Proselytizing On The Way Out The Door

'You're missing Jesus' writes a Confluence Health supervisor to a subordinate after he quit rather than get vaccinated

In 2021, Confluence Health announced that it would require all health providers and staff to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 by Oct. 18. This led to some employees leaving the company in protest. One individual, a supervisor with a whole team of employees under him as well as a member of Grace City Church in Wenatchee, was one of the employees who quit.

Not long after that he decided to pen one of his employees a letter to tell her what’s missing in her life.

Spoiler alert: it’s Jesus.

That woman, who we’ll call Patricia, is still employed by Confluence and met up with me recently to show me the letter.

“It made me feel small. It hurt. It made me second guess everything I had ever told him thinking he was my friend but this letter was clearly a summary of his judgement of me,” she said. “It makes me wonder if that why I didn’t get raises or considered for promotions or assignments. The more I thought about it it made me really angry but then something switched in me that made me realize how cowardly and selfish of him to write that. That letter wasn’t for me. It was for him to feel like a hero and to make me feel small. It was a chickenshit pejorative ‘power’ move that was calculated to be sent at a certain time with certain words to avoid legal issues at work.”

The supervisor, who we’ll call Gideon, begins his letter stating that he felt he could be more articulate in writing than in face-to-face conversation. He spent the first three paragraphs espousing Patricia’s strengths and achievements. He gets to the heart of the matter in graph four:

“You may of may not remember that conversation,” Gideon wrote. “I do. It is one that I have reflected on regularly since it took place because my initial response was not what I wanted to say. What I should have simply said is, ‘You’re missing Jesus.’ I know that may come off preachy, or quite frankly, not the answer you are looking for. However, I still, more than ever now, stand by my initial conviction. Patricia, I believe Jesus is what you are missing.”

Gideon goes on the quote scripture extensively and then finishes the letter stating why he decided to write it.

“I would be remiss if I had not written you this letter. I had it on my heart to write this to you because I have seen your desire for more and your heart for people,” he wrote. “I believe that God has been calling you closer to Him. I will always be praying for you and your wonderful family. God is gracious, good and faithful, and his arms always remain wide open.”

Here is the two-page letter in its entirety:

Patricia reported that Gideon is a member of Grace City Church. Pastor Josh McPherson’s anti-vaccine stance is widely known, and he even claimed that vaccines are “supercharging the virus” with no evidence to back it up.

But not all Christians share GCC’s mistrust and outright animosity toward safe, free and effective vaccines. I actually wrote about what other Christian sects are teaching about Covid-19 vaccines in past pieces because as much as McPherson and his leadership team would like to pretend like they represent Christianity as a whole, they do not.

And this isn’t even the first case of a GCC-affiliated employee causing problems for Confluence Health. Then there’s the case of the alleged vaccine card forgery involving two former Douglas County Fire District first responders trying to avoid Covid vaccines, one of whom has close ties to GCC and even helped build Josh McPherson’s palatial personal residence.

And that’s just anti-vaccine activity that disrupted Confluence Health and the DCFD #2 internally. I, like Gideon, would be “remiss” if I didn’t note the myriad protests outside the Mares building in Wenatchee were anti-vaccine activists brought bullhorns and made so much noise outside that facility that doctors reported they had trouble hearing patients they were seeing inside exam rooms.

It’s possible that those protestors were not sent directly by GCC leaders, like what happened at the August 2021 Wenatchee School Board meeting. But many of them made no effort to hide their affiliation with Grace City Church, as evidenced by hoodie the man in this photo is wearing at one of the protests outside the Mares building.

From the proselytization directed at former employees to the religious exemption classes put on by Sage Hills and GCC to directing protestors to disrupt public meetings to Josh McPherson’s Covid-19 political manifestos – the impact Grace City Church has had not only on public health but also the community spirit and general morale in the Wenatchee Valley community is hard to quantify.

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Have you received a letter like Patricia’s? Or do have some other experience with GCC in your professional or personal life? I’d like to hear about it.

Send me an email at wenatcheejournalist@gmail.com.