Repent Amarillo: Saving sinners through spiritual warfare

The first of a three-part series.

By George Schwarz

The Amarillo Independent

On its Web site, Repent Amarillo, now a chapter of Raven Ministries, promises to wage spiritual warfare. The militaristic Web site calls for confrontation and boldness while being composed and loving.

Further, those activities are not protests, which Repent Amarillo considers political, but “witnessing” to the unsaved.

But some of the targets of Repent Amarillo say the religious group goes too far, invading privacy and jeopardizing jobs. Further, some of the group’s activities interfere with legitimate businesses doing nothing illegal or immoral.

To the Amarillo Independent, in talking to David Grisham, the head of Repent Amarillo, and John “Big John” Leinen, both seemed passionate and sincere. But targets of Repent Amarillo claim that when the group has acted against those whom it views as sinners, it has invaded privacy, jeopardized jobs and affected businesses.

Specifically, this investigation found:

· Members of Repent Amarillo collect the license plate numbers of cars in the lots of businesses of which it disapproves — specifically the Route 66 Swingers Club — and contacts the owners of the vehicles.

· Route 66 Swingers Club says members of Repent Amarillo have contacted or tried to contact employers of members in attempts to get the employees fired. In some cases, swingers say, ·Repent Amarillo has succeeded. Some club members have gone on the record, but others fear for their current jobs and would not do so. Repent Amarillo denies it has contacted employers.

· At least one member of Repent Amarillo has a criminal record. Specifically, Russell Shane Grisham, a member of Repent Amarillo and son of David Grisham, was placed on deferred adjudication after admitting he hacked into the Amarillo Independent School District’s computer system, while other members acknowledge they were former gang members. Leinen said he was a gang member as a child.

· Several downtown business owners have said Repent Amarillo interferes with their businesses by harassing customers coming into their venues. Other business owners did not want to go on the record about the situation.

Why they do it: Saved through an epiphany

David Grisham said he led a dissolute life before he was saved.

“I am an open book in that area,” he said. “Now, there are some things I won’t discuss because I’m not very proud of them and they’re between me and God.”

He said he was sexually irresponsible, committing fornication and adultery and drunkenness. He is on his fourth marriage, but the other three were before he was saved and it will stick, he said, “Till we’re dead or raptured. I prefer rapture.”

His salvation came in an epiphany in 2007, while Pantex guards were on strike.

He took a cruise to Puerto Progresso and Cozumel with his wife. But they didn’t have much money beyond the prepaid cruise. Leaving the others, who took expensive jeep tours, they rented a small motor scooter to go to some Mayan ruins and after walking along a clear path in the jungle looking at the ruins, they sat at a small shelter.

“I wasn’t thinking about anything in particular and I heard, and I guess you could say it was in my ears, but it was something other people couldn’t hear,” he said. “Really it was in my heart and my spirit. I heard the voice of the Lord say, ‘David, what do you see?’”

In his head he replied, “I see the gravestones of a dead, godless society. I see these ruins as gravestones of a dead pagan world.”

He decided this was a revelation that all the kingdoms the devil tempted Jesus with are gone except Israel. That Israel was scattered and is now together as a nation fulfills Ezekiel’s 2,500-year-old prophecy and proves the world is in its last days. If America doesn’t repent and embrace God, it will also become a dead, pagan ruin, he said. “And immediately after receiving this revelation, my wife, who hadn’t heard anything I’d said, turned, looked at me and she said, ‘David, what do you see?’”

When you hear the voice of God, he told this reporter, you’re never the same and he has the new responsibility to do something about America’s decline. And that has to start in your own hometown. He added that Jesus Christ is returning soon and we have to get our house in order. Gay marriage and abortion are two evils that must be stopped and Christians need to stand up to fight them legally and without violence. Fulfilling Christ’s commandments would save America, he said passionately.

How Repent Amarillo targets witnessing

David Grisham and Leinen talked in an extensive interview with an Amarillo Independent reporter at Grisham’s modest home Monday. Leinen shot video and Grisham recorded the interview, as did the reporter.

Grisham said the scriptures guide the group.

“We go by the Bible,” he said. “If we believe it’s a false religion, which according to Christ, He is the only way to God, John 14:6, ‘I am the way, the truth and the light. No one comes to the Father but by me.’ Then we regard anything that’s outside of Christianity as a false religion. And so that’s a spiritual concern.”

Repent Amarillo’s Web site has a map noting a variety of places in Amarillo that concern the group. The map (http://www.repentamarillo.com/map.php) includes sexually oriented business, occult witchcraft, idol worship and “compromised church’s” (sic). For example, it lists mainline churches such as St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church because it is “(r)eferred to on OUTstanding Amarillo’s ( Homosexual activists) website as a ‘gay friendly’ church. In other words, they do not tell homosexuals who attend this church that they must repent of the sin of homosexuality. This a (sic) serious violation of scripture.”

The concerns also include the Islamic Center and Buddhist Temple, he said.

Grisham said the abundance of churches in Amarillo doesn’t protect people from the devil lurking elsewhere in the community. The map is designed to “illuminate the dark areas of our city” so people can pray about those places and so Repent Amarillo can “witness” at those sites. But those aren’t the only places with which Repent Amarillo has spiritual concerns.

“But we’d cover up the map with pins if we did that,” he said. “We were concentrating on some of the more serious ones.”

Repent Amarillo targets bars because the main reason people go to bars is to drink to excess and pick up partners.

“I have done that in the past, many times in the past,” Grisham said. “So the bars have spiritual concern because of drunkenness and fornication — things like that.”

“Alcohol is a huge, huge problem in our society,” he said, adding that teen nights, such as the one last summer at Le Chateau, are a gateway for young people to experience the bar scene, “training them up” to run into the bars. Alcohol kills more people than do guns, he asserted, and parents should have more concern about children being exposed to the party life in bars than guns.

He called Amarillo a dangerous place at night for unsupervised teens and said some of the youths attending the teen night at Le Chateau were congregating at the parking lot at Polk and Seventh. Some of the teens brought the alcohol stored in their cars into the bar and then ended up throwing up in the street outside the bar. But, Grisham acknowledged, the bar didn’t provide the alcohol.

Next Week: How Repent Amarillo conducts spiritual warfare