(WND)—Christian ministers do Christian ministry, and that’s what a number of volunteers from several churches in Northglenn, Colorado, were doing just days ago.
They were setting up tables in a public park preparing to distribute hot meals to the homeless, as they have done every Tuesday and Thursday for more than four years.
However, on this day, the churches’ ministers had to leave early, because they had court dates on city-issued tickets for violating a city rule, according to a new report from the American Center for Law and Justice, which is defending them.
Among the church volunteers at the park that day, a week before Christmas, “were the pastors we’ve been representing at the ACLJ – faithful men driven by a deep conviction to live out their calling,” the legal team reported.
They simply were following the biblical instructions, from Matthew 25:35: “for I was hungry and you gave Me food; I was thirsty and you gave Me drink; I was a stranger and you took Me in; I was naked and you clothed Me; I was sick and you visited Me; I was in prison and you came to Me. … inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me.”
The ministers, the ACLJ said, had to report for “their scheduled first court date on the criminal citations issued by the City of Northglenn for simply gathering in a public park to exercise their faith.”
It was officials in the city just north of Denver who “passed a targeted ordinance prohibiting recurring gatherings of five or more in public parks, leading to criminal citations against these faithful pastors,” the team said.
“In the courtroom, the city begged the judge to delay the proceedings. Their hope? That future amendments to their unconstitutional ordinance might somehow save their law. This wasn’t just a tactical delay – it was a clear violation of our clients’ constitutional right to a speedy trial, a foundational protection meant to prevent exactly this kind of prolonged government harassment,” the ACLJ report explained.
“These pastors had done nothing wrong. For years, their gatherings caused no complaints, no disruptions, despite attempts from the city to pin unrelated 911 calls on the outreach. They used the park on a first-come, first-served basis, just like countless secular groups – pickleball clubs, fitness classes, walking groups – that continue meeting without interference. The Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed that public parks ‘have immemorially been held in trust for the use of the public,’ and later called parks ‘quintessential public forums,'” the report said.
Still, the city targeted the pastors and their churches, “enacting a resolution seemingly designed to shut them down, and then issuing criminal citations that carry the threat of conviction for following Christ’s command.”
The ACLJ already has filed a separate federal lawsuit against the city to strike the “discriminatory ordinance and hold officials accountable for their hostility toward religious expression.”
WorldNetDaily previously has reported on the long history of outrageous discrimination and extremism generated by the leftist state of Colorado.
One of its counties, Gilpin, a few years back paid out $700,000 after officials in government documents repeatedly referred to a black resident as “N—– Roy.”
A pending lawsuit claims the leftist state – it’s run by Democrats in the governor’s office, legislature and state Supreme Court – is continuing “slavery” in its work programs for prison inmates.
State officials are demanding that taxpayers nationwide fund the lucrative abortion industry, and it long has pushed the radicalism of having boys who say they are girls in girls’ showers with the females.
It has had more school shootings that just about anywhere else, the latest just weeks ago in Evergreen.
It also has a long history of attacking Christians. Jack Phillips of Masterpiece Cakeshop has been in the courts for a decade for refusing to submit his Christian faith to the progressive LGBT agenda in which state officials believe.
That’s despite the state losing at the U.S. Supreme Court in the fight.
Same thing happened with the state’s demand a web designer give up her Christian faith in order to operate her business. It lost again at the Supreme Court, and taxpayers there were billed millions for state officials to waste in their legal fight.
Right now the Supreme Court is considering whether the allow the state to censor pro-Christian comments by counselors, who are urged to deliver pro-LGBT ideologies to young clients.
The Northglenn fight so far involves pastors Brent Denney and David McCamish, of Brave church, and pastor Dustin Mackintosh of Next Step Christian Church, who have been holding weekly ministry gatherings at E.B. Rains Jr. Memorial Park for years.
Then the “chief of police informed the pastors he had been ‘tasked with shutting down’ their weekly gatherings,” the ACLJ said.
‘Peaceful religious gatherings’: Colorado’s anti-Christian ideology spreads, city harasses pastors
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.