People Had A Lot To Say After Pastor Marvin Sapp Told Ushers To "Close The Doors" While Asking For $40K From The Congregation
He's a gospel singer and pastor known for the 2007 hit song "Never Would Have Made It."
Recently, a July 2024 clip resurfaced of Marvin preaching at the 109th Pentecostal Assemblies of the World Convention in Baltimore, Maryland, and people are finding it very polarizing.
After he explained he just paid $2000 for renewing his ordination and licensing, Marvin asked the congregation for donations in a manner that didn't sit right with many people.
"There's 1000 of you, I said, close them doors. Ushers, close the doors. Close the doors. Close the doors," he said.
"We all gone leave together."
"Y'all ain't going no place but to the restaurant."
"There's 1000 of you tonight, and those that are watching... it's a 1000 that are watching online," he said. "If I get a 1000 only to give this, if I get a 1000 in the sanctuary to give this — that's 40,0000 dollars tonight. I'm challenging each of you down here to give a $20 seed."
While paying tithe (or giving 10% of your income as an offering to support the church and clergy) is a traditional practice in many Pentecostal churches, the viral clip received a lot of backlash for his delivery.
One person said, "lmfao, Marvin Sapp ain't never been wrapped too tight, so I'm not surprised that he held that congregation hostage until they gave $40K. NEVER WOULD'VE PAAAAAAAAID IT."
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"Marvin Sapp was OUT OF ORDER. I would have immediately dialed 911 as I walked toward the exit. You gone open these doors, or you're catching a false imprisonment charge," another person wrote.
This person suggested, "Marvin Sapp is clearly HUSTLING his congregation for 40k— and using God's name to do it. he's calling for the doors to be locked? that's not faith, that's a shakedown and a false prophet. someone had a bill to pay, and it wasn't to the church."
Even viral creators like KevOnStage and notkaltonbanks joined in the conversation, making comedic videos about what it would be like to interact with the ushers closing the doors.
Well, the viral clip and the discourse got back to Marvin and he responded to the backlash, more or less doubling down on his methods to raise $40,000 by locking the doors.
On his Facebook page, Marvin said in the lengthy response, "Some have taken issue with a particular moment when I instructed the ushers, rather firmly, to close the doors during the offering. To those unfamiliar with the church context or who may not regularly attend worship gatherings this has been misinterpreted as holding people hostage as well as offensive. That was never my intent."
"The truth is, when finances are being received in any worship gathering, it is one of the most vulnerable and exposed times for both the finance and security teams. Movement during this sacred exchange can be distracting and, at times, even risky. My directive was not about control it was about creating a safe, focused, and reverent environment for those choosing to give, and for those handling the resources."
"Unfortunately, in this social media age, snippets are easily shared without context, and assumptions are quickly made without understanding the full picture. Conferences have budgets. Churches have budgets. And people have budgets. As the assigned ministerial gift for this international gathering, one of my responsibilities was to help raise the conference budget. That's not manipulation, it's stewardship."
Marvin continued by giving "biblical context" by citing Chronicles 29 from the Bible, referencing that people once gave "gold, silver, bronze, iron, and precious stones" and never focused on the specific amounts given.
In the end, Marvin hoped his explanation would give context to the viral clip, and several people (with religious ties) did come to his defense. But, alas, the jokes and criticism are still going strong.
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Los Angeles Times
8 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
Inside the tragedy that silenced a soul legend: Marvin Gaye's last fight with his father
By the time 44-year-old Marvin Gaye moved into the big, rambling house with his parents on South Gramercy Place, his cocaine habit was severe and his paranoia was deep. Enemies were conspiring against him, he feared. He gave his father a .38-caliber revolver. To protect the house, he said. He had come full-circle from childhood, to live with his mother, who adored him, and his disapproving father, who would kill him. It was 1984. It might have been a period of triumph for the vocalist known as the King of Sensual Soul. The year before, he had finally won two Grammy Awards after decades of nominations. At the NBA All-Star Game in Inglewood, he had delivered a slowed-down, funkified version of the Star Spangled Banner that redefined the national anthem. He had broken free from Motown, his longtime label, with a hit comeback album, 'Midnight Love,' and one of his signature songs, 'Sexual Healing.' Suave tenor, restless risk-taker, longtime sex symbol with an elegant-playboy persona, Gaye had an otherworldly voice. His falsetto found new registers of rapture and longing. His songs married carnality and spirituality, with an echo of the little boy singing in the gospel choir of his father's church. 'My daddy was a minister,' Gaye said, 'and so when I began to sing it was for him.' Growing up in a slum of Washington, D.C., he had inherited his father's harsh Pentecostal Christianity and his notions of discipline, heaven and hell. There was little tenderness in his relationship with Marvin Gay Sr., a jealous man who drank hard and dressed in women's clothes, a habit that embarrassed the young singer. They were at war from the start. The father beat the son regularly, and scorned nonreligious music as the devil's work. 'My husband never wanted Marvin,' the singer's mother, Alberta, told a biographer. 'And he never liked him. He used to say that he didn't think he was really his child. I told him that was nonsense. He knew Marvin was his. But for some reason, he didn't love Marvin and, what's worse, he didn't want me to love Marvin either. Marvin wasn't very old before he understood that.' In 'Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye' by David Ritz, Gaye describes his father as 'a very peculiar, changeable, cruel, and all-powerful king,' adding: 'Even though winning his love was the ultimate goal of my childhood, I defied him. I hated his attitude. I thought I could win his love through singing, so I sang my heart out.' Gaye noticed his jealousy. 'I realized my voice was a gift of God and had to be used to praise Him,' Gaye said, but his father 'hated it when my singing won more praise than his sermons.' Even as he grew bigger than his father, Gaye would recall, the violence continued. 'I wanted to strike back, but where I come from, even to raise your hand to your father is an invitation for him to kill you.' It was a volatile relationship, Ritz told the Times in a recent interview, and a complicated one. 'The man who beat him also led him to God,' Ritz said. To escape him, the singer dropped out of high school and joined the Air Force, then faked a mental breakdown and won an honorable discharge. He dreamed of being the Black Frank Sinatra. He found a surrogate father in Berry Gordy, the founder of Motown, and became an architect of the famous Motown sound. His 1968 version of 'I Heard It Through the Grapevine,' a song about a man tormented by rumors of his lover's infidelity, was a No. 1 hit. Gaye drew inspiration from his disintegrating marriage to Gordy's sister. His father hated work. His mother rose at 5 to clean rich people's houses. When Gaye started making money to provide for her, it became another source of resentment between father and son. Against resistance from Motown, he gambled with the self-written, self-produced 'What's Going On,' the radical 1971 concept album that launched him into the stratosphere. (Rolling Stone has called it the greatest album of all time.) His social commentary encompassed war, protests, ghetto life, police brutality, pollution, and nuclear holocaust. Inspired by his brother Frankie, he sang about a struggling soldier back from Vietnam. And he sang, 'Father father/ We don't need to escalate/You see, war is not the answer.' As his fame increased, he became reclusive. Worshipful crowds filled his concert seats —women particularly adored him — but the love felt fleeting and unreliable. 'I want to be liked and I would hate it, I mean really hate it, if an audience didn't like me,' he told The Times. 'It's really a hang-up.' He hated the government and scorned taxes, which the government noticed. By the late 1970s he was bankrupt and owed the IRS $2 million. He fled for Europe, chased by creditors and depressed that Motown seemed to have given up on him amid a sales slump. ('I adore being revered,' he said. 'I wasn't being adored here.') He spent 3 1/2 years in self-imposed exile, and returned to tell The Times, 'I'm egotistical. I could lie and pretend that I'm very humble but that's jive. You can't do what I'm doing and not have a big ego to feed.' In 1983, as Gaye toured with his 'Midnight Love' album, which he made for Columbia Records, Times music critic Robert Hilburn described one of his concerts as a 'triumphant showcasing' of artistry that marked a liberating break from Motown. 'At last, he was standing alone: the artist vindicated,' Hilburn wrote. 'This tour is supposed to be the culmination of that artistic climb.' But Gaye was wrestling with serious depression, and a freebasing habit that inflamed his paranoia. He was found wandering on the freeway, as if daring cars to hit him. More than once, he had talked of suicide — he admitted trying to do it with a cocaine overdose — but had not been able to go all the way. His father's religion told him it was a mortal sin. In early 1984, twice divorced, Gaye was back with his parents, living down the hall from his father on the second floor of the family's brickfront Tudor in the Crenshaw District of Los Angeles. It was a 'madhouse' where screaming matches were frequent, as Frankie Gaye, who lived next door, wrote in his memoir 'Marvin Gaye, My Brother.' The musician holed up in his bedroom, with a gun in the pocket and a Bible in his hand, and steady visits from his drug dealers. His 69-year-old mother doted on him, cooking for him, rubbing his feet, and praying with him. The father, often drunk, resented the loss of her attention. He kept the .38 revolver, a gift from his son, under his pillow. The fatal confrontation was on April 1, 1984. The father had come to the son's bedroom, and was berating his wife about a misplaced letter from an insurance company. The singer ordered him out of the room, then followed him into the hall and 'pushed the father around pretty good,' police said. The father returned with the gun and shot his son twice, once in the shoulder and once in the heart. When news got out, some thought at first it must be a twisted April Fool's joke. Some, like his biographer Ritz, saw it as the culmination of Gaye's death wish and thought, 'So that's how he did it.' At Forest Lawn Memorial Park, 10,000 fans stood in a mile-long line to say goodbye. It was estimated to be the biggest crowd in park history. In his account to a probation officer, Gay said that his son had pushed him to the floor and kicked him, and that he grabbed the gun from under his pillow in fear of further attack. Los Angeles prosecutors charged him with murder but found themselves with a weak case. 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'I had sensational defense facts, not the least of which was the only witness was the mother,' Gold said, and 'she refused to testify.' Gold said he was holding out for a reduced charge of involuntary manslaughter, but 'everybody wanted the case resolved as quickly as possible.' And so Marvin Gay Sr. accepted the deal when, five months after the shooting, prosecutors allowed him to plead no contest to voluntary manslaughter. The conviction might have brought him up to 13 years in prison, but the probation department had recommended against lockup, and there was little expectation that the judge would give him hard time. What Gold recalls about his client is 'how sad and pathetic he was.' The legal process unfolded in a relatively fast and muted fashion, without notable controversy or protest. 'This was one of the first big-name criminal cases, but it didn't have the polarization that, for example, O.J. Simpson had,' Gold said. 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By provoking his father, he had ended his own misery and had freed his mother, who finally found the courage to leave her husband of 48 years. Ritz said he thinks of it less as a crime than a tragedy, and as an elaborately choreographed suicide that had the added effect of punishing the father. 'He thought that because his father had killed him, his father would go to hell,' Ritz said. In his memoir, Frankie Gaye describes rushing into his brother's bedroom to cradle him as he died. 'I got what I wanted,' the singer mumbled, by his brother's account. 'I couldn't do it myself, so I made him do it.' Informed of that account, Bracke, the prosecutor, said she had not heard it before. 'He certainly didn't tell detectives that version,' she said. 'That's the first I've ever heard of that.' Seven months after he killed his son, Marvin Gay Sr. received a sentence of probation from a Superior Court judge who concluded that the singer had provoked the fatal confrontation, and that prison would be a death sentence for the frail, aging defendant. Gay Sr., who would live another 14 years, stood between his attorneys and thanked the judge for his mercy. His voice shook, and he spoke very softly. He said he was sorry. He said he had been afraid. 'I wish he could step through the door right now,' he said. 'I loved him. I love him right now.'
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