PRESS RELEASE
For Immediate Release, November 14, 2012
Contact: Pastor Scott Lively, 413-250-0984
sdllaw@gmail.com
Springfield Pastor Forms Committee to Explore Run For Governor
Pastor Scott Lively of Springfield today announced the formation of a committee to explore the possibility of a run for the governorship of Massachusetts. A fifth generation Bay Stater, born and raised in the Village of Shelburne Falls, Pastor Lively was for many years a Christian missionary and social activist in various parts of the world, based primarily in Oregon and California. In 2008, following a year-long speaking tour through eight countries of the former Soviet Union, he and his wife Anne moved back to Massachusetts to start a mission to the poor and disadvantaged in inner-city Springfield. They bought a home in the heart of the troubled McNight neighborhood and opened a church and ministry center called Holy Grounds Coffee House, strategically located on State Street between the Downtown and Mason Square areas, to serve the homeless and street populations of the city.
Pastor Lively has successfully organized a large network of Christians from a variety of local churches who now regularly cooperate together to carry on inner-city outreach and evangelism through annual events such as the March For Jesus and Family Day and through a full schedule of daily and weekly activities based at Holy Grounds Coffee House. The mission’s most visible impact on the city has been its TRUST JESUS Campaign, which encourages all the Christians of the area to unify around that simple Gospel message and display it publicly. Through these efforts many lives in inner-city Springfield have been changed for the better and a return to biblical values is being recognized by an increasing number of residents as the only real solution to Springfield’s problems.
On September 30th of this year Pastor Lively turned over the day-to-day management of the mission to Pastor C.S. Cooley, senior pastor at United Temple Church of God in Christ and a highly respected leader in the community. Pastor Lively remains the pastor of the Coffee House Church, which holds services at Holy Grounds on Sunday afternoons, and will continue to serve as a member of the board of Redemption Gate Mission Society, the umbrella organization over the various ministries at the mission.
On October 1st, Pastor Lively launched a new effort called the King Josiah Project to begin challenging movements and ideologies in Massachusetts which he perceives as being most responsible for the moral and economic degeneration of Springfield and the state. These include in order of destructiveness: The abortion industry, the homosexual movement, the public education system, corrupt elements in state government, and a broken social welfare system that breeds dependency instead of rebuilding lives. The King Josiah Project is being conducted under the auspices of Abiding Truth Ministries, a 501(c)(3) religious non-profit organization founded by Pastor Lively in 1997 to promote and defend biblical values in society. As he has done in other states and nations for more than 20 years, Pastor Lively will engage in social activism in Springfield and around the state to rally Christians and other social conservatives to oppose these social ills and to attempt to cure them through a return to biblical values.
If, in the course of these efforts, his exploratory committee determines that a run for governor would complement the larger purpose of turning Massachusetts back to God, Pastor Lively will enter the race to win the governorship.
Pastor Lively (54) is fully qualified to serve as governor were he to be elected. An attorney as well as a pastor, he graduated magna cum laude from Trinity Law School in Santa Ana, California, and was managing partner of his own successful law firm in Southern California, with a flawless personal record before the state bar.
While running the for-profit firm he also founded the Pro-Family Law Center, a public interest law firm specializing in constitutional law, taking his most significant case, Good News Employee Association v. Hicks all the way to the Federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, where he argued the First Amendment before a three judge panel held in special session at Stanford University.
Pastor Lively holds a Certificaté in International Human Rights from the Institute of International Human Rights in Strasburg, France, and is the author of the Riga Declaration on Religious Freedom, Family Values and Human Rights (2006). http://www.defendthefamily.com/intl/
Pastor Lively is an internationally recognized authority on biblical values in public policy, serving as an educator, trainer and consultant to church, community and government leaders in more than 30 countries, and as a media figure in more than 700 radio and television interviews here at home. He is known as the “Father of the Ugandan Pro-Family Movement” for his work in that country, and his efforts in Russia, Eastern Europe and the Baltics have strengthened both the Christian church and social resistance to the homosexualization of those regions.
Pastor Lively holds a Doctor of Theology degree from the School of Bible Theology of the Pentecostal Assemblies of God, studying directly with PAGA founder Dr. Richard Anderson, who went home to be with the Lord October 11, 2012 after 79 years of active ministry. He was 92. In 2009, Pastor Lively’s doctoral thesis was revised and published in book form under the title Redeeming the Rainbow: A Christian Response to the “Gay” Agenda, which may be downloaded in PDF form at http://www.defendthefamily.com/rtr/.
Pastor Lively is the author of four other books, including The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party which is in its fourth edition and has been translated into five languages. A fifth edition is in progress, a sample of which may be viewed at
http://www.scottlively.net/tps/tps1.pdf. He is the author of countless articles, editorials and essays, many of which are published online at defendthefamily.com and/or www.ScottLively.net.
Pastor Lively, the oldest of six children in a Roman Catholic family, achieved all of these accomplishments despite tremendous hardship and tumult in his early life: becoming homeless and on his own at the age of sixteen after his father’s steadily deteriorating mental health left the family destitute; falling into alcoholism and drug addiction from the age of twelve; and finally drifting around the United States as a transient in his late teens and early twenties, sleeping under bridges and begging spare change to survive. He accepted Jesus Christ as Savior in prayer in 1986 and was instantaneously completely healed. With this background, Pastor Lively has a unique perspective, not just on social justice and the needs of the disadvantaged and mentally ill, but also the amazing transformative power of Christianity.
Asked why he is considering a run for governor, Lively replied “I am greatly dismayed at the breakdown of family and morality here in Massachusetts over the past few decades. This state desperately needs a return to God and that means the people of God must begin boldly speaking out about His power to solve our many problems. We also need to speak against the social and moral evils that have come to dominate our culture in the absence of God. I can’t think of any better platform to advocate this view than as governor of the state. I don’t know of anyone else willing to take the abuse for daring to say these things in the political arena, so I have formed a committee to explore the possibility of entering that race myself.”
