Photo of Pastor Dimas Salaberrios from Twitter
As the nation continues to reel from recent events, one follower of Christ is showing up at protests with a message of love and faith.
Pastor Dimas Salaberrios is used to protests. He often travels to locations where protests about racial discrimination are taking place, to offer hope and healing. He went to Charleston in 2015 to pray with those who were shocked and outraged by the shooting of nine black churchgoers. Now he’s visiting protests in Minneapolis, where he’s hoping to encourage and comfort others.
During an interview on CBN’s “Prayer Link” segment, Salaberrios said “...Christians, need to throw on their masks and go out to these protests. And walk around and ask, 'Can we pray for you?' Can we pray for your safety? That's what I normally say.”
Salaberrios even shared an encounter he had with another protestor who was lighting a firecracker to frighten the nearby police. When Salaberrios approached the man and asked to simply pray with him, it put a stop to a potentially harmful act before it started.
“I think when darkness is running rampant, we gotta bring the light,” he said. And Salaberrios is no stranger to darkness. As a former drug dealer, he has witnessed his fair share of it. But now as a follower of Jesus and a pastor for Infinity Church, he believes the best way to bring about change and stamp out hatred is through spreading the love of God.
As Salaberrios explained, most of the people at these protests are young. "These are kids – 16, 17,18 years old," he said. “And they were weeping and crying...We started praying with them, ministering to them, praying with the police officers. We went to the front of the crowd, right where people were speaking...and we just started to pray for people. We had six, seven-thousand people sit down to hear us, to pray. And many of them are hurt."
The pain that many protestors are currently feeling is very real and very poignant. It may even seem overwhelming. But there is a source of comfort for those who are hurting, as Paul pointed out in his second letter to the Corinthians: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, through the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. For as the sufferings of Christ abound to us, even so our comfort also abounds through Christ” (2 Corinthians 1:3-5).
This is the message that Salaberrios hopes believers can spread. On Facebook, he has posted multiple invitations for his followers to represent Christianity at protests, writing, “If we have Heaven as our home, why be saturated with fear. Our city needs [us] to...bring peace.”