By Al Johnson
On September 10, 2025, Charlie Kirk was assassinated while speaking to a group of students at Utah Valley University. I heard the news as I was wrapping up one meeting and running late for the next. Messages flooded my phone with the first videos circulating online. At that point, Charlie had not been publicly pronounced dead. Numb, I walked into my next meeting in a thick fog, trying to process what I had just seen and praying with everything that somehow he would survive. By the end of that meeting, President Trump made the official announcement that the world had lost Charlie Kirk.
This moment sent shockwaves across the nation. A young husband and father, gunned down in cold blood for daring to speak openly, honestly, and civilly in the public square. For much of my pastoral ministry, I have pleaded with Christians to reclaim the lost art of civil conversation as Charlie was doing. We as a church used to host our own public dialogues around hot topic issues called Pub Talks.
Pub Talks was a conversation at the intersection of Christianity and culture with the goal of having a civil conversation around subjects that people are not usually so civil about. It was our hope that we could help cultivate a forum where people talk with each other, not about each other. These were events where we invited people to wrestle honestly with big questions in a respectful way. Charlie was assassinated while doing the very thing I have been training our church to do for years; to speak truth, engage culture, and hold conversations that matter, even with those you disagree with.
Demons And Darkness
Charlie’s death was not an isolated act of madness; it is a symptom of the deep demonic darkness that has settled over our land. We live in a time when telling the truth as defined by God is deemed hate speech, and those who claim to be the party of tolerance shoot their opponents. Rather than mourning the loss of life, people celebrated. I received messages from so-called Christians telling me it was unbefitting to mourn and that the world is a better place now that Charlie was dead. A demonic ideology has overtaken a generation in a visceral way.
When sin entered the world in Genesis 3, it was like a sickness released into the bloodstream of humanity. The rebellion of Adam and Eve seemed small at first, believing a demonic lie and eating the forbidden fruit, but sin never stays contained. By the very next chapter, we see its full effect in jealousy, rage, and the first murder as Cain rose up and killed his brother Abel (Genesis 4). This is what happens when mankind rebels against the God who made them. We live in a nation that has cursed and mocked the Creator God, and those who would call one another back to Him will be opposed. This is what we have witnessed as our enemies attempt to silence the gospel of Jesus Christ.
This was not a political killing, this was an attempt to silence the gospel of Jesus Christ. Charlie was not killed because of his conservatism, he was killed because he effectively preached Jesus. There are plenty of conservatives who put on similar events like Charlie Kirk, but none of them preach the gospel like he did. The amount of clear gospel proclamation from Charlie available on the internet right now has more precision than many pulpits across America, especially here in San Antonio where I pastor. Even moments before he was murdered, he preached the gospel of Jesus.
And they took him out.
Blood That Cries Out
After, Cain killed Abel, God said, “The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground” (Genesis 4:10). In the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, it is almost impossible not to see the same is true today. His blood is not silent. It cries out for revival from an entire generation. In the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s death and funeral, it has become abundantly clear that the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it (John 1:5). To be sure, God is always working and had been working long before Charlie Kirk, but is is evident we are seeing signs of the light, gospel, and glory of Jesus Christ breaking through the darkness of our day.
This has always been the pattern. You kill a Christian, and you make a thousand more. Or as Tertullian once said of the early church, “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.” We are watching that seed fall into the ground right now. The enemy meant to silence a voice, but God is multiplying it.
Across the nation, men and women who had walked away from faith are coming back. We are certainly seeing this at The Well, and I am hearing similar testimonies across the entire country. Families who have not stepped into a church in decades—or ever—are now walking through the doors. They may not share the exact faith Charlie held, but they see that his faith was something real, something worth having, and so many are exploring Christianity for the first time.
At the same time, courageous Bible preaching is rising to the surface. While there are plenty of cowards in pulpits, those who have faithfully and boldly preached the Scriptures for years are beginning to stand out. Faithful Bible teachers have prepared their congregations for moments like this, because the entire New Testament was written to churches living under pressure and persecution. Those who sit under courageous preaching week in and week out are now growing in their confidence in their pastors. The inverse has become painfully clear as well. Moreover, courage itself is rising among believers, causing them to engage in the mission with a confidence they have not had before. Christians are rightly recognizing that our Christian brother was killed, and so, rather than running for the hills, they are shouting from rooftops about Jesus.
And perhaps most powerfully, we have seen forgiveness and repentance on display. At Charlie’s memorial, his wife Erika Kirk, stood in front of thousands and forgave the man accused of murdering her husband. This only possible because she herself have received this kind of forgiveness herself. You can’t give to someone else something you don’t possess. The gospel of Jesus Christ is on display. We are witnessing Christian love in the face of hate and grace in the shadow of violence. There is far more mercy and grace in Jesus than there is sin in us. From those in attendance, to those who streamed Charlie’s memorial, millions have now heard this news!
Reports of what Jesus is doing are everywhere. Testimonies are rising of people confessing they have been in a spiritual slumber and that this tragedy has awakened them to pray, to read the Bible, and to live for Jesus again.
Amazing. I am here for it. I am rejoicing because of it.
I believe we are standing on the edge of something like we see in the book of Acts. The movement God is doing cannot be found in any other book but the Bible. The church growth experts have written and their strategies have failed. God is doing things the old-fashioned way. Or as Pastor Doug Wilson put it back in 2013, “a great reformation and revival will happen the same way the early Christians conquered Rome. Their program of conquest consisted largely of two elements — gospel preaching and being eaten by lions — a strategy that has not yet captured the imagination of the contemporary church.”
Many are waking up to this reality. Many are being mobilized. May we not waste this moment. May we be found faithful to Jesus. May we not deviate from the mission (Matthew 28:18-20). And may His kingdom come, His will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
Amen.
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