“We do empathize…but we tend to believe it’s more than anything just people that don’t like hearing the name of Jesus shouted so loud,” he added.įor Moore, the situation is particularly frustrating because the church is just a few feet beyond the town line of Mount Juliet, which does have a noise ordinance. “If they’re close enough to hear us, then they’re close enough to attend.” “We certainly empathize with them, but we just hope they’ll participate,” he said. With regards to the jangled neighbors, Caparas said, “We’re just having church.” “We have people driving as far as California,” he said. He concluded, “We’re just getting started and won’t be bullied by people that tolerate many loud events all over the area but only want to complain about our church.”Ĭhurch spokesman Wayne Caparas told The Daily Beast that of the 2,000 who attended an average service, half are from outside the area. I’m not going to turn them away just because people can hear us down the road.” We literally meet in a tent and thousands of people are showing up. “We’re in total compliance and there is no sound ordinance that we have violated,” he noted. In response to a Daily Beast request for comment, Locke messaged via Twitter on Tuesday, saying, “Yes, people complain,” adding, “We do everything we can to minimize the sound.” “I think we just need to revisit it and see is it valid to move ahead with,” he said. Commissioner Jerry McFarland noted that there had been talk of instituting a noise ordinance, but he was not sure what happened with it. Owen did guarantee that the sheriff's department would “without a doubt” enforce any law or any ordinances passed by the commission. “ I think there’s too much protection by the federal law… I wish I knew the answer, but I don’t.” “When it comes to a church worshiping… I don’t know how you can tell someone how loud they could sing-or how loud they could play their music,” Owen said. And it seemed to Owen that the church was a noise problem with no immediate solution. However many complaints there may be, the county does not have an ordinance to remedy them. Wilson County was otherwise largely quiet, with the 12 remaining complaints involving “everything from a donkey to a motorcycle to kids playing in the street.” “Four calls were from a cannon being fired in the north east,” he said. He noted another, lesser source of complaints at the other end of the county. Owen did not name it, but he was clearly referring to Locke’s church. But 22 were from a church down in the west end of the county. “We had 41 noise complaints,” he said “Sounds like a lot. I’ve never had one complaint on a church in my district ever, except I’ve never heard another church five miles away, either.”Ĭhief Deputy Mike Owen of the Wilson County Sheriff’s office gave the commission a breakdown on the noise complaints his department received countywide in September. “It’s loud.”įranklin added, “I’m five miles from the church and can hear the music… I have a lot of churches in my district. “It will rattle the windows of your car if you’re anywhere near this thing,” County Commissioner Bobby Franklin reported during an October meeting. Moore added, “You can hear it in my house with all the doors and windows closed… On New Year’s Eve, it was going on past midnight.”Ī number of the county commissioners in surrounding Wilson County are also concerned with the pastor’s decibel level. You can hear the music and then you can hear him yelling and then you can hear some more music.” “It seems like I’ve been hearing it for over a year, but it seems like the past several weeks it’s gotten louder,” Moore told The Daily Beast. What bothers her most is the extraordinary volume of the loudspeakers Global Vision employs when 2,000 people pack into the church at least three times a week. William DeShazer/The Washington Post via Gettyīut it is not simply the content of Locke’s pronouncements that trouble local residents such as Sarah Moore, a paralegal who is raising two teenagers just under a mile from the church.
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