Death Threats Gave an Opportunity to Share My Faith | Opinion

The following essay is an excerpt from Jack Phillips' new book, The Cost of My Faith: How a Decision in My Cake Shop Took Me to the Supreme Court, now out from Salem Books.

The day of my meeting with David and Charlie marked a new era for Masterpiece Cakeshop in more ways than one. For one thing, from that day to this, I became the primary person to answer the phone. I felt a responsibility to protect my employees from the horrific calls that began to flood our shop.

The phone was already ringing when I unlocked the shop door the next morning, and it kept ringing pretty much nonstop. I made myself wait to answer it—a first—until we opened for business at seven. From then on, the calls continued unabated until I stopped answering them again at 6:00 p.m. Virtually every call was hateful, profane or threatening. I marveled at how quickly word of the previous day's incident had spread and at how many people were eager to verbally attack someone they'd never met or heard of before. How angry (or hurting) do you have to be, I wondered, to wake up with this kind of hate? Think about it. The alarm goes off, you grab a shower, get the kids ready for school, take a sip of coffee, chew a bite of toast—see an email, read a tweet—and see that a little cake shop out in Colorado isn't creating cakes for same-sex weddings. And that tears it.

You're suddenly so angry that you can't do anything until you've given that shop owner a piece of your mind. He's got it coming! In fact, you're going to tell your friends to do the same: call him and let him have an earful.

Or email him. By the time I woke up that day, a couple hundred emails were already sitting in my inbox, and that number grew all day long. And—again—almost every one was hateful. (I'd offer you a few examples, but as a reporter later said while scrolling through them, "Everything here is too vile to put on the [TV] screen.") The next few days offered more of the same. Hour after hour after hour. I began to really wonder how long this might go on.

After a few days of this, I answered another phone call, bracing myself for yet another vitriolic earful.

"Masterpiece Cakeshop, this is Jack. Can I help you?"

"You the owner?"

"I am," I said, smiling into the receiver. I had made a conscious decision to be friendly and cheerful, no matter what came next. My faith in Christ teaches me that everyone is valuable and loved by God, and I want to treat them with love and respect.

"I'm in my car, and I'm heading to your shop." The voice was flat but menacing in a way that made me stop what I was doing and listen closely to what he said. "I've got a gun, and I'm coming to your store to blow your head off." He hung up. Was this for real, or just another crazy call? I'd had so many of the latter those last few days. But Lisa was working in the back that morning, and my four-year-old granddaughter was with her. I decided to err on the side of caution.

"What's up, Dad?" Lisa's voice was apprehensive. "I just got another call," I said. "But this one sounds as if it might be dangerous." I paused, letting it sink in for both of us.

"Some guy says he's got a gun and he's on his way here. I want you to stay in the back and don't come out until I tell you it's safe. I'm gonna call the police." Lisa took her little girl's hand and did as I asked. I dialed 911 and explained my situation to the dispatcher. She said she would send an officer right away.

The phone rang again. It was the same caller renewing his threat, telling me how close he was, even naming the streets. Then again, he said something that indicated to me that he knew my daughter was in the shop. And so the calls kept coming, every few seconds—each more menacing than the last—while I waited with one eye on the clock and one on the parking lot. Finally, a police cruiser pulled up outside. The officer came to the door. I thanked him for coming, then explained the situation, the conversation of a few days earlier and all that had transpired after that. As we were talking, the phone rang—and caller ID confirmed it was the same man, once again. This time, the policeman answered, but the caller merely hung up. He continued doing that for a few minutes: call, hang up, call, hang up.

He never stayed on the line long enough for the policeman to trace his number. That made me wonder if he was just a crank, making empty threats. Or had he been serious but changed his mind when he saw the officer's car in our parking lot? I'll never know. But he certainly prompted me to rethink the seriousness of some of the other calls and emails I'd been getting. Soon, we'd be installing an alarm system and surveillance cameras—something my little cake shop had never needed before.

By God's grace, to my knowledge, I never heard from that particular caller again. And I wish I could say the threats of physical violence ended there too. But they've continued, off and on, through the years—including one man who made it a point, for quite a long while, to call me up at regular intervals to tell me I wasn't fit to live, that he owned a machete and that one of these days he'd be coming in to chop me into little pieces. So far, he hasn't done that.

Even when talking to the guy with the machete, I have tried to keep a smile in my voice. I always hope that, if given the chance, I might be able to share God's love and grace with him. Yes, even him. Where else is he going to hear it? On TV? The internet? Read it in a newspaper? From his closest friends? Does he have any close friends? That man—like every one of the rest of us—needs to hear about God's grace and how Jesus came and died on a cross to pay the penalty for our sins and restore our broken relationship with the Father.

Actually, I have prayed for that opportunity with everyone who calls, and quite a few times, I have gotten that chance. Just two days after David and Charlie came through my shop, I took a call from a man who said he was an atheist from up in the Northwest. He wanted to talk about what had happened. He was polite, genuinely interested, and we talked for most of an hour. I explained exactly what had happened between the two men and myself, that I was happy to serve them and happy to sell them anything else in my shop, or to create other custom work for them. It was just the iconic nature of the wedding cake itself that was problematic. I also took the opportunity to share what I believe is the best news in the world: The Bible says we are separated from God the Father by our sin. It says clearly that Jesus Christ left His throne in Heaven and became a man. He lived a sinless life and took the punishment for our sin when He died on the cross. He was buried, and when He rose from the dead, He proved that He had power over both sin and death, as well as the authority to restore our relationship with the Father.

The atheist on the phone was kind enough to let me share many aspects of my faith in Christ with him, and I gave him room to explain some of his lack of faith to me. We ended the call on friendly terms, and for me, at least, it was something of a life-changing conversation.

Before the events of that week opened the door to so many visits with people of vastly different points of view, I'd always thought of sharing my faith as something God might give me a special opportunity to do once in a great while. After my phone call with the atheist, though, I suddenly realized that those kinds of opportunities were probably around me all the time, every day—I'd just never looked for them, much less taken advantage of them.

Starting that Saturday, I began looking. I always wanted to be alert, able and willing to share Christ with anyone I met. What's the point of suddenly being on so many people's radars if you can't use those moments to share with them your deepest beliefs? That, for me, is the best news in the whole world: the love of Jesus Christ. My opportunities, I soon learned, were about to begin in earnest.

Jack Phillips is the owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop in Loveland, Colorado.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.