A South Florida church says thieves broke inside their sanctuary hours before Sunday service and stole thousands of dollars\u2019 worth of equipment. <\/p>\n
Dr. Johnny Sanders, the chair of the trustee board at Bethel Apostolic Temple in Miami’s West Little River community, said when the deacons came in Sunday morning to set up for service, they noticed the lights weren’t working. They then noticed many of their\u00a0essential worship, sound and technology equipment were gone.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur mixers, the keyboard for the musician, our cameras similar to the ones you use were gone that we use to stream the service live,\u201d Sanders said. \u201cYou certainly feel violated.\u201d<\/p>\n
The church says they were forced to cancel service.<\/p>\n
Sanders said they checked their surveillance and watched two people break in through a back door and spend almost 30 minutes inside the church grabbing whatever they could get their hands on, before they cut the power.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey took the console, the sound board, laptops, everything we need to facilitate service,\u201d Sanders said. \u201cIt is a huge devastating hit.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sanders said Bethel is sharing what happened to them as a cautionary reminder to other churches and faith based organizations.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur pastor, Reverend Dr. Carol Nash-Lester, as well as our trustee board ministers and members, want to remind churches to be vigilant and be sure to up your security because we’re living in a different time now,\u201d Sanders said.<\/p>\n
He said they can replace the equipment, but their focus will always be on ministry. As for the people who they say broke in, Sanders said they forgive them.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe prayed for them, and we would let them know this isn’t about equipment that you took; this is about you interrupting service going forward and interrupting people being able to connect with their spiritual faith families and connect with God through these services \u2013 never a connection they can’t have with God, but through our worship experience,\u201d Sanders said.<\/p>\n
The church filed a report with the Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office. NBC6 reached out Tuesday afternoon for information.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The church is now asking the community for support and donations to replace the stolen equipment.\u00a0They are sharing their information on the Givelify app under Bethel Apostolic Temple Miami, and their Zelle at\u00a0adminofc@bethelapostolictemple.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A South Florida church says thieves broke inside their sanctuary hours before Sunday service and stole thousands of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":369085,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[225,227,226,2033],"class_list":["post-369084","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-hialeah","tag-hialeah","tag-hialeah-headlines","tag-hialeah-news","tag-only-on-6"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369084","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=369084"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369084\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/369085"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=369084"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=369084"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=369084"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}