(RNS) — Leaders of Cities Church, the Minneapolis congregation whose worship service was disrupted by anti-ICE protesters, are considering legal action against the activists, saying the group that invaded the church on Sunday (Jan. 18) “jarringly disrupted our worship gathering.”

In a statement issued Tuesday, the church leaders said the protesters “accosted members of our congregation, frightened children, and created a scene marked by intimidation and threat. Such conduct is shameful, unlawful, and will not be tolerated. Invading a church service to disrupt the worship of Jesus — or any other act of worship — is protected by neither the Christian Scriptures nor the laws of this nation.”

The church also called on federal officials to protect all houses of worship from similar protests.

Nekima Levy Armstrong, a minister, lawyer and activist, told The Washington Post that activists were protesting against David Easterwood, a lay pastor and elder at the Southern Baptist church who also works for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Armstrong said she was angered at seeing a video of Easterwood defending his work with ICE.

“I don’t understand how as a pastor he thinks that that’s acceptable,” Levy Armstrong told the Post.

Easterwood is one of several ICE officials, including Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, named in a federal lawsuit filed by protesters in Minnesota who have accused federal officials of trying to suppress their free speech. “They have pepper-sprayed, violently subdued, and aimed assault rifles at protesters and observers, and even followed observers home to scare them in a tactic lifted straight from the mafia,” the lawsuit alleges.

Easterwood, the acting field director of an ICE office in St. Paul, has denied the allegations.

Videos of the protest were shared widely on social media over the weekend, leading to outrage from Southern Baptist and other evangelical Christian leaders. SBC President Clint Pressley, in an interview with Religion News Service, said the scene was “just unbelievable.”

Pressley said he was thankful the protest ended peacefully, given how recent shootings and acts of violence at houses of worship have put congregations on edge. “It scared me to death to think about what might happen in a church if you had intruders like that,” he said.

No matter what people think about ICE, he said, disrupting a church service is wrong. 

In a message on the Cities Church website, pastor Jonathan Parnell wrote, “Rejoice in the trial. See God’s blessing. Keep doing good.”

Cities Church was planted by Parnell in 2015 and worships in a former Episcopal church known as St. Paul’s on the Hill. An article on the church’s website notes that the church is “neither a gym nor a theater,” unlike many modern evangelical churches. Through the SBC’s North American Mission Board, church leaders declined a request for an interview.

The congregation has a more formal liturgy than many SBC churches, including a weekly confession of sin and “assurance of pardon,” as well as Communion at every service. The church also has ties to Bethlehem College and Seminary, a school started by John Piper, a bestselling author and pastor, and Joe Rigney, an author and professor known for his belief that empathy is sinful and his critique of “woke” Christians.

On X on Monday, Rigney called himself a founding pastor of Cities Church. He is now a pastor at Christ Church DC, where Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth attends, a congregation “which faces weekly protests by vile leftwing activists.”

The U.S. Department of Justice is investigating Sunday’s protest for possible civil liberty violations or violations of the 1994 Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, which protects access to both abortion clinics and houses of worship. The FACE Act also bans protesters from intentionally “injuring, intimidating, or interfering with, or attempting to injure, intimidate, or interfere, any person by force, threat of force, or physical obstruction.”

John Greil, a law professor at the University of Texas who co-teaches a religion and law clinic, said that the protesters had claimed they wanted to disrupt a worship service and that videos of the incident seem to show that at least some activists appear to have intimidated worshippers.

“There’s a pretty touching image of a child who’s being consoled by her parents, and at least some of those individuals who went into the church were going into people’s faces, shouting,” he said. “I think that that satisfies the intimidate or interfere with worship.”

Greil also said that one protester appeared to threaten a worshipper who asked him to leave.

Though protesters could invoke a First Amendment right to protest at the church, Greil said, that would hold true only if the protest had taken place on the sidewalk or in another public forum. In a 2011 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed a $5 million award for damages against members of Westboro Baptist Church who had been sued for protesting at a veteran’s funeral, ruling that the church members had protested from the sidewalk outside the funeral, not on private property.

A protest on private property is different than a public setting, Greil said.

“I think we could very easily imagine the real harms that would happen if Black churches were interrupted by white supremacists just to chant public slogans, if Jewish services were interrupted, if Muslim prayer services were interrupted,” he said. “I think it’d be a pretty scary world to imagine.”

Greil said the church could sue protesters for trespassing on its property.

The St. Paul Police Department is also investigating the incident, in which 30 to 40 protesters entered the church, though most of them had left the building and were walking away when the officers arrived about 10:40 a.m. local time.

“This incident is an active & ongoing disorderly conduct investigation,” public information officer Alyssa Arcand told RNS in an email. “Because this is an open investigation, no additional public information is available at this time.”

The Baptist Joint Committee, a pro-religious freedom group, declined to comment specifically on the protest but issued a statement on Tuesday criticizing the Trump administration for undermining religious liberty in its immigration policies. “In Minneapolis and across the country, the threats to the religious freedom of all people are not the people standing up for and participating in civic life but the people who wield state power in a manner that undermines it,” the statement read. 

The statement also called on officials to “respect places of worship as spaces of conscience and community.”

Trey Turner, executive director of the Minnesota-Wisconsin Baptist Convention, said Baptist churches in both states have been struggling to respond to ICE enforcement and the issue of immigration. Many of the churches in the convention, he said, including about a third of those in the Twin Cities, serve immigrant congregations.

“There are Hispanic churches that are not meeting right now because they are afraid of what’s happening in our part of the world, in part, because of the interaction between the federal government and the state government,” said Turner.

Even church members who have legal status fear that ICE could raid churches, he said, causing a great deal of concern in the immigrant community. He said churches in the convention don’t all agree on how best to deal with the issue of immigrants. This week, Turner hopes to meet with Baptist leaders from the Southeast Asian Hmong community to talk about ways that SBC churches in Minnesota can work together to support one another.

Turner cautioned that not all Southern Baptists hold the same view on immigration but that many other pastors in the area had reached out to offer their support. Turner said his first thought after hearing about the protest was, “How can I serve this congregation going through this trauma?”

“Because they’re going to try to get together this coming Sunday, and what will be the response?” he said.

He said Sunday’s protest felt like something sacred had been violated. People go to church to seek sanctuary from the outside world, he said. They don’t expect the kind of chaos and disruption that occurred on Sunday.

“It’s shocking to us,” he said.