A co-pastor and First Lady of a church in Texas is going viral— for all the wrong reasons— after a clip of her firing a praise team member mid-service made its rounds online. Folks are not only calling out the church and the pastor, but condeming her actions. Now, the fired singer is speaking out.
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Cassandra Pope, who co-pastors Macedonia Worship Center in Houston with her husband, is being dragged online after telling the church how she “needed to make a correction on this morning.” Said correction was directed at a praise team singer named Mahoganee Medlock-Brown because she didn’t appreciate the way she… wait for it— hugged her.
“Mahoganee kinda gave me a different hug than she normally does,” Pope said from the pulpit. “We’re not gonna have that in the body of Christ. The Word of God tells us that open rebuke is better than secret love, so we can’t have that up in this house on this morning, amen!” Her comments were met with a slew of “Amens!” from the pews as Mahoganee and other praise team members stood flabbergasted.
But Pope didn’t stop there. She told Mahoganee how she’s “gonna expose it” while letting her “know I know how you feel, amen. So we just gonna get rid of all of that. [And] if you need to excuse yourself I’m going to allow you to do that.” Why? Because the pastor “just don’t like fake.” She added: “We tried to talk about it, but you didn’t want to talk about it!”
The pastor continued: “And God has told me to clean up His house, amen! We not gonna have that kind of behavior in God’s house, because this is the house of the Lord, and we gon’ praise God up in here.” After the rebuke, Mahoganee hugged her fellow praise team members on stage. Pope began to recite Psalm 23 as Mahoganee walked off before her husband, Pastor Walter Pope, took over the microphone and agreed with his wife.
After the video went viral, Mahoganee addressed the incident on Facebook. “The way that some church leaders use scripture to demean and humiliate people needs to be studied,” she wrote. “This is me getting fired publicly from a church that I served for the past 2 years up until yesterday. I was on my way out the door due to previous instances, but I guess she couldn’t wait.”
See for yourself:
Folks went OFF in the church’s Facebook comments. “Where the First Lady at? I just need a swing at her,” one person said. “In my color purple voice….Until you do right by Mahogany everything you do gone crumble,” a second person wrote, while a third called out Pope’s “boneless locs.” A third Facebook user commented: “All members should be running for the hills.” The jokes continued over on TikTok.
TikTok user Anna C. Douglas’ parody of the incident has over 30K views and nearly 2K comments.
“God bless Mahoganee, she handled that foolishness with so much GRACE, and the fact that she hugged the whole praise team after being rebuked about a hug was FUNNY,” one person wrote. “2 Huggalations 7:9 for scripture reference,” added another. As of this writing, Pope nor her husband has spoken out about the firing.
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