Nation, Not Religion: What Pastors in This City Taught Me About Friendship with the Jew
Hazan Gavriel ben David · Elul 5786 / August 2026
I have been the chazzan for the Jewish community in Amarillo for twenty-five years. What I am trying to show is simple. Over those years, every pastor I have dealt with in this city has carried the same agenda. Their book tells them: to the Jew first.
Their book tells them they will not see the one they wait for until we say, Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. So the Jew is not a neighbor. The Jew is an unfinished verse. Friendship lasts as long as the verse is still open.
The polite form of that agenda is a sentence I heard again this week. Pastor Glenn Stoker of Bible Believers Baptist Church on Rockwell Road called offering support to the Jewish community after hard years. Then he told me he supported the nation, not the religion.
From the pew, that sounds like kindness: flags, not a conversion class. From the Jew, it is the same agenda. Israel is not a church in one folder and a state in another. Israel is a people under a covenant — land, law, Name, and seed. If you bless the map and bury the Torah, you have not blessed Jacob. You have kept the stage for the last act.
The Call and the Texts
I listen to Pastor Stoker’s radio program some Sundays on the way to work. He is a fire-and-brimstone preacher. He holds that the King James Version is the Bible, and that anything else is not translated correctly. I asked how the King James could be the perfect translation when no Hebrew scholars sat at that table, and none sat at Nicaea either.
He said I was ignorant. Had I not read the book about the compilers? I asked whether he had ever spoken with an Orthodox Jew. Assuredly yes, he said, several. Then I asked why Christians claim that our Bible contains Jesus everywhere. In that moment, the call left the Jewish community and landed on the nation. He believed the Jews would be in the tribulation and would suffer because we would not believe in Jesus.
What followed was texting. The wording below is from the phone, not from memory.
I wrote first with courtesy.
Thank you very much. I have not been able to speak to any pastor in my 25 years as a Jew. Thank you again. Gavriel Ben David
I sent the site.
beithashoavah.org Here are my credentials as a Hazan.
His answer to the work was not a verse.
Pastor Stoker text:
I don’t care what your credentials are or from where; if you can’t tell the difference between a non-practicing Jew and a Jew who converted to Christianity on his own, ie Mordachi Ham, etc I’ll stroke your oversized ego though and check it out.
I asked him the question I have asked for years, the question a teacher named Yehuda Yisrael puts to missionaries in the same words.
Deuteronomy 4, the whole chapter. That is our covenant with Hashem, just like Jeremiah 31. What part of the New Covenant did Jesus initiate?
Then I sent Jeremiah 31:35–36 in both English and Hebrew. The Lord of hosts is His name. If those ordinances depart from before Me, saith the Lord, then the seed of Israel also shall cease from being a nation before Me forever. That is the answer found in the same chapter that Christians use for a new covenant. The sun still stands. Israel is still a nation before Him.
I answered his question about authority. He asked it more than once.
We have 613 commandments, and my boss is Hashem. What other authority do I need as a Jew other than Moses and the GOD who took us…
The Tree of Life. The Ten Sayings, Exodus 20. That is where every human being should get his authority. From the God of Israel.
I do not understand your question because I have stated this at least 4 times. The Torah is from Hashem…
He did not then open Jeremiah 31. He answered the writer.
Pastor Stoker text:
Write all you want. You still have no absolute authority
Where is your absolute authority?
Answer the question: what is your final authority?
Ok, prove the Torah is 100% accurate without any mistakes, then show some facts that no man could have known when it was written
Hazan Gavriel text:
I asked where the Tree of Life is. He answered with a label.
Pastor Stoker text:
Yep, read about the “Tree of Life,” kind of getting into the kabala
Hazan Gavriel text:
I laid out the six days of creation and the seventh as the history of man— Psalm 90, a day as a thousand years.
Day one: light from darkness, Adam given the knowledge of good and evil and the power to choose.
Day two: waters from waters — the Flood, the ark on Ararat, dry land again.
Day three: seed after its kind — Avraham in 1948 of the Jewish calendar, then Yitzchak, Yaakov, Israel.
Day four: lights for signs and seasons — the prophets.
Day five: swarming things and birds — Israel scattered.
Day six: beast and man, and the choice of the sixth millennium.
Day seven: Shabbat. The thousand-year rest is coming. Baruch Hashem.
He answered the map in three words.
Pastor Stoker text:
typology not doctrine
Gavriel text:
I answered the label from the peshat. Genesis 8 is a world begun again. The wind of Hashem moved over the waters the way the Spirit moved in the beginning. Waters separated. Dry land. The ark rested. He never wrote back after that second creation and Noah as a beginning. Silence is also an answer.
How I Came to Sit at Those Tables
I was raised in church — Baptist and Catholic rooms, Black father, Spanish-speaking mother whose people came up through Jalisco, Guanajuato, Durango, Chihuahua, and New Mexico.
911 – On the eleventh of September, 2001, when I was about thirty-five, my mother told me what the house had been hiding: secret candles, Ladino in the kitchen, spring cleaning that was more than spring cleaning. She said we were from Spain, like every family member said.
Her grandfather was a Cohen, but we did not know until I did both of my uncles’ DNA. My two tios both tested positive for the COHEN MODAL haplogroup through the Jewish DNA testing site, FamilyTree DNA. My family is related to the owner of FamilyTree DNA.
I went to Israel in 2002. I met Rabbi Chaim Richman of the Temple Institute. Rabbi Richman asked me if I was coming to return since my mother was Jewish. I was still a Jewish Christian then. I studied for years in Messianic and Hebrew Roots circles — Brad Scott, Bill Cloud, and others. We founded a ministry. Mayim Hayim Ministries mayim-hayim.org
That website is still there, but the content is not Christian.
I wore tzitzit and talked about Yeshua and the Torah in the same breath. In 2012, I completed a Conservative conversion in El Paso under Rabbi Stephen Leon. I now serve as chazzan of a very small Sephardic minyan in Amarillo, Esnoga Beit HaShoavah, and I teach Torah within the walls of a prison.
Twenty-five years of standing for this community is long enough to know which invitations were friendship and which were recruitment. I am not writing as a man who never loved the church. I am writing as a man who sat in its Bible studies, Seders, and Chick-fil-A booths, and then stayed Jewish when the friendship ran out.
The First Four Shepherds
The first was Pastor Bo at Trinity Fellowship Church. I was in a men’s Bible study on a book called Following in the Master’s Footsteps. The questions I asked did not line up with the history he was giving — not Jewishly. He called me and asked me to leave. People come to his Bible study, he said, to listen to him and not to me.
The second was Pastor Bill Glimm of Grace Community Church. I had invited him to a Passover Seder, and then to another gathering. In the conversation, I mentioned Jehovah’s Witnesses and Latter-day Saints.
He said those people are not his brothers. If I said they were, he would call the police or have security walk me out of the building. I asked him plainly: Are you saying Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses are not your brothers? I told you, he said. Jehovah’s Witnesses are a cult. Mormons believe the devil is Jesus’ brother. Leave now, he said, and he called security. I left.
Grace Church My First Visit
I remember the first time I visited Grace Church; the sermon was on Matthew 23, which is not a good chapter for the only Jew in the house. I was called a Judizer by Bill. He once told me that I do not need legalistic rituals; I keep Passover every day.
Later, one of Bill’s largest donors found out he was an Iranian Jew and started coming to our Center. He never stopped being a Christian Jew from Iran. I will always love him; he gave over $200,000 to Mayim Hayim Ministries, which Mayim Hayim gave away until our best friends stole everything we did not give away.
The third was Pastor Polis of Hillside Church, one of the largest congregations in Amarillo. We met at Chick-fil-A. The owner introduced us and told him I was a Jewish man in this town who did not believe in Jesus. We sat down over coffee. I asked why he kept Shabbat on Sunday.
Because Jesus was resurrected on Sunday, he said. I said the Greek of the resurrection accounts does not give the Church the sentence it thinks it has. Mia ton sabbaton — the first of the Sabbaths — sits in the counting of the Omer, not in a transfer of the seventh day. Pastor Polis is college-educated in Greek.
I said he knew what the phrase means. He said he would have to go home and study it. The next time I saw him, he was with his son. You are not to say anything in front of my son, he told me. I am the one who teaches my son doctrine. The third time I saw him at Chick-fil-A, he was with his wife. He walked past me as if I were furniture.
That is why, when Pastor Stoker called, I was skeptical and also glad. I know the radio voice. I also know what happens when a Jew asks the text to remain the text.
Other Rooms in This Town
Pastor Maurice Burks, who one day accused me of hitting him in the Sam’s Club. I asked him a question about Christianity, and he said he was not going there. I said to Maurice, ” You, as a pastor, should be able to defend your faith in and out of season and he called me a liar and said the Christian Bible does not say that. Then he called me the “devil”.
2 Timothy 4:2 New International Version: The Proof That Is Why I Ask
2 Preach the word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke and encourage—with great patience and careful instruction.
1 Peter 3:15: Advises believers to always be ready to give an answer or defense for the hope they have, doing so with gentleness and respect.
I did get upset because he, as a pastor, just called me a liar and took off. I pulled up the verse on my phone in seconds and followed him to show him the verse; that is when he said I assaulted him in Sam’s Club. He started yelling as loud as he could and said, ” Stop, Archie, this man is assaulting me, and I knew his many years in theft management had kicked in. Sam’s has cameras, so I was not worried, but I was shocked that all of it, in front of our wives, was more embarrassing.
Pastor Herman was an ex-railroad engineer turned pastor.
Pastor Graves was the Black pastor I sat with in good faith. The heads of the Black Israelite Congregation who looked at my Yemenite rabbi and at me and told us we were not Jews. Blood, they said. Geography, they said. We did not fit the story they needed.
A gentleman I remember as Pastor Graves looked at the weapon I carry — a Jew in Texas, a chaplain, a man who has buried family in a violent year — and said I looked as if I thought I was bad because I carried a gun. He said he was going home to get his and we could have a shoot-out. We left.
Pastor Dr. Carr wanted to fight me over Luke chapter 4. In the synagogue at Nazareth, the reading is made to say that the anointed one is sent to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind.
Open the Hebrew of Isaiah 61. The recovering of sight to the blind is not there. It is in Isaiah 42, and it is in the Greek of the Septuagint that Luke is following. A pastor who will not let Isaiah speak in Isaiah’s language will not let Israel speak in Israel’s language either.
Pastor Lee Simpson told me I had answered many of the questions he carried. Then he said he could not teach that to his people. They were not ready. The text is allowed to move a man in private. The congregation must not be disturbed.
Pastor Brown of Victory Church went on the radio and said he could eat bread on Passover. He did not need some little man with a beanie and strings hanging down to tell him that Easter Sunday would not have ham and rolls. Tzitzit and a kippah became a punch line so that ham could stay on the table.
The Church of Christ congregations I have met in this town have been the hardest. They denounce Israel. There is no such thing as Israel, they say. We are the Church. Replacement is not a theory to them. It is the air they breathe.
Pastor Larry, who pastors a church in Fritch, let me know that the Christian Bible and the New Covenant were, in effect, not the Old Testament.
Even a man from a Reform temple told me he did not lose anything in Israel. That, he said, is why they are called Temples: there is no need for another one. I pray they turn to Hashem and to His Torah as Jews.
The Sentence I Cannot Forget
My niece’s husband, Bishop Ludwig Onoko, said it without ornament. We are just waiting, he told me, for the Third Temple to be built so you Jews can accept the antichrist and go through the tribulation and see Jesus returning with wounds in his hands, so you Jews can fall on your faces and say we were wrong and bow down and worship Jesus. Then you will see.
That is not support of Israel. That is a scheduled humiliation. The Temple, in that sentence, is not the house of prayer for all nations. It is a trap laid for the Jews so that the nations can be proven right. Stoker said the polite part: nation, not religion. The bishop said the last act. Same script.
The Questions That Were Not Answered
Which clause of Jeremiah 31 did Jesus initiate, and where does that chapter name the blood of a crucified messiah as the start of the new covenant?
The reply is stages, patterns, and the Greek book proving itself.
Bible Believers Baptist Church Glen Stoker
Here is the scorecard of the Stoker thread as the phone recorded it.
I asked how the King James could be perfect with no Jewish scholar at 1611 or at Nicaea. On the phone, I wrote that about forty-seven scholars translated it, and there was not one Jewish scholar among them, nor at Nicaea. He had already called me ignorant and told me to read the book about the compilers. A bibliography is not a name.
I asked why Pharaoh would stone Israel in Exodus 8:26, and I sent the King James and the Hebrew, the ram-god of Egypt in our tradition, and the fact that the Passover sacrifice is a peace offering, not a sin offering. He did not answer 8:26.
I asked what part of the new covenant in Jeremiah 31 Jesus initiated, and I sent 31:35–36. He did not name a clause.
I asked how the Christian replaces me if only Jews and the sons of Abraham still claim that father, and if Jeremiah says the seed does not cease while the sun stands. He did not open the verse.
I asked where the Tree of Life is. He said kabbalah.
I laid out the six days and Genesis 8. He said typology, not doctrine. Then he stopped writing.
He asked where my final authority is. I answered: 613, Hashem, Moses, Deuteronomy 4, Exodus 19, Exodus 20, the God of Israel. He asked again. Then he raised a new exam: prove the Torah one hundred percent, with facts no man could have known when it was written.
One question he answered outright on the call: had he spoken with an Orthodox Jew? One textual note he offered later: “Isaiah is not the end of our Bible; Chronicles is. That is true of the Tanakh’s order”.
It does not answer Jeremiah 31. The rest were redirected, labeled, or turned into a remark about my ego.
What Nation-Not-Religion Means for a Jew
I do not write that every Christian on earth is this way. I write what I can swear to. Pastor Bo, Pastor Bill Glimm, Pastor Polis, Pastor Brown, Pastor Carr, Pastor Simpson, the Church of Christ rooms, the bishop, and Pastor Stoker. The faces change. The terms of friendship do not.
The flag is allowed. The beanie and the strings are a problem. The Jew who keeps Shabbat is religion. The Jew who is only a prophecy token is nation. The moment you read Jeremiah 31 as still naming Israel and Judah, the support cools. That is what happened on the phone: first the offer, then not the religion, then authority, then typology, then silence.
Their book tells them to go to the Jew first. Their book tells them the story is unfinished until we say the verse they require. As long as there is a chance to convert us, they are friendly. When there is not, we are a nation they can pray over and a religion they can wait to watch fail.
Typology and Doctrine
A pattern that helps a man see is not the same as a commandment. I do not bind anyone to a six-thousand-year clock. The sages themselves argued about the length of the days. What I will not surrender is this: the Torah’s week is not a children’s story.
Creation, Flood, Avraham, prophets, exile, the beast and the image, and then rest — that is the shape of the world I was given. The rainbow after the Flood and the Shabbat after the six days are both signs that judgment is not the last word. Covenant is.
The difference between us is not whether a day can be a thousand years. The difference is whether Israel remains Israel when the thousand years are spoken of. If the seventh day belongs to the Church instead of to Zion, then the first six days were only a preface to our disappearance.
I cannot read Bereshit that way. I cannot read Isaiah 2, Micah 4, Zechariah 14, or Ezekiel 40–48 that way. The mountain is still the mountain. The House is still ahead of us.
What I Carry Now
I carry a weapon because I live in this country and because this year has already taken family. I carry tzitzit because the Torah told me to. I carry a small congregation and a prison classroom because the hidden ones are still coming home — crypto-Jews, the wounded, the men who found a Chumash after they lost everything else. I do not need a pastor to certify that we are Jews. I needed my mother’s kitchen, a beit din, a priestly memory in the blood, and the Book.
To the pastors who were kind: thank you. To the pastors who wanted a shoot-out, a fist over Luke 4, a radio joke about a beanie, or a front-row seat at Jewish tribulation: I am still here. The Third Temple, when it stands, will not be built so that we can accept an antichrist. It will be built because Hashem spoke of a house for His Name. If you love that House, love the people without a conversion clause.
As long as there is seedtime and harvest, the covenant with Noah stands. As long as there is a seventh day, the covenant of Sinai stands. As long as the sun and the moon stand, the seed of Israel does not cease from being a nation before Him. I am waiting for the rest. I am not waiting to be proven wrong on my face.
B’H’
Hazan Gavriel ben David
Esnoga Beit HaShoavah, Amarillo