KC man tackled, handcuffed at church after unauthorized but straight-from-Jesus prayer

A man who walked up to the pulpit at the church he’d grown up in, Holy Spirit Catholic Church in Overland Park, a few minutes before last Sunday’s 11 a.m. Mass was soon wrestled to the ground by four parishioners, including a deacon.

Jimbo Gillcrist had just started to recite his own version of the “Our Father,” and to say how we’re all God’s children. He had intended to talk to his fellow Catholics about care for the migrant, but he didn’t get to before being taken down, marched out and handcuffed by OP police.

“I thought the worst that could happen is maybe they’d try to shout me down and ask me to leave,” Gillcrist told me in an interview on Friday. “I in no way thought I’d be tackled in a church.”

When one of those who removed him called the police, they reported, “He has long hair and a beard.”

I know that because I listened to the 38-minute audio of the whole thing that was recorded on Gillcrist’s phone, which his removers took away from him but failed to stop from recording.

So I can also say that the police who responded were a lot more chill than the church folk, one of whom asked the others, “Is anybody armed?”

“Mine is in my car,” one responded. “Mine is, too,” said another. All the better to protect followers of Christ from someone quoting Christ?

Some horrible things have happened in churches throughout history, actually, so I could understand safety being a concern. But the back-and-forth between Gillcrist and those who made him leave suggests they were more focused on propriety.

Neither Holy Spirit’s pastor, Fr. Justin Hamilton, nor Deacon John Williams, who Gillcrist said was among those who removed him, answered messages asking about what happened.

If Gillcrist’s name sounds familiar, he’s the theology teacher fired from Kansas City’s Rockhurst High School last November after telling his students that it would be their moral duty as Catholics to stand up against mass deportations. So here he is, doing that, or trying to.

‘Brother, you need to leave’

After he started his prayer, a priest approached him at the pulpit: “Come with me. Turn the sound off! Brother, you need to leave.”

And then, after the sounds of a very quick takedown came this: “Stay still. We’re not going to hurt you.”

“You already used violence against me in a church.”

“You’re trespassing.”

“Trespassing? I’m a baptized Catholic.”

“It’s inappropriate.”

“To pray?”

“There’s an appropriate time.”

“It is the appropriate time.”

“No, you have to listen to your authorities, which is your pastor.”

As Gillcrist was taken out, he raised his voice for the first and only time, “Love your neighbor as yourself! And who is my neighbor?”

When police arrived, an officer asked those who had marched him out, “Did he do anything physical?”

“He pushed our priest off the steps” one answered, “but he didn’t fall or anything.”

A second officer arrived and said, “Is he the one who pushed the priest? Put him in handcuffs.”

“But I didn’t,” Gillcrist insisted.

We’ll figure it out, one of the officers said. And they did, while Gillcrist sat in the back of the patrol car in cuffs.

‘So I see you mention Gaza and Ukraine’

Officers asked Gillcrist some questions as telling as his answers, so I’m just going to let the recording play:

“Why are they saying you pushed a priest?”

“They were trying to pull me away from the pulpit. I grabbed the pulpit and just held on. I didn’t push anyone. They had four guys grabbing me and dragging me off there.”

“What made you want to preach today?”

“I’m worried about human beings, our brothers and sisters who live within our midst and are being targeted by the government.”

“What do you consider to be targeted by the government? What class of people are you …”

“Undocumented immigrants.”

“So you don’t agree with deportations and things like that?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Did you say anything like that?”

“I didn’t even get there.”

Looking at a copy of Gillcrist’s prepared remarks, the officer said, “So I see you mention Gaza and Ukraine in here. What’s your message with that?”

“They’re our brothers and sisters. When we stop seeing people that way it’s so easy to start making laws or enacting policies that harm them.”

In the end, another officer said he had talked to the pastor and there wouldn’t be any charges for now, but “if you do return here, you will be charged with trespassing.”

So was this a pointless provocation or an important disruption? I understand those who say church needs to be a refuge from politics. At the same time, I don’t see how you could take Matthew Chapter 25 seriously — “for I was a stranger and you gave me no welcome” — and register no protest right now.

Where is American Oscar Romero?

Jesus spoke a lot about care for the stranger, who is these days being snatched off the street without any due process and used by smiling Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem as a prop — with a shaved head and few clothes, looking shamefully for us not unlike a prisoner in Dachau. If you’re an actress from Canada, maybe things will eventually be made right, but if not, who knows?

The danger everyone ought to see is that if you can be picked up and shipped out without any hearing for supporting Palestinians — and without due process, we really don’t know that it’s any more than that — then you can also be sent away for supporting Israel, or Ukraine. Or Jesus, or even Donald Trump.

Gillcrist belongs to a different, less conservative parish now. But what he was thinking in going to Holy Spirit, he said, is that those in his original faith home may not hear his point of view very often. If he could move even one person who doesn’t like what’s going on a little closer to speaking out about that, he had to try. Of course, his effort might also have had the opposite effect.

He went, too, because he sees the Catholic Church in the U.S. as silent when it should be strong. “Where is the American Romero?” he asked, referring to Oscar Romero, the sainted Salvadoran archbishop assassinated in 1980 for standing up against a repressive regime.

Gillcrist had just started speaking when he was stopped, so I don’t know that he had the chance to change that one mind, or that he would have even if he’d been allowed to finish.

I do know, however, that many are wondering how to make this country a place where both people and the rule of law matter again. They’re not sure how to stop our slide into autocracy. I’m not, either, but we do know we have to try and then try some more.

Whether or not Gillcrist went about it the right away, I give him credit for looking for different ways to express his straight-from-Jesus dissent. Because for those of us revulsed by what’s going on, smiling along like we’re still in the “before times” is no longer possible.