Apr 2, 2020 4 min read

Invoking “Woodstock,” a hallucinogenic free-love festival held during 1969’s Summer of Love that drew crowds in the tens of thousands, a Washington County pastor told his audience this week that he plans to hold a massive Easter Sunday service in defiance of warnings about the COVID-19 pandemic.

Jonathan Shuttlesworth of Revival Today – whose website lists its address as a post office box in Prosperity – framed his comments as part of a fight for religious freedom in a live-streamed video Tuesday. A day earlier, Pastor Rodney Howard-Browne, the leader of a network of megachurches to which Shuttlesworth’s organization belongs, turned himself in to authorities in Florida to answer charges of violating public health rules and unlawful assembly because he’d refused to stop conducting worship services at his home church, The River at Tampa Bay.

“We’re going to hold an outdoor Easter blowout service,” said Shuttlesworth, during a “special tribute episode” for Howard-Browne. “A national gathering. (People) can come from all over, like Woodstock.”

The video didn’t include specifics of the plans, and it’s unclear whether or not Shuttlesworth was serious. No events are listed for Easter, which falls on April 12 this year, on his ministry’s website. A phone call and email to his ministry elicited no response, including to a question about why he chose Woodstock, normally remembered as a festival of sexual and psychedelic excess, for his analogy.

Shuttlesworth presented the decisions by various religious leaders not to hold face-to-face services – and authorities’ decisions to include them among prohibited activities – as an erosion of religious freedom.

Many religious organizations that now livestream prayers and services as leaders urge their flocks not to worship in person. Religious leaders around the country have said they’ve closed their services as a way of protecting believers and communities amid the outbreak of the contagious and sometimes-lethal respiratory illness.

Shuttlesworth balked at the notion of holding services remotely in the video.

“Try Skyping you wife only and see how long your marriage lasts,” Shuttlesworth said. “How do you lay hands on people online?” How do you baptize people online? … Of course, many ministries don’t care because they quit doing those things anyway.”

His tribute video lasted 74 minutes and included a segment when he asked viewers to pray with him. Shuttlesworth posts videos of himself and others engaged in prayer or giving commentary on his ministry’s website and other platforms. He appears sometimes in multiple videos on the same day. His wife, Adalis Shuttlesworth, is another star in the videos. She and fellow host Magalis Griffiths star in a podcast called “Adalis & Magalis.”

Jonathan Shuttlesworth was listed as having an Oakdale, Allegheny County, address on tax returns filed in 2017, the most recent year available. A calendar on Revival Today’s website lists upcoming events in various U.S. cities and in Montréal, Québec. 

Books are also part of the Shuttlesworths’ oeuvre. One of Jonathan’s books, Financial Overflow: 10 Bible Principles To Unlock Heaven’s Unending Supply retails is available in paperback for $14.99 on Amazon. Adalis is author of several passel children’s books under the imprint The Mighty Series, which sell for $19.99 on a dedicated blog.

Jonathan Shuttlesworth’s teachings fit into a tradition known as the Prosperity Gospel, whose more famous adherents include celebrity Pastor Joel Osteen. Adherents of the doctrine identify with multiple denominations – Howard-Browne, a white South African who settled in Florida in the 1990s, was raised as a Pentecostalist – but generally understand material wealth as a reflection of God’s favor.

In 2017, the writer of an essay published by WHYY, a Philadelphia-based public media outlet, described Shuttlesorth as having “interspersed the laying on of hands with tossing gift cards into the crowd is a testament to the power of money and hope in a place this poor” during an appearance in Camden, N.J.

Not every preacher in Shuttlesowrth’s orbit shares his views. At one point in his video about Howard-Browne, Shuttlesworth took exception to the writings of an unnamed fellow online preacher.

“I read a young pastor write  on his blog that it’s actually good that the coronavirus happened because it’s transferring authority from the pastor to the high priest of the home, and that’s what needs to happen, that, ‘I think it’s positive that now the father’s going to be the high priest of the home, instead of a pastor,'” Shuttlesworth said. “People have lost their freakin’ minds.”