V1 Church co-founding pastor Mike Signorelli warns Christian parents about celebrating Halloween because celebration is connected to embracing a day in which many partake in demonic rituals.
V1 Church was listed at No. 26 in Outreach Magazine’s “Outreach 100 Fastest-Growing Churches in America” this year and has been called the “fastest-growing church in America” by INJOY Stewardship Solutions. V1 Church has grown from one location in 2017 to three campuses nationally across Long Island, New York City, and Northwest Indiana, and includes over 100 home watch parties globally.
“The classic question is should Christians accept, reject or redeem Halloween,” Signorelli said and shared that over time he has come to the conclusion that Christians need to “reject it.”
Signorelli said that he has interviewed many witches and warlocks who have testified to performing seances on Halloween, but even if one never personally sees this taking place, just the mere fact that “there’s dark occult themes and a glorification of death” should be reason enough for parents to want to protect their children from it.
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When children see their parents taking part in Halloween what parents are “essentially doing with your child is you’re normalizing it,” V1 Church’s pastor warned. “And so as you’re normalizing it, and desensitizing it, what is normalized in their childhood can be embraced as an adult, and you’re opening these doors and you’re opening up these pathways” to the demonic.
“It’s a slippery slope even when churches attempt to redeem Halloween because, in all reality, they are really just desensitizing it,” he added.
“I’ll put it like this, I just had a national movie release in theaters last week (‘The Domino Revival’). We came in at No. 3 in the box office, which is amazing,” Signorelli said. The two movies that claimed the top two spots were “one directed by Martin Scorsese, and the other one was ‘The Exorcist’ franchise.”
“The reason why they can pump these films out every Halloween season is because people are enticed by it,” Signorelli said, clarifying that he thinks it is unwise as a parent to celebrate Halloween because “it makes positive memories around a time of darkness—what you’re basically doing is sowing the seeds for later on for your children to go deeper on that journey as they continue to mature.”
Throughout his years in ministry, Signorelli told ChurchLeaders that he has witnessed a lot of parents neglect spending quality time with their children, especially in today’s smartphone era.
Consequently, now “one of the memories that will stand out to them most is the one time you actually put the phone aside and it was to dress them up and actually subject them to all this dark imagery in their neighborhood going from house to house with ghouls and goblins,” he said. “You have basically desensitized them, and then you’ve put an element of parental love around what you subjected them to, and you’ve sown those seeds, which to me is like the perfect gateway to the demonic when they get older.”
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Signorelli cautioned churches that even holding an alternative such as Trunk-or-Treat can, although it might not be the intended to so, create a bridge to the demonic.
