This is Pastor Tim’s article which appeared in the Evening Leader on Tuesday, Jan 28, 2025
On Tuesday, Jan 21, the newly sworn in President Trump and his wife, Melania, along with VP JD Vance and his wife, Usha, and a collection of cabinet officials went to church at St John’s Episicpal Church in Washington DC for a traditional prayer service that is held after the inauguration of a new president. That is nothing out of the ordinary, Presidents have been attending church at St Johns for over a century. Back in October, it had been announced that Bishop Mariann Budde was going to be preaching that evening. Again, nothing out of the ordinary for the church to invite a high ranking official to conduct a service under these circumstances.
Bishop Budde came to this service with an agenda and she addressed a significant part of her sermon at Trump by directly calling him out from the pulpit. She was concerned with the fact that Trump is going to enforce immigration laws and he was no longer going to give preferential treatment to certain identity groups. Bishop Budde addressed her concerns publicly from the pulpit to President Trump. To call a move like this unprofessional is a massive understatement.
I am not going to address any of what she had to say because my opinion on what she did would not change even if I agreed with her, which I do not. I want to assure anyone who attends services at Wayne Street, there is no circumstance where I would ever do anything like this. If I want to address anything with you, we will talk in private. To air grievances like this in a public forum turns the church’s pulpit into a bully pulpit and that should never be done.
If she wanted to speak her mind, she should have requested a meeting with President Trump. Now I know what you will say, he would not have taken the meeting, which is true. However, President Trump also would not take a meeting with me either. To use her time in the pulpit to speak directly to one person in the congregation is a disgrace to the office she holds. Even if she would have taken the time in the pulpit to speak about how President Trump is the greatest president since George Washington, I would not agree with that either. My frustration with what she did has nothing to do with her opinion, it has to do with what is appropriate to the situation. She had a whole congregation of people there and she turned her attention toward one person. That is an abuse of the office of clergy and should not have been done.
My original thought on this was that I was amazed that someone in the president’s orbit did not check into the background of this Bishop and make sure something like this did not happen. But after considering it for a moment, I am sure that the team around Trump expected a Bishop to be more professional than this.
We can debate the Christian position on immigration, identity preference, and politics, but that debate can not come from the pulpit where there is no chance for response. She had a captive audience and she decided to make a political statement rather than speak words of grace and inspiration. She made that special opportunity about her politics, and I guess to that end, her stunt worked. I wrote a whole article about her when I probably would never have known her name had she done what she was supposed to do. Instead of focusing on God speaking words of conviction and comfort through this Bishop, the Bishop hijacked the message to speak to her own politics.
I was very disappointed by what happened here because it makes all of us who have the God-given privilege to stand in church pulpits look bad. But what is the most disheartening about this is could you imagine if President Biden would have attended church and someone decided to call him out from the pulpit while he was in attendance? This Bishop was celebrated and invited on shows like the View. Had someone attacked President Biden and then went on Sean Hannity’s show afterward, I would be equally upset with that.