Grace City Church Pastor One of 100 Invited to White House to Mark First 100 Days of Second Trump Administration

Josh McPherson joined fellow pastors Ryan Visconti and Josh Howerton on a tour led by Trump's personal pastor Paula White, then participated in praise and worship led by Sean Feucht

Grace City Church Pastor and Wenatchee Valley native Josh McPherson was one of 100 pastors invited to the White House last Friday for an event to help mark the first 100 days of Donald J. Trump’s second administration.

Trump himself did not attend the event but it was organized by the White House Faith Office and led by Trump’s longtime personal pastor Paula White, who heads up the newly-established organization that has made headlines recently.

White is no stranger to headlines though. She has been garnering them for decades due to her unique brand of property gospel preaching mixed with heavy doses of wisdom from “The Power of Positive Thinking” by Norman Vincent Peale – Trump’s favorite book.

Her ostentatious displays of wealth, like buying her mentor a Bentley for his birthday, and her promises of “supernatural blessings” for donations of $1,000 or more made her controversial, but not entirely unusual among the pantheon of American evangelical Christian “prophets,” preachers and pastors.

It’s her antics from the pulpit that once put her on the marginalized fringes of American Christianity.

But with Trump’s rise to power White moved from the fringes to the mainstream – at least for now.

Here she is calling on “African angels” to help Trump overturn the 2020 election results and “speaking in tongues” to talk with God.

White and White House Faith Office Director Jennifer Korn led the small group of men that included McPherson, his friend and pastor Josh Howerton of Lakepointe Church in Texas, Ryan Visconti of Generation Church in Arizona and Russell Johnson of The Pursuit NW for a tour of the White House.

Last year, McPherson and Howerton teamed up for “closed-door” pastor lessons that cost $1,500 a head and culminated with a backyard BBQ at Howerton’s $2 million estate in the Dallas suburbs. In January, Visconti was a guest on McPherson’s “Strongerman Nation” podcast when McPherson said empathy is a sin. That clip that would later make national news.

Howerton is also no stranger to controversy himself and faced backlash last year for his advice to young women on their wedding nights and for his plagiarized apology afterward.

In this clip the small group passes by Trump’s Tesla and Howerton seems overcome with emotion.

In this second clip, recorded by marketing and communication advisor Jeff Audas, you can see Korn showing McPherson where White House snipers take their positions and Audas asks White about her anniversary.

According to Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), the day was part of White and Korn’s mandate to elevate certain voices in American evangelicalism and to halt, “all forms of anti-Christian targeting and discrimination within the federal government.”

You can read CBN’s article covering the event here.

Controversial Christian nationalist, New Apostolic Reformation leader and graduate of Bethel’s “School of Supernatural Ministry,” Sean Feucht, led praise and worship for the group. Feucht rose to prominence and made a small fortune during the COVID-19 pandemic when he led protests against public health mandates in California and sued California Governor Gavin Newsom.

That suit, like a similar one McPherson brought against Washington State Governor Jay Inslee, failed.

You can read more about McPherson’s suit, and his first pandemic manifesto titled “We Do Not Consent,” here:

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Although the Calvinist McPherson and NAR adherent Feucht come from different sides of the tracks theologically, they are both firm believers that government must “submit” to religion, and have made that clear many times.

They also both seem to share an affinity for real estate. McPherson has spoken about the various investment properties he owns from the pulpit many times before, and he was involved in the “Freedom Hills” development in Cashmere. Feucht made millions during the pandemic and has amassed luxury homes across various states, according to the Trinity Foundation.

I actually got the opportunity to interview Feucht when he was in Yakima, Washington last year for a story I was working on for Crosscut. He didn’t like it when I pressed him for details about his beliefs that the US was founded as a “Christian nation” and that only Christians should have roles in its government. Seeing as he has associated with and employed members of paramilitary subversive groups like the Proud Boys as security in the past, I asked him if he believes it’s ever acceptable by God for a Christian to use violence to achieve political goals.

He walked away at that point and later complained about me on stage.

You can watch video of that here:

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The Responses

McPherson also posted a video from the praise and worship session on his Youtube channel with the caption “Jesus is above all powers and positions.”

And while the scene was held up by many as a “return” to the values that “made America great” others criticized the gathering, calling out what they see as hypocrisy and a subversion of actual Christian values.

One woman put together a slideshow of headlines over the footage of the pastors to illustrate the point:

But Biblical scholar, theologian and professor Pete Enns articulated his feelings about the scene more directly.

After Howerton took to social media to respond to critics, saying that those who had a problem with pastors praying in the White House had “lost the plot,” Enns rebuked the young pastor.

“If you’re a Christian pastor not realizing that singing at the White House while the administration is acting in such ungodly, unjust, unrighteous, indefensible ways – well my friend it is you who has lost the plot line,” Enns said.

You can watch his remarks here:

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