Bishop Jeremiah Reed of the Des Moines Apostolic Temple is under fire after a video of one of his sermons started to circulate online.
In the video, Reed made death threats against an unspecified person, saying someone kept calling him to “mess with him.”
“We’ve got telephone calls,” he said, “and I am holding folk back. Ain’t nobody that big in the world that cannot be hunted down. I got folk that will hunt you, put you in the cornfield, or drop you in the river with a weight on you, or cut your tongue out and leave it on your chest.”
“That’s the kind of connections I have,” Reed continued. “I want people to know that I’m not a playboy.”
He went on to tell a story of a supposedly unrelated incident, concerning a man who had “been calling this city, saying he talked to a hit-man. They brought me his picture, and they say, ‘here, he ain’t fit to live.’ He said he didn’t believe in the God of the Bible, because he was God. When his momma died, he cussed God and was shot down.”
An anonymous former member of Reed’s congregation said that the relationship between herself and the church was often strained because of fear and because of Reed’s words in similar sermons. She said, “I always think to myself, this is like a woman who that’s being beaten by her husband and she wants to get away and she can’t.”
“There was never a time when I went and sat in the congregation and felt comfortable,” she added. “If you are a shepard of the sheep you are supposed to build them up not tear them down. Just to hear that stuff who would want their kids or their loved ones to sit up under something of that magnitude.”