Four Christian pastors want their faith to override public safety concerns in a Colorado park
Northglenn officials say the church gatherings aimed at helping the homeless are creating more problems than they solve
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Four pastors are suing the city of Northglenn, Colorado (just outside Denver) for passing new rules that prevent them from hosting lunch events for the homeless at a local park. They say the city is targeting them specifically and this prevents them from practicing their faith.
The allegations they make, however, don’t match the realities on the ground.
The pastors—David Baca of The Crossing Church in Westminster, Dustin Mackintosh of Next Step Christian Church in Thornton, and Ronald Brent Denny and David McCamish of Brave Church in Westminster—say in the lawsuit filed by the right-wing American Center for Law and Justice that they’ve been handing out lunches to the homeless and holding prayer sessions for years at E.B. Rains, Jr. Memorial Park, a 28-acre area with multiple sports fields, pavilions, skatepark, and a lake.
The pavilions were always open to anyone who wanted to use them (unless they were reserved in advance), and since mid-2020, the pastors have been meeting twice a week there for Bible study, prayers, and handing out meals. They say in the lawsuit that “feeding, serving, and ministering to the local community, including the homeless community, is a religious exercise central to their faith.” Each of those events draws in between 20-40 people.
But in mid-2024, city officials began questioning if these gatherings could continue. The lawsuit claims the officials were worried about the park becoming a “magnet” for the homeless, specifically due to safety concerns. In one case, the city cited “an assault involving a child by a homeless individual,” but the pastors said that didn’t occur on a day they were there.
The city apparently told the pastors they could make use of a different public building, but they rejected the offer because they wouldn’t be allowed to use the facility’s kitchen or electricity. (Which was a strange claim given that neither was available in the park, and there’s no biblical mandate to have access to a kitchen.)
It seemed like the pastors had no intentions of leaving.
And then, coincidentally or not, Northglenn officials suggested and approved a new policy regarding the park earlier this year. The relevant parts of City Resolution 54 said that the new policy would prevent groups of 5 or more people from using the pavilion or other non-athletic spaces on a “recurrent basis” unless they had permission from the city.
The lawsuit says the policy is intended to block the pastors specifically, but it would affect other groups as well: “Under the plain language of CR-54, the rule would criminalize a family of five or more meeting weekly for a picnic, a running club gathering every Saturday, or five coworkers sharing lunch at a pavilion every Thursday.” (They’re not entirely wrong there. The rule would apply to those groups unless they had permission to meet in advance. But I’m not sure why a “running club” would be hogging a pavilion instead of, you know, moving.)
The bottom line is that while CR-54 may have been passed to prevent the churches from having their gatherings, it would be illegal if the policy only targeted those churches. But it doesn’t. The rules appear to apply to everyone equally.
It looked like there was nothing the pastors could do. But they attempted to point out how this was aimed directly at them. For example, once the new policy was adopted, law enforcement officials “did not know how to code it,” the said, as if confusion about the new rule automatically nullified it.
One of the pastors was also written up, he says, just for being in the park on his own. (“Upon information and belief, prior to being cited, officers told the men that they only wanted to give them a warning, but after speaking back and forth with command over the phone, the officers were instructed to cite the individuals from the churches.”)
In addition, the pastors said that other large groups in the area were not penalized for meeting in a pavilion—including a seniors’ fitness group and an adult day care service—though no details were provided about the nature of those gatherings, so it’s not clear if the comparisons are appropriate.
The pastors claim “the selective enforcement against the religious ministry, while numerous other groups continue to use the Park freely, demonstrates that the City’s actions are directed at religious exercise itself.”
But according to the Denver Post, the lawsuit leaves out a lot of relevant information. Like the fact that the church gatherings are directly leading to incidents of violence in the park:
What’s not mentioned in the lawsuit, which was filed in federal court on Nov. 14, is a half-dozen troubling incidents the city contends have occurred at the park over the last few years. They include a woman wounded in a stabbing, an unregistered sex offender slipping a 7-year-old child alcohol in a bathroom, a man harassing a child and a Northglenn police officer getting hit over the head with a glass bottle.
According to a memo prepared for a special council meeting this week, the alleged perpetrator in each incident was an attendee of the church gatherings in the park, which until recently had been held twice weekly.
The lawsuit cites one specific incident and says it happened on a day the pastors weren’t even there. But there appear to be many, many more incidents that go unmentioned that happened when they were definitely there. In fact, of the 322 people in the park who have generated phone calls to the police over the past two years, “at least 49 have been connected to the lunch program,” the city said, adding, “For comparison, on 4th of July 2025 there were zero calls for service at E.B. Rains, Jr. Memorial Park.”
The city said that they offered the pastors space inside their Human Services Building “at no cost,” but the pastors didn’t want that. What about renting out the pavilions while implementing “participant registration to ensure accountability for conduct within the park”? That suggestion was rejected.
During the special meeting held on November 17, the city tried to make clear that they wanted to help unhoused people, and to that end, they have six employees who specifically handle crisis response, three outreach days around the park each week, and walk-in resource hours for case management where they can help unhoused people get resources they need (and that includes directing them to local churches that offer services). They also have grants to help those struggling with drug or alcohol addiction. In short, the church makes it sound like they’re helping the homeless because the city isn’t. The city says otherwise.
Officials also noted that calls about homelessness have gone down across all of Northglenn over the past three years… but they’ve gone up in the park specifically.
Given all that, the city says they’re not trying to target religion at all. They just want to fix a growing concern that the churches are making worse:
Northglenn City Manager Heather Geyer said she was unable to go into details, given the litigation the city faces.
But the June measure, she said, “had nothing to do with religion and everything to do with keeping our park spaces and park amenities safe and open to general public use, and to ensure that no single use of any park impacts or excludes individual members of the public from enjoying the amenities.”
Beyond that, residents have raised questions about why the churches don’t use their own buildings to feed the hungry. The churches don’t have an answer to that.
For now, the city has chosen not to make any revisions to CR-54. They need more time to decide if changes need to be made or if the policy should be rescinded entirely. Then again, it’s possible that this lawsuit could force those changes before city officials have time to consider any other alternatives.
For now, though, this lawsuit seems to expose how these pastors just want special treatment. They’re not being persecuted; they’re being told to follow the same rules as everyone else while keeping in mind that this is a public park that must be used by the whole community. It’s not a makeshift church that one group of people can treat as their private gathering spot. Their insistence that any limit on their conduct is an attack on Christianity is a tactic we’ve seen before: redefine religious liberty as the right to ignore neutral rules, evade responsibility, and shift the consequences of their actions onto the public. The city introduced a policy that was neutral on the surface, but these men are crying foul because they treat neutrality as oppression.
To be clear, the city isn’t cracking down on religious charity; they’re responding to documented violence, behavioral issues, and rising public safety concerns that trace back directly to the pastors’ services. They offered alternatives. They offered indoor space. They offered a way to continue the program with accountability. But the pastors said no every time because they’re not really concerned about feeding the hungry. They want to do it in a public way, without oversight, without responsibility, and without regard for how their gatherings might affect others who use that space.
A city cannot ignore real harm just because the people causing it invoke Jesus.
Based on the claims in the lawsuit, it’s hard to see why the pastors don’t want to accept any of the alternatives. If helping the homeless was the priority, then why not work with city staffers who specialize in that? Instead, they’re holding events that lead to more disruption and don’t fix any of the problems in the long-term. They appear to be more concerned with optics than anything else.
Northglenn is right to push back against what these pastors are doing. It’s not Christian persecution to hold pastors accountable for what they do in public spaces. If anything, this whole dispute shows how quickly good intentions can cover up for negligence. But religion should never be an excuse for city leaders to avoid keeping their communities safe.
The religious right never stops trying to mark their territory in the public square. When thwarted, they claim they are being persecuted for their faith and the victims of the godless left. There are few groups with a greater sense of entitlement than the Evangelical preachers.
If a person thinks they're being persecuted, they'll find something to back that up, even if it is unreasonable.
If these pastors cared about the homeless situation, they'd be working with the city to solve the problem; instead, they're fighting the city, because it isn't about helping the homeless at all - it's about proselytizing to a captive audience.