"I did not expect what happened to have happened," he told CBN's Faithwire during a recent extended interview. "There's no way we could have anticipated that. Even as we were seeing things progress and even as arrests were kind of on the table, [I] never even thought for a moment that it would have the visibility and the impact that it did."

It was in June of 2020 when Coates decided to reopen the doors of GraceLife Church in Edmonton, Alberta. The pastor recalled a handful of coronavirus infections prompted him to close the doors to the church for a couple of weeks before reopening the sanctuary for Sunday morning services in late July of that year.

GraceLife remained open for a lengthy stretch of time before running into problems with government authorities. In mid-December of 2020, Alberta Health Services inspector Janine Hanrahan issued an order against the church, mandating pastors restrict attendance to just 15% of the building's total capacity, a stipulation with which Coates was not willing to comply. The health official also ordered parishioners to wear masks and remain physically distant from one another.

While the church fought the onerous restrictions placed upon them, the legal clash ultimately resulted in Coates' arrest and incarceration for 35 days, beginning in mid-February and ending in late March.

Backing up just a little bit, Coates recalled the numerous conversations he had with his fellow GraceLife pastors, noting they often sought God's guidance and consulted Scripture to ensure their decision to remain open was one rooted in their theological beliefs rather than their political views, though it became increasingly difficult to separate the two, as their convictions certainly carried with them political ramifications in the form of civil disobedience.

Despite the risk of arrest, Coates said, the pastoral staff deemed it important enough to stand by their decision to keep the doors of their Edmonton church open for worship services.

"We [the pastors] continually met and we agreed, ‘We're gonna stay open, we're gonna press on, we're gonna move forward,'" Coates said. "And that ended with my imprisonment. When I got in prison, our leadership was done talking about whether or not we were gonna keep going. I mean, that just settled it—we were going all the way."

Although the pastor recalled several "difficult moments" over the course of the entire saga, he said he never once second-guessed the decision to defy what he saw as a flagrant attack on his religious freedoms.

Coates—who has become something of a household name—eschewed those who characterize him as a "courageous man," revealing it was the Holy Spirit who equipped him to handle the trials he faced.

"A lot of folks just kind of see the courage and they think I'm this incredibly courageous man," he said. "Well, if you could just be in there along the way, what you see in the pulpit is this Spirit-empowered moment as I preached the Word of God. But there are moments of difficulty and challenge and turmoil along the way"... Subscribe for free to Breaking Christian News here

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