https://oklahoman-ok.newsmemory.com/?publink=0e0af9c94_134f9c3&fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR6ZASG55cnWrobJGWhxkgby6MroyqvDCrUthzSU0BnEfLxK3o61uVZLzKWvzw_aem_RcSK3ZI1HczWg4C3nWcwAA

The City of #OklahomaCity needs to do more careful vetting of its employees. #DillonAwes should never have been hired with such a long history of public violent hate speech against #LGBTQ folks as well as his past involvement with a.Texas church that engaged in extreme anti-semitic hate speech.

Excerpt: Co-workers of Dillon Awes say the City Hall information technology employee is polite and friendly at his job. In his second job as a church leader, however, he says people who are LGBTQ+ should be tried for abomination and executed.

“They should be lined up against the wall and shot in the back of the head,” Awes is heard saying in a recording of a June 5, 2022, sermon at his former church in Texas.

In the same sermon, Awes also told his congregation “all homosexuals are pedophiles” and LGBTQ+ friendly pastors should be “put to death.” Addressing children listening to his sermon, he warned that people who are LGBTQ+ “will hurt you.”

While he is not known to have espoused those beliefs during his city job, his rhetoric has some of his co-workers worried for their safety.

“It’s terrifying,” said one of two LGBTQ+ coworkers interviewed by The Oklahoman. “I didn’t expect that to come out of his mouth. While watching those videos, I felt physically ill.”

Both workers asked not to be identified out of concern of being retaliated against.

. . . On the website for his Oklahoma City church, Awes shares how he went into full-time ministry at 23 at Stedfast Baptist Church after he moved to Texas and how it was that church’s pastor, Jonathan Shelley, who ordained him and sent him to Oklahoma City to start what is now Anchor Baptist Church (not to be confused with other churches using the name of Anchor Baptist Church in other communities).

A 2023 story in the Houston Chronicle reported Shelley co-founded Stedfast Baptist Church in Fort Worth in 2014 and built a congregation around open hatred of Jewish and queer people. The newspaper quoted an October 2022 sermon in which Shelley asked, “Did (the Nazis) actually kill six million (Jews)?”

The paper went on to quote Shelley as answering his own question with “I doubt it. Only if we were lucky. We need to be the loudest voice out here, explaining how the Jews are wicked, evil, Satanic people.”

Awes, meanwhile, more recently posted a sermon on YouTube titled “Burn in Hell Pope Francis.”

The March 2, 2025, live stream was viewed more than 1,800 times. The church channel has 915 subscribers. The ailing pope died on April 21, 2025.

The Oklahoma City church, then under the name Stedfast, popped up on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s 2023 list of anti-LGBTQ+ hate groups.

The list was part of a report warning that the number of such hate groups had jumped by about one-third, to 86, marking the highest number of anti-LGBTQ+ organizations recorded in the history of the SPLC.

Recent guest speakers at Anchor Baptist Church include Steven Anderson, who celebrated “50 less pedophiles in the world” after the 2016 massacre of 49 people at the predominantly LGBTQ+ Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida.