Have you ever noticed how two situations can seem unrelated, but soon discover a connection between them?

The first situation developed over the weekend when I was visiting my mother in a retirement home in Chino.

Mom is 88 years old and needs a little extra help with activities of daily living. We therefore hired an outside agency to provide a companion caregiver.

They sent Michelle, an active mother of two in her 30s. She seemed exactly what Mom needed, a good loveseat, present and heartwarming.

During our get to know conversation, Michelle mentioned how she recently started attending Calvary Chapel in Chino Hills.

When I asked her what she liked about her church, she said, “Pastor Jack! He speaks the truth and preaches the Bible.

The church looked familiar. Later that afternoon, an internet search reminded me that Pastor Jack is one of many pastors promising a religious exemption for anyone hoping to avoid the COVID-19 vaccine. By shutting down my laptop, I decided that this situation would become the occasion for a field trip.

Late Sunday morning, I drove 15 minutes to a visitor parking lot outside the mega-church. A few minutes later, I began to walk through an unmasked crowd of at least 3,000 people to locate the church office. There, behind a reception desk, volunteers were handing out exemptions to anyone who asked for them.

So I asked for one.

The signatories of this two-page statement must certify that the vaccine violates the Bible word. The statement is reinforced by a mishmash of verses that I struggled to follow. The document allows the Bible to say what we want it to say in order to help us avoid what we don’t want to do. (James 4:17; Romans 14; Romans 15: 4; Acts 2: 38-39; Romans 8; 1 Corinthians 3: 16-17; 1 Corinthians 6: 19-20; 2 Corinthians 5:10; 2 Corinthians 7: 1; Psalm 139: 13-16)

The office volunteers must have guessed that I was confused, so they sent me back into the crowd to find their assistant pastor, Steve Hurlbert.

When I found him, I asked him what theological problems the church had with the vaccine.

“Some people have a real problem with the way vaccines are made and their use of abortive fetal tissue,” he told me.

He then reinforced the main point of the exemption. Vaccines are “sin” because they use “fetal stem cell lines from aborted babies”. Hurlbert, a COVID-19 survivor, considers taking the vaccine “an act complicit in the act of abortion.”

There is no church that has a bigger problem with abortion than the Roman Catholic Church. So I contacted Dr Jason T. Eberl, Ph.D., professor of ethics and philosophy of health care at the University of Saint Louis, a private Jesuit research university.

Eberl considers Calvary’s argument more than fallacious because the legal test for any conscientious objector is “sincerity.”

“Just because someone drops the words ‘fetal cell line’ doesn’t mean we should automatically grant them an exemption.

For example, no one is against using the same fetal cell line to test food additives or over-the-counter drugs.

Eberl asks, “Do they really conscientiously oppose the use of a product with these cell lines or are they buying into a political narrative …?” If so, then they’re using that as an excuse to avoid a vaccination warrant, and that’s not really a sincere objection. “

Eberl and others have confirmed what I know to be true, that there is no major religious organization that opposes this vaccine.

Like Pastor Hulbert, I also attended seminary. I also love Jesus and read the Bible. So I’m definitely on my way to tell my Christian readers that this vaccine does not violate the Scriptures. It’s not made from aborted babies.

It turns out that Michelle’s choice in churches is no stranger to my mother’s health. Because you see, Michele, my mother’s caregiver and Calvary participant, tested positive for COVID-19 four days after our last visit.

Medical disinformation reinforced by inaccurate Bible quotes is killing people. My brother died last December for believing in nonsense like that. Hope my mom isn’t next.

Read the Calvary Chapel exemption statement.

Learn more about how major churches view vaccines.

Some say the COVID-19 vaccine is the ‘mark of the beast’. Is there a link with the Bible?

Contact Chaplain Norris at [email protected] or 10556 Combie Road, Suite 6643 Auburn, CA 95602 or voicemail (843) 608-9715.