Browne’s Addition residents raise alarm at new neighbor: A pastor in Trump’s orbit
The Browne’s Addition Neighborhood council meeting had nearly come to a close when someone asked to talk about what everyone wanted to talk about: the new church.
All Saints Lutheran had sold its church building across the street from the historic neighborhood’s Coeur d’Alene Park to The Pursuit NW, a Western Washington chain of churches led by a conservative firebrand pastor with a knack for provocation.
Since taking over the property All Saints had called home since 1962, pastor Russell Johnson’s church dug up a community garden. It beamed floodlights into neighboring homes. Worship music boomed through the neighborhood on Sundays, rattling walls. The small parking lot overflows, forcing congregants to park down the street for blocks.
These were complaints upset neighbors felt like they could do something about. They lodged a handful of them with city officials, who have sent the church warnings about unpermitted construction and unsafe crowd sizes.
But mostly, residents wanted to talk about what the church believes, who it associates with and how it has engaged with communities on the West Side of the state.
One resident pointed to Johnson’s ties with Matt Shea and Sean Feucht.
Johnson headlined a Seattle rally last summer alongside Shea, a Spokane Valley pastor and former state lawmaker kicked out of the Republican caucus after an investigation concluded he had participated in “domestic terrorism.” He has never faced charges.
During Columbia University’s 2024 Gaza War protest, Johnson counterprotested alongside Feucht, an evangelical musician and self-described Christian nationalist who sued the city of Spokane after the City Council condemned him in 2023; that lawsuit was thrown out in 2025. Feucht was one of the first guest pastors at Pursuit NW in 2014, according to archives of the church’s website.
The Pursuit NW is itself currently suing the city of Seattle, after former Mayor Bruce Harrell condemned Pursuit NW and other organizers of last summer’s anti-trans Mayday USA rally on Capitol Hill, Seattle’s historically gay neighborhood. Hundreds of protesters gathered outside of that event, many of whom believed that the rally’s location in Cal Anderson Park was an intentional provocation. There were 23 arrests, primarily during confrontations with police.
The church has grown rapidly since its founding in Snohomish in 2014. It expanded into Seattle’s University District in 2022, Kirkland in 2023, added elementary schools and recently opened Pursuit College. Now, Pursuit NW is in Browne’s Addition, one of the most liberal neighborhoods in Spokane. The church’s decision to buy the All Saints building didn’t seem coincidental.
Johnson, who did not respond to Spokesman-Review requests for an interview, has lamented from the pulpit and on podcasts with conservative Christian influencers about Spokane’s departure from the conservative city of his youth. He points to the city’s stubborn homelessness and addiction crises as evidence the city has been “overrun by bad policy, by bad politicians enacting bad laws and legislation.”
He is occasionally critical of conservative Christian pastors who are comfortable staying in deep red states. Unlike them, Johnson confronts those who he describes as the enemy.
“I live in the People’s Republic of Seattle,” Johnson once said in an interview. “We are on the front steps of the kingdom of darkness.”
Johnson, who got his start in Republican politics but gave up aspirations of running for Congress to go into ministry, hasn’t abandoned politics entirely. He attended an Easter luncheon at the White House on April 1, where President Donald Trump spoke for about an hour about the Iran War, insulted French President Emmanuel Macron and joked that both Christ and himself have been referred to as a king.
“On Palm Sunday, Jesus entered Jerusalem, as crowds welcomed him with praise calling him King,” Trump said. “They call me king now, do you believe it? No king. I’m such a king I can’t get a ballroom approved.”
Confrontation with liberalism and secularism has become a pillar of Johnson’s religious practice, particularly after COVID-19 restrictions shut down in-person church services. If he isn’t catching flak, Johnson often says, he isn’t over the target.
“I don’t just want my name to be written in the Lamb’s Book of Life; I want to be on the Most Wanted poster in the hallways of Hell,” he said in an interview with Lance Wallnau.
Wallnau authored the hit Christian-lit book “Invading Babylon: The 7 Mountain Mandate,” a major text in the modern Seven Mountains movement, which calls on Christians to pursue dominion over government, culture and society. In the last decade, Wallnau has also become a key figure in bringing the Christian right into the MAGA fold.
Johnson argues that pushback only creates interest in his church. Reframing that criticism, often by mischaracterizing it, is a staple of his Sunday service.
On at least two occasions, Johnson has used an exaggerated tone at the pulpit to mock online comments written on Reddit that are critical of Pursuit’s arrival in Spokane: “Now they’re in the church, and I can’t believe this, and now we got parking problems in the neighborhood and how dare they use the church that they bought?” Johnson regaled to the congregation, making fun of the comments he had read.
“It’s just, ugh! I would just really love there to be more fentanyl addicts. That’s what really makes Spokane glow at night!” he continued.
In a Kirkland sermon, he railed against the “pencil-pushing bureaucrats” at Spokane City Hall that had been pestering Pursuit.
In a March 31 letter obtained by The Spokesman-Review, the city cited at least four violations of local law, including the floodlights, substandard building conditions, lacking an operational permit while overfilling a building with no fire suppression system, and voiding its certificate of occupancy due to unpermitted construction.
The city ordered the church to cease using the building until it at least obtained an operational permit. On Easter Sunday, worship proceeded regardless. Johnson told the Kirkland congregation that morning that “the county” ordered them to shut down because there was moss on the church roof, which was noted by the city as one component of one of the four violations. He made no mention of the missing permit or inadequate fire suppression for the size of their assembly.
“And we informed the county we will be having service on Easter Sunday,” Johnson said. “If we have to bail (the guest pastor) out of jail, we’ll do that after service.”
The city isn’t actually concerned that the church is breaking the law or endangering its congregation, Johnson said during an earlier service. They were afraid of the church’s success.
“That is terrifying for people who hide behind legislation and use it as a way to get rid of their political enemies in a region,” Johnson said. “The city doesn’t belong to darkness. It doesn’t belong to devils. It doesn’t belong to communists. It doesn’t belong to addicts. The city belongs to the people of God, and we’re coming for everything that the devil has tried to take from us.”
“I don’t need the permission of the mayor in Spokane to have a revival.”
The pastor
Johnson is a self-described 135-pound “fiery young guy who dresses like Antifa but preaches like Spurgeon,” though he has recently ditched his bleach-blond mullet, skinny jeans and hoodie for a short-cropped side part and suit jacket, alternating between a dressy button-up or a graphic T-shirt.
Rather than the forceful or rhythmic tone of many evangelical pastors, Johnson preaches in a plaintive voice that sometimes seems on the verge of tears, his face grimacing with emotion.
He has two main hobbies outside of church, he recently told the online blog Prophets n’ Watches: Banyas, a type of Russian spa, and playing the video game Call of Duty.
Born and raised in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood, the Johnson family has roots in charismatic, evangelical Christianity going back more than a century to a tent revival in northwest Minnesota, according to a documentary self-produced by Pursuit NW.
“(Johnson) got a touch of God in his life when he was 9 years old,” his mother recalled in that documentary. “I’ll never forget, at (the Seattle-based) Philadelphia Church, him being filled with the Holy Spirit and starting to speak in tongues, and that really changed the trajectory of his life.”
But before founding his church, Johnson waded into Republican politics. In 2009, he worked as the government affairs director for the Family Policy Institute of Washington. He worked on former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee’s 2008 presidential campaign, Dino Rossi’s 2010 campaign for U.S. Senate, and then for state Rep. Mike Hope, R-Mill Creek.
He stepped off the political stage soon thereafter to lead the youth group The Exchange for Cedar Park Church in Bothell, an organization that has repeatedly fought Washington’s mandates for abortion coverage in employer-provided health insurance plans. At the time, at least, he wasn’t ready to give up his political ambitions entirely.
“If you would have asked me four years ago, my long-term goal was to one day get into Congress,” he told the Everett Daily Herald in 2013. “I am not 100% sure I won’t ever run for some elected office.”
By 2014, he had broken away to form his own church in a Snohomish barn, which quickly grew a following with the promise of “healings, salvations, deliverances and miracles,” according to an archive of Pursuit’s website. By the end of the year, they had rented a building just a mile away, before buying the church’s first permanent property, an old JCPenney, in 2015, which still serves as the Snohomish church .
The barn plays an important role in Pursuit’s understanding of itself – the church’s documentary is called “The Kids in the Barn” – highlighting both the humble beginnings for the church and the rising-star pastor who has a fondness for Rolex watches and whose church reportedly purchased him a $2.3 million home in 2022.
Johnson shares the lead pastor role at Pursuit with his wife, Marija, and every location except Spokane also has a husband-wife duo serving as local campus pastors. But Johnson serves as the central figure of each branch simultaneously.
To preach at four campuses every Sunday, he travels by helicopter between his West Side churches and now takes a chartered plane from Snohomish to Spokane. In a February sermon, Johnson said both are paid for by friends of the church.
The politics
Confrontation with progressives and liberal governments became an increasingly central part of the church’s identity following the COVID-19 lockdowns.
When the Pursuit NW reopened its doors while the lockdowns were still in effect, Johnson claimed to have received threats to kill him and burn down the churches. Meanwhile, he said, the state had allowed the radical left to riot in the wake of George Floyd’s 2020 murder.
He has also claimed to have received death threats for his support for Israel. At least one was reported to Snohomish law enforcement and appeared to have come from out of state, according to police officials.
Today, Johnson is tangling with Seattle in federal court for alleged First Amendment violations stemming from last summer’s Mayday USA event. Organizer Jenny Donnelly, a former multilevel marketer and founder of the anti-LGBTQ+ Her Voice Movement, invited Johnson and Shea to headline.
Mayday USA is inspired by the #Don’tMessWithOurKids movement, a campaign that began in Peru to oppose pro-trans laws and “gender ideology” in curriculums and one that Donnelly has helped to popularize in the United States.
Hundreds of protesters surrounded the event, calling it an attack on the neighborhood’s LGBTQ+ community. It ended with Seattle police pepper-spraying the agitated crowd of protesters and arresting 23.
The next day, Johnson told Fox News host Laura Ingraham that the event had been “swarmed” by “antifa militants.”
“They were throwing water balloons filled with urine at Christians who stood in the park and were assaulted for the high crime of worshiping Jesus in a public space,” Johnson told Ingraham.
The only reference to balloons in law enforcement’s after-action report is of a protester cutting the strings to some of Mayday USA’s balloons, which was the inciting incident that kicked off hours of confrontation between officers and protesters.
After the event, Seattle’s then-Mayor Harrell claimed the “far-right rally was held here for this very reason – to provoke a reaction … in the heart of Seattle’s most prominent LGBTQ+ neighborhood.”
Organizers responded with outrage for myriad reasons, including that the city had suggested Cal Anderson as a possible venue in the first place. Organizers had wanted to host the Mayday USA event at the Pike Place Market but were denied by the city and offered Cal Anderson as an alternative, according to emails released at the time.
Johnson also decried what he saw as hypocrisy from the mayor, who blamed the church for the crimes perpetrated by protesters. He called for Harrell to resign – though he would later endorse him in lieu of Harrell’s progressive opponent, now-mayor Kate Wilson – and filed to sue the city for religious discrimination.
At the pulpit, Johnson would compare the suit to the activism of Civil Rights Movement icon Rosa Parks.
“Why did she have to make a big issue about sitting at the front of the bus?” Johnson asked his congregation. “Because rights that you don’t enforce, rights that you don’t claim, are rights that you end up losing.”
“Unfortunately, a lot of these tyrants in these deep blue metroplexes have been actually able to operate like that unfettered,” he continued.
Spokane may face the same kinds of confrontations following Pursuit’s eastward expansion, suggested Liz Yates, a program manager for the civil rights organization Western States Center.
“Spokane residents have good reason to be concerned about Pursuit NW coming to town,” Yates wrote. “Johnson is clearly very comfortable with stoking conflict by engaging in politicized and bigoted rhetoric, then highlighting criticism for his audience to create the impression that he is fighting back against supposed persecution.”
By standing up, Johnson says that Pursuit faces not only political persecution but also the threat of death.
In July, Christopher Castleberry, also known as LeBron Givuan, was shot and killed outside of the Seattle Pursuit branch just weeks before his 29th birthday. The suspects fired over 30 bullets from illegally modified handguns, Johnson would tell reporters. The car believed to have been driven by the assailants was later found 2 miles away, having been doused in gas and set afire.
Castleberry’s former pastor, as well as his family members, told the Chattanooga Fox station that he was likely killed because of his prior gang affiliation. Seattle police, who also believe the shooting was targeted, have made no arrests.
Johnson also claims that the shooting was targeted, but for a different reason.
“I do believe they were trying to send a message to the church at large and to religious folks in particular, like ‘We own this city,’” Johnson said.
The pulpit
At a March 15 sermon, toward the end of a booming 45-minute worship music opener, Johnson took the Spokane stage for what he said was his fifth or sixth sermon that day.
Much of his message that night reflected his belief in modern miracles and prosperity gospel – that wealth is not a sin, but a reward from God for the believer’s faith.
Backed by a massive screen depicting the many ways the crowd could give their tithes and offerings, including with stocks or cryptocurrency, Johnson noted that he used to thank the congregation for their donations, but that God had “rebuked him” for suggesting that the church had been built by their offerings. God was going to build the church whether they donated or not, he said.
“But when you decide to partner with what God has already decided to build, it positions you for blessing like you can’t imagine,” he continued.
He described Pursuit’s rapid growth, railed against attempts to strip miracles from modern interpretations of the Bible, dismissed evolution as improbable and mocked his critics on Reddit.
Not long into the sermon, Pursuit’s plainclothes security, flanked by a uniformed Spokane Valley Police officer whose services had been rented for the evening, removed a reporter with Range Media from the service.
Throughout the March 15 sermon, Johnson advertised the weeklong Revival Nights event that started the next day in Spokane, where he claimed churchgoers from around the country and Canada were gathering in Spokane to worship. From so far afield were the faithful coming that Pursuit pointed them to lodgings at Bear Paw Camp, 55 miles north of the city.
The main focus of the event was not Johnson, however, but his close friend and associate Jonathan Shuttlesworth, the founder of Revival Today Global Pursuit and a pastor based in Texas.
“People think I’m nuts, I’m crazy – I am the medicated version of (Shuttlesworth),” Johnson said on March 15.
Where Johnson flies a small helicopter between his churches, Shuttlesworth often posts photos of himself around private jets. He clocked over 5,000 miles in a Dassault Falcon 900B valued at roughly $6 million before landing in Spokane for the week, according to publicly available flight logs. On two separate nights, Shuttlesworth belittled a Florida pastor who criticized his use of private jets, playing clips for the congregation in Spokane.
Shuttlesworth called the man fat, arguing that he would be in better condition if he were also constantly traveling around the country.
Johnson and Shuttlesworth regularly defend each other from Christian influencers who are critical of their displays of wealth; to a recent tweet criticizing Shuttlesworth’s jet and net worth, for instance, Johnson responded with a “those are rookie numbers” meme from “The Wolf of Wall Street.”
A common feature of the prosperity gospel is a request for “seed donations,” which pastors say God will multiply and return to the faithful. While Shuttlesworth’s church does the same, his March sermons to Spokane were framed more toward prospective ministers than the average congregant, who he suggested would also be gifted private jets and other financial blessings if they gave their lives to the ministry.
Where Johnson tends to speak in broad terms about the miracles and blessings the faithful can receive, Shuttlesworth frequently makes specific claims about people who have been healed by God after Shuttlesworth prayed over them.
Shuttlesworth told the people gathered in Spokane that a woman dying of cancer was healed by Christ after Shuttlesworth prayed for her. The cancer didn’t just recede or stop spreading, but disappeared, he claimed, with no evidence it had ever been there. Another woman, wheelchair bound, was able to walk after he prayed over her, he said. And during an October sermon in Texas, Shuttlesworth claimed that a man with amputated feet had grown new feet through the power of prayer.
In Spokane, Shuttlesworth claimed there was no evidence COVID had spread in churches, noting that nobody could see the virus pass from body to body. He encouraged the congregation to chant that their hands don’t spread disease.
And where Johnson extolls his congregation on the importance of preparing the earth for Christ’s imminent return, Shuttlesworth all but places a date on the Second Coming. He told the Spokane congregation that the generation who witnessed the nation of Israel be created in 1948 – people around Trump’s age, he added – would also witness Christ’s resurrection.
Shuttlesworth is also more direct than Johnson about tying current political events to God’s influence. He framed the U.S. seizure of Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro and the recent attack on Iran as divine punishment for oppressing Christian pastors. He shared clips from the Holy Dome, in Abuja, Nigeria – whose head pastor gave Shuttlesworth his first private jet, according to the Florida pastor who Shuttlesworth mocked – where a preacher called Russia’s invasion of Crimea a definitive sign of the imminent End Times.
The end of All Saints
The decision to sell the Browne’s Addition church had been a clear one, the Rev. Alan B. Eschenbacher wrote in an email. Attendance had been on the decline for the past 15 years or longer, expenses were increasing, and offerings were “greatly reduced.”
“We no longer had enough income to be an active and effective ministry site,” Eschenbacher wrote.
All Saints Lutheran had explored alternative uses for the building, but those studies came up with no viable solution. Last summer, the congregation voted to sell the building. Pursuit offered their asking price “along with good terms.” By the end of the year, the deal was closed, and All Saints Lutheran was out of the building by Jan. 30.
In the months since, All Saints Lutheran voted to close entirely, Eschenbacher added.
They’re not alone. While affiliation with all forms of Christianity has been decreasing in America over the past 20 years, mainline Protestant branches like All Saints Lutheran have seen the most rapid decline, from 18% of the nation’s population in 2007 to 11% by 2024, according to a 2025 Pew Research survey.
Evangelical Protestantism has also seen a decline in the past 20 years, but by the lowest margin of all of the categories surveyed, dropping from 26% of the population in 2007 to 23% in 2024.
The decline in religious affiliation is also far more concentrated among self-described liberals than among conservatives, with a majority of liberals reporting no religious affiliation by 2024.
Where All Saints Lutheran couldn’t fill enough seats to keep the lights on, Pursuit hosts thousands of people every Sunday across its four churches. Within weeks of owning the Browne’s Addition building, Pursuit knocked down walls to accommodate the size of its new flock, each week serving well in excess of the 299 they can legally have in a building without a fire suppression system. While the church’s finances aren’t public, its coffers appear full.
And Pursuit is nowhere near finished growing, Johnson has said in recent months.