Tara Palmieri

Jesus did it.

That's what Jesus did when he walked in and flipped the tables over.

And we were doing things like that.

But what was happening is there were a whole group of people that were just like, this is getting too political.

We don't want politics in the church, which, Don, as you know,

is a very privileged thing to say.

And we just kept insisting, no, there are people all around our community and within our collective that are being wounded and hurt by the actions of this administration and this policy.

And the hijacking of Christianity is unacceptable.

And so we just kept speaking on it.

Over time, we started my first day, there was 600 plus people.

And eventually, it wasn't immediate exodus, but over time, we dropped down to our lowest was 12 people, which, Don, was quite the moment when you show up on a Sunday morning gathering and you look out and you have seen the building completely full a couple services times over to now have one gathering and 12 people were there.

And I remember having a call with our team, our leadership team, and I had to just explain to them, hey, we're going to have to let go all of our staff.

So we lost all of our money.

I had to make that terrible call of calling all of our staff members saying, hey, you're going to have to be let go.

We can't afford to keep you on.

And to my surprise, Don, most of them, if not all of them, were like, OK, we're still here.

We still believe in this.

Let's go.

And then COVID happened, which everybody knows this, but a year and a half, we didn't meet at all except online.

And there were just a handful of us.