ANOTHER CHURCH RAIDED IN CALIFORNIA

ANOTHER CHURCH RAIDED IN CALIFORNIA

Pastor's Report Staff

Another church in Southern California was raided by the Attorney General's office! Thursday morning, April 5th, a search warrant was served on Morningland Church of the Ascended Christ in Long Beach. State agents, accompanied by 14 uniformed Long Beach police officers, entered the church and began going through its financial records, seizing any and all that they chose. The original allegation by the State was that the Church had made an "illegal political contribution," and so they were looking for the evidence to support this claim.

Meanwhile, the same day across town, other state investigators literally ransacked the offices of the attorney who represented this church, as well as another church (Faith Center which operates channel 30). The Attorney General had been investigating Faith Center before he descended on The Worldwide Church, but had been thwarted by a "NO, no, we won't show" resistance to his office's unconstitutional gestapo-type attempt to review their records.

In the raided attorney's offices were the private files of over one thousand clients. Because the attorney made a quick call and got camera and sound crews over to his offices, he has over seven hours worth of documented proof showing the Attorney General's men opening, and even in some cases taking, papers from the files of some of these clients whose cases are outside the stated purpose of the investigation. This clearly violated attorney-client confidentiality, as well as the rights to privacy of over 1000 heretofore uninvolved citizens of California — and by the highest law officer of the state!

After the raids a spokesman for Attorney General George Deukmejian stated that the searches of the law offices were being conducted in the investigation of a church. "We're examining the financial records of Morning land [Morningland Church of the Ascended Christ] and I've been told," he said, "we're a long way from filing charges," Obviously they were on a "fishing expedition" under the color of state authority.

Could it be that the Attorney General's office is now in so deep that they are going to continue raiding what some consider out-of-the-main stream churches in the hopes they will find something somewhere to justify their outrageous actions?