Update 11:28 AM PT — Howard-Browne has officially been arrested. He’s been booked for unlawful assembly and for violating health and safety rules.
Pastor Rodney Howard-Browne is head of the River at Tampa Bay Church. He has about 2,000 congregants.
Unlike many churches, who have suspended public worship because doctors and scientists say social distancing is necessary to slow the coronavirus pandemic, Pastor Howard-Browne’s church is open, and the faithful congregated there as recently as Sunday.
His church was packed.
During a recent service, he told his congregation to shake each other’s hands, adding. “Well I know they don’t want us to do this, but just turn around and greet two, three people. Tell them you love them, Jesus loves them. Listen, this has to be the safest place. If you cannot be saved in church, you in serious trouble.”
Through the power of Christ, he claims, he’ll cure coronavirus.
Pastor Howard-Browne said on March 17, “We are not stopping anything. I’ve got news for you, this church will never close. The only time the church will close is when the Rapture is taking place.”
The Rapture is an “end-times” event when all Christian believers who are alive, along with resurrected believers, will rise “in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air.”
The Pastor claims his church avails itself not only of blind faith but high tech as well.
“The Lord has helped us to secure our congregation. We brought in 13 machines that basically kill every virus in the place,” he said, “and if somebody walks through the door it’s like, it kills everything on them. If they sneeze, it shoots it down at like 100 mph. It’ll neutralize it in split seconds. We have the most sterile building in, I don’t know, all of America.”
Toilet Paper and Other Needs Will Be Met By the Lord
Pastor Howard-Browne, in a clip posted to Twitter, told his congregation that “this should be a time of supernatural sustenance, where what you have in your hand will multiply.”
“And every day there will be multiplications,” he continued. “You look at your toilet paper and you think I’m going to run out of toilet paper, but you have another roll where that one was and you don’t know how did that even take place.”
Howard-Brown added: “Are the toilet paper rolls getting together and having families now? What is taking place? When you look again, there’s still enough. You think you’re going to run out but when you look again there’s still enough. That’s supernatural sustenance.”
In addition to his church services, Pastor Howard-Browne said, “This Bible school is open because we’re raising up revivalists, not pansies.”
To date, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has not issues a statewide stay-at-home directive, as governors of other states have done.
Tampa’s county — Hillsborough — announced an official stay-at-home order starting March 27.
On top of recommendations from health officials, which include practicing social distancing at least six feet apart and scaling back “non-essential” businesses, the county also announced an order limiting all gatherings to 50 people, which includes churches.
Sunday’s service
In a blog posted to Revival’s website on March 22, Howard-Browne claimed that government orders limiting public gatherings, along with the social distancing recommendations, are “arbitrary in nature,” and a “violation of the principle of separation of church and state.”
“There has been no tested nor proven scientific or medical data to show us what ‘number’ of people that congregate together are a danger to society,” wrote Howard-Browne.
“The number has varied from place to place and moment by moment. Somewhere it’s 50, other places it’s 10 and there are still other variations. When politicians assign an ‘acceptable’ number of people allowed in a private church, they are reducing our right to Freedom of Religion to a first come, first served privilege.”
it is hoped that Pastor Howard-Browne will fare better than Virginia pastor Landon Spradlin. The good Pastor Spradlin posted on Facebook that the “mass hysteria” surrounding the coronavirus was designed to hurt Donald Trump.
Unhappily, Spradlin took a trip to New Orleans with his wife, and days later, he died of COVID-19.
Pastor Used to Be in MLMs
Pastor Howard-Browne is Pentecostal and he and his wife, Adonica, founded the River at Tampa Bay Church in 1996,. He was born in South Africa.
During his services Pastor Howard-Browne often performs laying of hands and worshipers can be seen giggling with apparent drunkenness, speaking in tongues, making animal noises, breaking into uncontrollable “holy laughter,” shaking with mirth, dancing in the aisles, or falling to the ground.
He refers to himself as “God’s bartender” and the “holy ghost bartender”.
At one time, Howard-Browne and his wife ,Adonica, were top-ranking (“Black Diamond executive level”) distributors for Monavie, a multi-level marketing company that sold acai berry juice-based beverages until folding in 2014 subsequent to a $182 million loan default and allegations of pyramid scheming, fraudulent advertising, and patent infringement.
Howard-Browne also served as a “North America Emerald Director” for the multi-level marketing company Jeunesse.
In July 2017, Howard-Browne was one of 17 evangelical pastors who visited the White House to pray for and lay hands on President Donald Trump.
Referring to Trump, Pastor Howard-Browne praised God for giving America a ‘Rambo’.
Hollywood and DC Beasts
In an October 2017 sermon at The River at Tampa Bay church, Howard-Browne alleged that “They sacrifice children at the highest levels in Hollywood. They drink blood of young kids. This is a fact”, continuing, “The human sacrifice and the cannibalism has been going on for years” in Hollywood and Washington, D.C.
In November 2017, two days after the Sutherland Springs church shooting, Pastor Howard-Browne said his church was not a gun-free zone and that he and the church’s pastors “are all heavily armed” and would use “deadly force”.
Howard-Browne on March 15 told his congregants that the pandemic was a “phantom plague” engineered by the Rockefeller Foundation to shut down churches and force people to receive a vaccine that would cause mass deaths, all as part of a population control scheme.
Several weeks prior, Howard-Browne claimed in a video that he would cure Florida of coronavirus.
But in a video he posted later he said he was “excited” and “emotional” at the prospect that the pandemic could be “the end of days.”
“For me, it doesn’t matter … Jesus is coming really, really soon,” he said, saying he has for years “prepared our people for what’s coming.”
“If you don’t believe God, and trust God, you will not make it in the days coming,” he said, adding he would continue to “lay hands” on fellow believers.
“God will protect our people,” he said. “And if you die to be with Jesus, so what’s the problem?”
Cheers and applause could be heard on a Tampa megachurch’s livestream Sunday from a few hundred people inside The River at Tampa Bay Church. The church is refusing to close its doors despite a “safer at home” order in effect in Hillsborough County meant to slow the spread of coronavirus.
Yesterday, he said at services, “They are trying to beat me up, you know, over having the church operational. But we are not non-essential.”
The church said in statement posted to their website, “We feel that it would be wrong for us to close our doors on them, at this time, or any time. In a time of crisis, people are fearful and in need of comfort and community.”
The Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement that they have “spoken to the leaders at the church regarding their Sunday services that were in direct violation of the President’s guidelines for America, recommendations made by the CDC, and orders from the Governor and the Hillsborough County Policy Group.”
As of Sunday night, both attorneys for the church and the sheriff’s office are in contact to determine how compliance can be achieved to keep the public safe.
A sign by Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office was seen placed across the street from The River Church in Tampa recommending social distancing practices.
So far there have been no reports of anyone catching coronavirus from Pastor Howard-Browne’s church.
However, several students at Jerry Falwell Jr’s university have been told to quarantine themselves after the evangelical leader reopened the campus of his Virginia’s Liberty University last week despite the growing coronavirus pandemic.
Falwell said he believed he is “protecting” students by keeping them on campus together.
Officials in Lynchburg, Virginia, where the university is located, did not approve the campus reopening.
As Liberty University’s spring break was drawing to a close this month, Falwell spoke with the physician who runs Liberty’s student health service about the rampaging coronavirus.
“We’ve lost the ability to corral this thing,” Dr. Thomas W. Eppes Jr. said he told Falwell.
But he did not urge him to close the school. “I just am not going to be so presumptuous as to say, ‘This is what you should do and this is what you shouldn’t do,’” Dr. Eppes told the NY Times.
Falwell reopened the university last week. As of Friday, Dr. Eppes said, nearly a dozen Liberty students were sick with symptoms that suggested Covid-19. Three were referred to local hospital centers for testing. An additional eight were told to self-isolate.
As of 8 p.m. on March 29, of three students tested, one was positive. However the student who tested positive lives off campus.
Of the 1,900 students who initially returned last week to campus, more than 800 had left.
