The Grinch Strikes with “No Explanation” Thanks Victory Church Lakeland

By Billy Townsend 

The Voctave concert isn’t sold out — because it’s free, which is not a thing Voctave seems to do normally. They are, after all, professional traveling performers. Tours do not pay for themselves. See below: one of these concerts is not like the others.

Indeed, Voctave had a paid show set up for the cavernous campus of Victory Christian on Dec. 6, which Victory was hyping relentlessly on social media and even NPR.

And then this happened, with “no explanation.”

No explanation pretty loudly suggests an explanation — as this TikTokker makes bluntly clear.

What Victory genius of sleuthing discovered an acapella singing group might have gay people in it?

The “no explanation” thing typifies what institutions (secular and otherwise) do when they know they’re wrong and stupid. Victory didn’t want to say this in public:

“We’re cancelling this concert you’re all so excited about because we’re shocked, shocked to learn some of the singers might be gay; and we can’t have gay people infecting our congregation with their gay sound cooties as they celebrate, with beautiful voices, the birth of our Lord and savior.”

So they said nothing.

Institutional bigotry is always cowardly before anything else — even before it’s hateful.

Thus, I’m not going to bother contacting the cowardly secular institution of Victory Church to verify its unstated reason for this moment of fake religious cancel culture. Its leaders would just lie to me anyway. If they want to articulate their reason, they can email it; and I will print it verbatim, with my assessment of its veracity.

While they’re at it, if they want, Victory “leaders” can articulate who within Victory’s congregation and/or leadership bureaucracy had the power to go:

• Wait, you mean there might be gay people in the group?
• Ok, that means we have to cancel and anger everybody who bought a ticket and make fools of ourselves.

Voctave’s statement cites the “executive pastor” as the messenger — but I seriously doubt the “executive pastor” would embarrass himself and his institution so profoundly because he suddenly discovered some of the acappella singers in this picture might be gay.

Somebody (or some faction) pushed/threatened him.

That’s a fascinating dynamic to me, and the people in Victory’s congregation deserve to know who wields that kind of power within their institution. I’d be happy to tell them. So send me the story, anonymously, if you want.

Enough about Victory, let’s praise FUMC

I don’t really know this part of the story with any detail, either; but I love the outcome.

It appears that somebody at First United Methodist Church wrote a check or authorized a check paying for Voctave to perform for free on Saturday night.

The new, free concert “sold out” in four hours.

To be clear, I have not seen any FUMC statement casting this free concert as a rebuke to Victory’s behavior. And I’m sure they don’t want to get into any church-on-church battle.

So let’s just call it a better example of how to Jesus — a message born of acts. And let’s praise that. (But if anyone wants to share the details of how this came about, you know where to find me.)

Editor’s Note: The views expressed by Billy Townsend do not necessarily reflect those held by the staff of the Lakeland Gazette. The Gazette provides a venue for people to express their opinions concerning any subject matter and presents this as “opinion,” not news.