Let’s talk about how Cities Church treats women

This article originally appeared at Baptist News Global on January 21, 2026.

“David Easterwood is a pastor here. He is also the director of the Field Office for ICE in St. Paul. So someone who claims to worship God, teaching people in this church about God, is out there overseeing ICE agents,” civil rights lawyer Levy Armstrong declared to the congregation of Cities Church in Saint Paul, Minn. as protesters interrupted their Sunday morning service.

Levy Armstrong confronting the congregation of Cities Church (Screencap)

“Think about what we’ve experienced. The murder of Renee Good at the hands of ICE, a Venezuelan national shot by ICE, a six-month-old baby who almost died as a result of ICE unleashing military-grade weapons on our community. How dare you claim to be a pastor of God and you are involved in evil in our community!”

While those who lean toward the left have a variety of takes on the protest, conservatives are playing the persecution card by casting the pastors of Cities Church as poor, faithful victims.

“The unspeakably evil intrusion of a leftist mob into a Christian worship service today in Minneapolis must be called out for what it is — and federal authorities should be fast and effective in response,” Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President Al Mohler said. “May God bless this steadfast pastor, this faithful gospel church, and the members who were traumatized, including children and youth. This was nothing less than the desecration of Christian worship.”

“The actions of protesters yesterday at Cities Church in St. Paul, Minneapolis were utterly shameful,” Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary President Danny Akin added. “Please join Charlotte and me in praying for their pastor and Southeastern alumnus Jonathan Parnell, that he would continue to lead with boldness. Pray for Cities Church, that they would remain steadfast in the face of opposition.”

But are words like “steadfast,” “faithful” and “bold” really the best words to describe Jonathan Parnell and the other pastors at Cities Church, one of whom is a director for ICE? When we take a closer look into who these men really are, we’ll realize they are anything but steadfast, faithful and bold. To the contrary, they are insecure little sexist and racist power-mongers who desire to be God.

John Piper’s glory hierarchy

To understand how abusive the pastors of Cities Church are, we need to examine where they came from, and how they view authority, submission, gender and punishment.

John Piper

They’re part of a network of church planters connected to John Piper’s Calvinistic complementarian Desiring God ministries and Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis.

Piper views all reality as a hierarchy, with an ego-obsessed God at the top controlling everything below including the movement of dust particles for self-glory, and creating humans to find their satisfaction in putting everyone in their place on the hierarchy. Of course, Piper makes it sound nicer than that by saying, “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.” And it feels freeing for many of us who grew up in fundamentalism to hear our satisfaction being valued rather than dismissed.

But because it’s a satisfaction situated in a glory hierarchy that requires male headship and female submission, it forms its followers to delight in women submitting to men and punishing those who won’t, like Renee Good.

“To the degree that a woman’s influence over a man — guidance of man, leadership of man — is personal and directive, it will generally offend a man’s good, God-given sense of responsibility and leadership, and thus controvert God’s created order,” Piper explains.

This extends beyond simply the husband and wife relationship to society at large, including law enforcement. For example, Piper suggests, “A woman who is a civil engineer might design a traffic pattern in a city so that she’s deciding which streets are one-way, and therefore she is influencing, indeed controlling in one sense, all the male drivers all day long. But this influence is so non-personal that it seems to me that the feminine/masculine dynamic is utterly negligible in this kind of relationship.”

So regarding roles such as police officers, drill instructors or simply managers at work, Piper declares, “If a woman’s job involves a good deal of directives toward men, they’ll need, in general I think, to be non-personal, or men and women won’t flourish, I don’t think, in the long run in that relationship without compromising profound biblical and psychological issues.”

Perhaps this is in part why these men are in such a panic over a Black woman like civil rights lawyer Levy Armstrong walking into their church and addressing them so authoritatively about their sin. Women aren’t supposed to do that, especially Black women, or these men will have psychological issues.

Continue reading at Baptist News Global.