Earlier today MoreThanTheCurve.com published an article on a disturbance that recently took place during Mass at Saint Matthew Parish. After posting the article, we received a tip that there was a similar incident at a West Conshohocken church the week prior.

We contacted BlueStone Church and received a message back from John Stange, who led the service the evening of the disturbance. He recorded the entire service, so there is audio. He also wrote about it on his blog.

The audio (we have it cued to just before the shouting):

From Stange’s blog:

The front of the church is very close to the edge of the road, and while I spoke this evening about the sacrificial love of Jesus and how Jesus calls us to love one another with that same kind of sacrificial love, I noticed that a man pulled his car up to the entrance of the church and he sat there during the course of the message for over 35 minutes. At first, I assumed he was waiting to pick someone up from one of the nearby homes. Then I wondered if he was planning to attend the service, but wasn’t sure where to park. But soon it became clear that he wanted to hear the message from his car, so he parked in the fire lane outside the church and listened. It seemed a little curious to me, but didn’t immediately strike me as alarming.

As I was wrapping up the message, he began yelling into the building. I wasn’t sure what he was saying at first, so I stopped speaking and walked toward him so I could engage in conversation with him. It quickly became clear that he took great offense to what I was preaching about, and in the midst of yelling at me he stated, “You press on my nerves. You press on Muslims’ nerves. You’re going straight to Hell on the day of judgment.” Apparently, he was Muslim and he wanted to make sure that I knew he had a problem with the Christian message I was preaching.

Needless to say, this experience made all of us uncomfortable. When he left, there was some nervous laughter in the room as we tried to process what had just happened, but as we talked about it a little further, the experience made us all rather uneasy. We notified the police and gave them his description and a description of the vehicle. We also took time to pray for this man that the Lord would open his eyes and his heart to see the truth.

In gathering information for the article about what occurred at Saint Matthew Parish, we had one source that told us that the man mentioned Allah when he shouted during Mass. While we have not confirmed the the same person disrupted both church services, the message was similar in each incident.

More to come.

Photo: BlueStone Church