Coral Ridge Presbyterian pastor says Budde's 'mean' sermon sowed division: 'Painful to listen'
Bishop's sermon showed mainline decay, Pastor Rob Pacienza said
A Presbyterian pastor who attended the inaugural prayer service at the Washington National Cathedral last week claimed Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde's sermon sowed the division she was preaching against.
Rob Pacienza, who serves as senior pastor at Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, further suggested during a recent interview with The Christian Post that Budde's worldview is symptomatic of the decay within mainline Protestantism that is increasingly rendering its churches irrelevant.
"It wasn’t really a sermon," he said of Budde’s message. "It was a lecture that really came across as mean and divisive. And I think the irony was she attempted to preach on unity, but her rhetoric and her very unwelcoming spirit — from the beginning to the end of her message — actually created more division in the end."
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Budde, who has served as bishop of Washington since 2011, continues to draw media attention a week after her sermon at the Service of Prayer for the Nation at the cathedral, during which she called for "unity" while imploring President Donald Trump to "have mercy" on "scared" people such as "gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican and independent families."
Budde also said Trump should be merciful toward illegal immigrants, who she described as "the people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings, who labor in poultry farms and meat-packing plants, who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals."
Pacienza, who has pastored the church founded by the late D. James Kennedy since 2016, drew attention on X last week when he described Budde's sermon as "painful to listen live to" as she lectured to Trump while explicitly promoting "a secular worldview and woke agenda.”
Pacienza, who had been invited to the service in the National Cathedral by Martin Luther King Jr.'s niece, Alveda King, told CP he knew something of Budde's antagonism toward Trump and his policies, and thought it was "an interesting choice" when he saw she was listed in the bulletin to deliver the sermon.
“I could tell right off the bat, as soon as she started delivering the message, that this was going to be her way of putting the president and his administration in their place,” he said.
Pacienza acknowledged that clergy are at times called to rebuke civil authorities, but noted "there's a time and place for it."
“There are certainly examples in Scripture — Moses petitioning Pharaoh, Daniel petitioning Nebuchadnezzar — but it was always for the sake of unity, using biblical truth, using the faithful Word of God in order to bring about unity, to bring about correction.”
Pacienza's own denomination, the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), agreed during its 50th General Assembly in 2023 to formally petition both federal and state authorities in the U.S. to "renounce the sin" of promoting transgender procedures for minors.
Budde's tactic, Pacienza argued, was not in that same spirit.
“The problem was none of her arguments were rooted in biblical truth,” he said. "They were all rooted in progressive politics and a secular worldview. She was advocating for transgenderism. She was advocating for open borders. She was advocating for lawlessness in America. She was advocating for an administration to embrace sexuality that is against God's design."
"So yes, there is a time and a place to petition our leaders. There's a time and place to speak truth to power. But the question is, how do you define that truth? [Budde's] certainly wasn't biblical truth. It wasn't grounded in God's Word. It was grounded in progressive politics and secular, woke ideologies."
Budde went on a left-wing media blitz in the wake of her sermon last week and was showered with praise on shows such as "The View" and "The Rachel Maddow Show."
Despite the fawning attention she has received from liberal media, Pacienza suggested that Budde's sermon was symptomatic of the progressive Christianity that is effectively destroying mainline Protestantism by replacing the biblical Gospel with "a social gospel."
"When you dig deep, it’s really not biblical truth at all," he said. "It's more of a social gospel. It's more an attempt to be culturally relevant. They replace biblical truth with culturally relevant progressive policies and ideologies like wokeism and Marxism."
The slide toward heresy began a century ago with the mainline's embrace of liberalism, the pastor noted, and its ultimate fruit has been the steady withering of those denominations that have preached it.
"These churches are dying: many of them are just a museum on Sunday mornings for people to tour and sight-see," he said, adding that churches that have stood fast against "worldly ideologies and progressive politics" are flourishing.
"When you look at the surveys and the statistics, the churches that are grounded in God's Word and preaching the whole counsel of God and applying it to all of life — regardless of what the culture says, and regardless of where the culture is going — those churches and denominations are growing,” he said. "The mainline churches and denominations, as we saw at the National Cathedral, churches like these are dying."
"They're becoming irrelevant, and it's really not what people are hungry for. They're hungry for God's Word. They're hungry for the truth. Unfortunately, as you saw [last week], you're not going to get that at the National Cathedral," he added.
Jon Brown is a reporter for The Christian Post. Send news tips to jon.brown@christianpost.com
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