A professional protester known for harassing worshippers at Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s church in Washington, D.C., has emerged as a key figure in the disruption of Sunday’s service at Cities Church in St. Paul, Minnesota.
William Kelly, a self-described combat veteran, was captured on video storming into the sanctuary with a mob of other activists associated with Black Lives Matter and the Racial Justice Network. The demonstrators chanted “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” and screamed at congregants, labeling them “fake Christians” because one of the church’s pastors also serves as an ICE field director. Jonathan Parnell, lead pastor of the Southern Baptist church, called the protestors “shameful” and eventually chose to end the service after some of the children started crying.
Kevin Ezell, head of the Southern Baptists’ mission board, said on X that he had spoken to Cities Church staff members who reported that “the kids in the worship service were terrified.” In a later post he added, “These intimidating tactics are not only illegal but cowardly. No cause justifies traumatizing families as they worship and desecrate a sacred space.”
Many on social media, including Deputy Undersecretary of War Justin Overbaugh, immediately identified Kelly as the same man regularly posted outside Hegseth’s church in Washington. Joe Rigney, a founding pastor of Cities Church in St. Paul who also helped plant Christ Church in D.C., said Kelly and his fellow protestors have regularly disrupted their D.C. worship services for the past six months.
“They’ll play music or yell and scream and use bullhorns and loud sound amplification to try to prevent us from singing psalms and hearing the Word preached,” he told The Daily Wire. One member was transported to the hospital after a protester screaming into a bullhorn shattered his eardrum. Rigney said Kelly’s tactics have also included screaming obscenities at minors as families are entering the sanctuary, forcing a need for police escorts. “They’ve sought to disrupt Christian worship gatherings now in multiple places.”
Kelly and his fellow activists are allegedly protesting an ICE agent fatally shooting Renee Good during a raid in Minneapolis earlier this month. But Rigney, who pastored Cities Church and lived in Minneapolis for seven years before he joined Christ Church, notes that he has no connection to Kelly’s ostensible reasons for harassing his new congregation, which Kelly has targeted for being “Christian nationalist.” Rigney believes the cause isn’t important to Kelly or his compatriots, who he accuses of being part of a network of paid activists who wait for an opportune opening to wreak havoc.
“I think Minneapolis, because of the George Floyd riots, the Black Lives Matter organizations were already sort of there but had just kind of been latent and inactive,” Rigney said. “And now there’s a new thing that has kind of triggered them … So I think that the same groups that were agitating about that then have found a kind of a new cause of the moment to allow them to protest.”
Rigney says he hopes the Trump administration will prosecute everyone involved in disrupting these church services to “send a message that that’s unacceptable.” And the Department of Justice has already announced that it is investigating the protest for violations of federal civil rights laws and the FACE Act, which protects religious worshippers from intimidation or obstruction based on ideological differences. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon called the protest “UnAmerican and outrageous.”
Local Minneapolis law enforcement does not look likely to act. The police department monitored the service but made no immediate arrests as demonstrators left the building after the service had been stopped. Police officials said they were working to balance respect for both free speech and the right of congregations to worship without disruption.
Asked how he responds to charges from Kelly and the other protestors that it is not Christian to support ICE’s work, Rigney, who published a 2025 book on the misuse of empathy, said he doubts they have much understanding of Christianity.
“I think that kind of rhetoric is an attempt to steer,” he said. “Particularly coming from people who likely aren’t Christians or at least aren’t Bible-believing Christians … It is an attempt to steer and sabotage Christians so that they won’t resist the lawlessness that the left is seeking to impose.”
Rigney believes the Christian response to such attacks is greater boldness. “In the book of Acts, you saw precisely this kind of lawlessness,” he said. “You had mobs, you had shouting false accusations. You had government officials encouraging it in the way that the Democrats are doing right now. And in that day, Christians gathered together, and they prayed for boldness.”
“That’s what Christians ought to meet this with.”
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