We talked to the preacher who is always in the ampitheatre

About once every semester, UVA is visited by what seems to be random pastors that come to our ampitheatre to preach the gospel. Although this should be a peaceful scene, the pastors are usually met with hostility from the students that claim the pastors’ messages are not only hateful but also inaccurate.

A preacher from last semester

Carrying signs that say on one side ” You Deserve Hell” and on the other “Jesus Saves”, these pastors preach the gospel to our community in hopes of reaching the students. In response, a majority of students claim the pastors’ message to be filled with hate speech, and so students respond by getting into verbal altercations with whomever is preaching at the moment – altercations which are actually pretty entertaining.

Other students have a different method of diverting attention from the pastors’ message and will take their shirts off, rub their nipples, and scream silly things such as “I cannot handle the truth.”

So who are the men that are preaching to us? After conducting an interview with Brother Jorge, whose full name is Jorge Pina, he has been able to shed some light on what it is him and his partners do and why they come to UVA every semester.

Jorge Pina, or Brother Jorge, is the person and founder of DC for Jesus whose headquarters are located in Washington D.C.

DC for Jesus preaching the gospel

“You try to be loyal to a person and you get mobbed and made fun of,” explains Brother Jorge.

“We are trying to show students and explain to them that sin has consequences not only here on earth but eternally because they are damned to hell – and so we give them the bad news: that they are sinners. And then we bring the good news: that they can be saved.”

I asked if you could give this message without delivering hate speech to the students?

“We cannot talk about heaven without talking about hell,” argued Brother Jorge, “The fact that we are saying there is a heaven implies that there is a hell, just like that if we say that God is love then we also have to talk about the wrath of God.”

Brother Jorge with his “You deserve hell” sign

But this is not where the message ends. Claiming that he cannot preach the good things without preaching the bad, Brother Jorge explains that the claim that we deserve hell is accurate because we are all sinners, however, God gives us what we do not deserve which is grace.

This is the message Brother Jorge and his partners preach, and do so on college campuses throughout the Washington D.C metropolitan area. They also go to homosexual and gay-pride parades as well as beer parades.

“College students are the upcoming generation, they are our future, and so it is very important that we preach our message to them.”

According to Brother Jorge, 99% of college students will answer ‘yes’ if they were asked ‘do you consider yourself to be a good person?’ This is because they are comparing themselves to the person in jail, the drug trafficker, the rapist, and to the worst in our society, and therefore their standard of goodness is based on what they themselves think.

“But once we start asking questions like ‘have you ever told a lie’ or ‘have you ever stolen’ we expose the fact that they are not good compared to God because God is holy and perfect, and what they in turn think we are doing is judging them and that makes them angry.

“They are so prideful because of the university they got into, so in their mind who am I to tell them that they deserve hell? We are making them uncomfortable with their sin.”

But there is hope, Brother Jorge continues, because we can all be saved. Brother Jorge explained that he himself was as wicked as we are, and said he used to be “a dirty stinking sinner” and uses those terms because our sin stinks to God’s nostrils.

“I used to fornicate and have sex with women, many of them, and I used to cheat on them and party, and I did drug trafficking but God changed my life just as he can change yours.”

Whether this is convincing, I will let the readers decide, but know that we are not the only students to react to Brother Jorge and his partners the way we do.

“Some people get angry to the point that they want to come and steal signs, and they get in our face or they call the police.”

“Someone came behind me and they got me all wet, like a football coach when they splash you with a large water cup, someone came behind me and baptized me with water even though I’ve been baptized already. It’s unfortunate but it happens and I forgive him and love him and I hope he repents.”

Brother Jorge explained that they are not there to physically fight with anybody or to be the cause of any violence – they are there to preach, “but people have accused us that we are there because we want to get a lawsuit so we can get money. Those are false accusations, if we really wanted to put a lawsuit together we could argue for slander but we are not going to do that.”