Arrested for Speaking the Truth
On Friday 23 April, Pastor John Sherwood, the minister of a north London church, was preaching the gospel in the centre of Uxbridge (in Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s constituency).
Several police officers arrived on the scene and a conversation with Pastor Sherwood ensued. When he refused to stop preaching and come down from the steps on which he was standing, a police officer took away the Bible in the pastor’s hand and pulled him from the steps. Three officers quickly gathered around the 70-year-old minister, handcuffed and arrested him and took him to a detention centre near Heathrow Airport, where he was kept overnight and not released until around noon the next day.
You can read an account of the arrest in this article written by Peter Simpson, who was preaching with the pastor at that time.
In the article, Mr Simpson asks, ‘what kind of nation have we become that the minister of a Christian church is arrested for upholding in the public square the very truths which Her Majesty the Queen promised to uphold in her Coronation Oath in 1953, with a Bible in her hand?’
Pastor Sherwood had been proclaiming the truth of Genesis 1:27, God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. A few days later, Maya Forstater, a former think tank researcher fired over ‘trans-critical’ tweets, was back in court to defend her right to free speech. She had lost her job at the Centre for Global Development after tweeting her opposition to gender self-identification, and stating that ‘men cannot change into women’. It may be several months before a judgement is made.