Stedfast, church preaching anti-LGBT violence, has found new home at Arlington hotel

Protesters gathered outside the DoubleTree Hilton on North Watson Road in Arlington on Sunday to protest Stedfast Baptist Church, the congregation that has been kicked out of multiple buildings after its leaders preached violently homophobic rhetoric from the pulpit.

The church was most recently kicked out of its space in Watauga in December, and its leader Jonathan Shelley told his congregation that “the reality is nobody wants to lease to us.”

The church found a new home recently at the hotel. Protesters found out about it when a delivery driver who is friends with the group No Hate in Texas saw congregants walking into the hotel while he was working, organizer Lynette Sharp said Sunday.

A hotel assistant manager declined to talk to the Star-Telegram on Sunday morning and said reporters were not welcome on the hotel’s property.

Sharp, holding a sign that said, “We have eyes everywhere,” referring to the fact that protesters have always found where the church moves to, and dozens of other people gathered outside the hotel Sunday.

The protesters have been picketing outside the church’s various meeting places since 2019. Recently, protesters said they’ve been outraged by calls for LGBTQ people to be arrested, tried and executed for being gay and the idea that parents should physically punish their children at very young ages.

Sharp said she and other protesters don’t believe they’ll be able to stop Stedfast from preaching the things it does, but that won’t stop them from protesting. The violent anti-gay messages and the way the church’s leaders talk about disciplining children and wives is dangerous and somebody has to fight against it, she said.

“They can’t just stop because religious people don’t stop their indoctrination,” Sharp said. “But we want to warn the public. They do go out trying to recruit to their group, and if we save one family from joining this cult, that’s good for us.”

Sharp said it seems the group is running out of places to gather for Sunday services. Leasing a room at a hotel appears to her a desperate move, but she doesn’t expect the congregation to break up any time soon.

“They’re not going to quit, but then again we aren’t going to quit either,” Sharp said.

Stedfast and its leaders have faced increasing pushback since 2016, when the church’s then pastor, Donnie Romero, prayed for the victims of the shooting targeting gay nightclub Pulse in Orlando, Florida, to die. Romero resigned from the church in 2019 after protests. That year, organized protests started outside the church every Sunday.

But in 2022, the protests at the church rapidly grew in size after Shelley went to city council meetings, including one in Arlington in May 2022 demanding that Pride Month should be canceled and homosexuality should be outlawed and punishable by the death penalty.

Around the same time, another leader at the church, Dillon Awes, advocated for killing LGBTQ people in a Sunday sermon.

“These people should be put to death,” Awes told the congregation from the pulpit. “Every single homosexual in our country should be charged with a crime, the abomination of homosexuality that they have, they should be convicted in a lawful trial, they should be sentenced to death, they should be lined up against a wall and shot in the back of the head.”

Brandy Sotillo, the mother of an LGBT child and a woman who herself identifies as LGBT, has been protesting outside the church at every sermon for nine months. She was protesting when the church was based out of Hurst, the location from which it was evicted for breaching its lease and advocating violence against LGBT people, and showed up to the first sermon at the new location in Watauga.

In September, the church first faced possible eviction from its Watauga location, but that eviction case was dismissed after the church and the landlord reached an undisclosed agreement.

Shelley has recently asked his church members for donations, saying that legal fees resulting from lawsuits against the church have been stacking up. He describes himself as an advocate for free speech and true preaching of the Bible.

In a livestream from December, Shelley called Christians who disagree with his message “cowards” and said churches that don’t preach the same rhetoric only care about money.

Leaders of other churches in North Texas have called the sermons at Stedfast “appalling.” Last summer, area pastors told the Star-Telegram that the homophobia and other hate speech from the church is dangerous and could drive people to commit acts of violence in the name of religion. They said that’s not what Christianity is about.