(LA Times) – Escalating its defiance of Los Angeles County public health orders, an evangelical megachurch in Sun Valley is gearing up to host an indoor conference expected to draw thousands of men from across the country in what officials fear could become a potential superspreader event.
Grace Community Church, whose pastor has preached for the last six months to his congregation of mostly unmasked members that the pandemic is a hoax, is expected to draw at least 3,000 people to its sprawling campus on Roscoe Boulevard from March 3 to 5.
The Shepherds’ Conference includes speakers who will present in the church, which holds about 3,000, and in smaller sessions throughout the church complex. A few weeks after last year’s conference, two older men from Washington who attended the event — one of them a 90-year-old pastor — died of complications from COVID-19, according to family members and news reports by Slavic Sacramento, a daily Russian-language news site in California.
It’s not known where the men contracted the virus or whether it was connected to the event. John MacArthur, the longtime pastor for Grace Community Church, said in an April podcast interview that the pastor was the “only person that we know of that came out of the Shepherds’ Conference and had that virus and ultimately died.” READ MORE
