Kanye West to headline evangelical mass prayer rally alongside homophobic hate preachers
Rapper Kanye West is expected to run for the US presidency (SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty)
Kanye West has announced that he will take part in a mass prayer rally starring multiple anti-LGBT+ hate preachers this Saturday, January 18.
Awaken2020 will be a huge evangelical prayer rally taking place in a Tempe, Arizona, football stadium which accommodates 50,000 people.
The event’s website says it will be “time for you to be part of the Jesus awakening that is shifting HISTORY. Open the door and enter into a new era, a new decade, of revival that is bringing a movement of signs and wonders, healing of the sick, and preaching of the gospel.”
The rapper and Trump-supporter will feature as a celebrity guest, and will play the free event along with his Sunday Service choir.
His involvement in the event follows an appearance in November at Lakewood Church, a megachurch in Houston, Texas. The church’s multimillionaire pastor, Joel Osteen, has repeatedly said that homosexuality is a sin.
West paid tribute to the notoriously anti-LGBT+ fast food chain Chick-Fil-A in his song ‘Closed on Sundays’, on his album Jesus is King.
Kanye West will feature alongside high profile anti-LGBT+ hate preachers.
One of the speakers at Awaken2020, Ché Ahn, is the leader of H Rock Church.
The church believes that marriage is “between one man and one woman”, and runs a ministry for healing “sexual and relational issues that ensnare Christians into unhealthy living” like “gender identity issues” and “same-sex attraction”.
Ahn has previously equated same-sex marriage with incest, and co-founded an organisation called The Call with another Awaken2020 speaker, Lou Engle, to protest same-sex marriage and abortion.
Engle is also fiercely anti-LGBT+, and is fond of recounting “visions” and “dreams” he has had.
In one post on his website he says: “We received a dream in which twin tornadoes had come to destroy America.
“Each tornado had the letters ‘HA HA’ written across it. We knew that the ‘H’ stood for homosexuality and the ‘A’ for abortion. These principalities were mocking spirits that had to be overcome in order to turn the nation.”
The Kanye West Jesus Is King album and film experience at The Forum on October 23, 2019 in Inglewood, California. (Winter/Getty Images for ABA)
Engle also previously said: “I sent my son to San Francisco with a group of people to pray for three years. They actually had a dream.
“They saw a three-story homosexual man, a huge giant, and they were throwing like rocks at it and nothing would happen to it, and then suddenly the foreman rolled a scroll and it read ‘Jehu’s Covenantal Community’, and the giant shriveled to nothing!”
Writing a blog post on a bill to ban conversion therapy in Massachusetts, he said: “He is coming to save and deliver. Soon hundreds if not thousands of testimonies of once gay men and women will overflow the refuge of lies that a person can’t change.
“God may just challenge this conversion therapy bill with his own conversion therapy, a movement of prayer and evangelism borne of great love, healing, and deliverance.”
A third Awaken2020 speaker, Cindy Jacobs, said if the Equality Act passed in the US, protecting LGBT+ from discrimination on the grounds of gender identity and sexual orientation, Christians would start a civil war.
She also previously said that same-sex marriage and the repeal of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ was leading to natural disasters and in relation to a string of bird deaths, she added: “It could be because we have said it’s OK for people who commit these kinds of acts to be recognised… these birds just fell out of the air.”
