With a worn, red leather Bible clutched firmly in his hand and a fiery tone in his voice, a familiar face to the Mississippi State campus proclaimed his return Monday on the Drill Field while also condemning homosexuals, masturbators and all students enrolled at MSU.”While you’re in sin, you’re not in glory at all. While you masturbate, you’re going to hell,” exclaimed Michael Venyah, a self-proclaimed Gospel preacher, wearing a shirt with the words “No Homos go to Heaven! All Homos go to Hell!” written on the front and back. “There’s a lot of masturbators here, especially the homos, the perverts. They watch these pervert videos and touch themselves.”
Venyah came this time with his wife, Tamika, and toddler son, Paul, after two years abroad, where the couple and a handful of followers partook in their own brand of spreading the Gospel. The last time he was on campus was in the spring of 2005, during which he stirred up controversy with both students and administrators. After he departed at the end of the semester he sent an e-mail to some students asking them to “pray for revival in this land of gross spiritual secular-humanistic anti-Christ darkness,” according to a previous Reflector report.
His return was not met warmly Monday afternoon. Venyah and his wife were quickly met with outcries from students, including members of MSU’s gay community, after particularly explicit words were targeted toward them.
“You say, ‘Jesus come in my heart,’ and then you sodomize, you go poke some man in the rear,” Venyah said. “Understand about this: A penis does not go in an anus. An anus is meant to push out waste material.”
Venyah made other comments condemning homosexuality and premarital sex, and called MSU students “hell-bound heathens” and “ignorant.”
Justin Warren, a sophomore interior design major, said he is gay and believes he is going to heaven.
“I believe that not just straight people are going to heaven because there are a lot of gay people that have faith just as well as heterosexuals,” he said.
Not only did Michael Venyah’s words outrage him, Warren said, but also the fact that he was condemning people in the presence of the couple’s own son.
“What’s really making me mad is that they have a child here that they are raising him in hate toward gay people. That’s sickening,” he said. “Everyone has their freedom of speech, but I feel like I’m being discriminated against. They’re just targeting gay people. They said that all gay people masturbate. Come on, everyone does. That’s ridiculous.”
“[Venyah’s words] are sick,” Warren added. “Gay people go to heaven.”
Other Christian students were also among those opposing Venyah’s words. Matt Kendrick, a senior foreign language major and minister of students for Adaton Baptist Church in Starkville, called the Venyahs’ words pure hypocrisy.
“I think they’re 100 percent off and are fighting the wrong battle,” Kendrick said. “They don’t understand what grace is. Ephesians 2:89 says that grace is a gift of God and that it doesn’t matter if we stop sinning because we never will. It doesn’t matter if you hate homosexuals or are homosexual. It has to do with God giving us that grace and mercy because He died on the cross and has redeemed us out of our sin.”
“They think they’re right, and it’s not true,” he said. “It’s hate and hypocrisy. I think that if Paul or Peter of the Bible were out here, they would have already, if not hit [Michael Venyah] in the face, been speaking pretty loudly against him. Christians are not against gay people. That is not our battle.”
After about one hour, a crowd of approximately 100 students gathered around Michael Venyah, most either laughing at his explicit descriptions of anal sex and sexual deviance, cursing or angrily telling him his words contradict the teachings of Christ. He continued to yell at students, telling them they were damned to hell for their practices.
“Most of you are damned because of your choice of lust,” he said. “Some of you I talked to many years ago. I pray you repent before you bust hell wide open. While you ask Jesus in your heart, you go home and masturbate, you go home and have sex outside of marriage, you go home and listen to Tupac [Shakur] who’s in hell like you’ll be, you go home and listen to Biggie Smalls.”
Tamika Venyah said Jesus Christ commissioned the family to come back to the MSU campus and preach the Gospel. She added that they knew there would be opposition to their words.
“It’s to be expected,” she said. “We know what the Bible says. People will either be offended because their deeds will be uncovered or their hearts will be open and they’ll receive the truth.”
She said that most of the confrontations the family has faced has involved cursing.
“We’ve never been hurt physically, per se, but we have been threatened,” she said.
However, the same e-mail Michael Venyah reportedly sent to students also stated that he and Tamika were physically attacked during a mission in Germany and locked themselves inside their apartment for safety.
Since leaving MSU, Tamika Venyah said the family has traveled across the globe.
“We’ve spent time in India, Europe, Poland, Czech Republic, Austria and we’ve spent time on more than 25 campuses in the United States,” she said. She added that they have been successful “in the fact that the word of God is being preached.”
Scott Mathers, a teaching assistant in sociology, brought his 1 p.m. class to the Drill Field to watch and hear the Venyahs.
“This is certainly something I’ve seen in a number of different areas,” Mathers said. “It’s interesting because they use inflammatory language and they scream ‘sinner’ and stuff like that. That always leaves me to wonder, are they trying to convince people and lead them into the fold, or do they just want some sort of inflammatory attention?”
Mathers added that college campuses are not typical environments in which to condemn people.
“On a college campus, because it tends to be a liberal environment, it actually tends to have us all come together against it,” he said. “It’s usually confrontational in terms of the students because they are so alienated from the message: don’t have premarital sex, don’t drink alcohol, y’know, don’t masturbate. They don’t tend to coax many people. But it is always good entertainment.”
Michael Venyah said the family plans to keep preaching on campus.