ”she said. The program was later instructed to explain how it violated regulations.

Oyakhilome’s sermons and unsubstantiated allegations about Covid have been repeatedly “fact-checked” and in some cases removed from social media in order not to give false information to its 2.1 million followers.

Recently, a Facebook page for the Oyakhilome Church falsely claimed that “vaccine is a gene therapy capable of opening DNA so that it can be manipulated”.

Hundreds of followers shared the debunked claim, which he allegedly repeated in a sermon that was posted on YouTube and later deleted.

Oyakhilome claims to be a spiritual healer who is a “unique servant sent by God who radiates an insatiable passion to reach the peoples of the world with God’s presence manifested”.