When Pastor Rick Bick entered the Ottumwa City Council meeting on Tuesday, he didn’t expect to be rebuking a satanic prayer. 

And yet, at the start of the meeting, former council member Matt Dalbey stood before the room and invoked a prayer to Satan, declaring, “Let us embrace the Luciferian impulse to eat of the tree of knowledge. That which will not bend must break, and that which can be destroyed by truth should never be spared its demise. Hail Satan.”

Bick, a pastor at New Life Center Foursquare Church in Ottumwa, watched in horror from the audience. During a Thursday appearance on “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins,” Bick explained that after Dalbey spoke the devil’s name, Bick confronted him. “I turned to him, and I said, ‘Did you just say Hail Satan?’ ... And he goes, ‘Yeah, if you can say in the name of Jesus, I can say, Hail Satan.’ I just looked at him. I said, ‘No, you can’t do that here, not here.’ And he ran out of the building.”

Bick then walked to the microphone at the front of the room and called for a reversal of the curse he believed had been cast on the city. “Let’s just reverse this curse that was put on our city. That ending with ‘Hail Satan’ or ‘Hail dark god,’ that’s not welcome here,” Bick recalled he asserted during a Thursday appearance on Washington Watch with Tony Perkins. 

Bick continued that after the incident, he felt righteous indignation. “I just said, no, this is not happening here. We’ve been praying for our city, for blessings, for good things to happen.”

Bick remarked that when he approached the front of the room to speak, it was out of turn, but that he needed to speak up immediately. “I said that guy just cursed our city and we need to stop and break that curse right now, because that’s not welcome here.”

Perkins commended Bick, “You held your ground. And I think you did the right thing to break that curse. But I want to talk about something more than just what you did there at the council, because you’re there on a regular basis. Your heart is for your city. You’re what I would call a watchman, a spiritual watchman. And you saw this, and you took the action that I think is appropriate, and that is to not allow this curse to settle upon your city.”

Bick remarked that the spiritual climate of Ottumwa has been dark at times, with a history of witchcraft and Wicca, a neopagan religion. “But we’ve had some great revivals too,” he shared. “And so that’s what we’re doing as we pray every morning for our city… we’re getting aggressive about taking our city back for God. We believe it’s to be a city where the light of God shines forth and touches and changes the nation.”

The pastor continued that garnering publicity was not his goal when he stood up for truth at the meeting, but that he did so without hesitation. “Greater is He that’s in you, [than He] that’s in the world,” Bick described, referencing 1 John 4:4.

Managing Editor of Broadcast for The Washington Stand Casey Harper urged Christians to learn from Bick’s example and stay vigilant in situations like these. “We can’t keep our heads bowed and our eyes closed and just go along with whatever is being parroted by the people in power now, because the agenda has been hijacked. And it’s not just a little bit liberal; it’s becoming outright demonic.”

“I think it was Billy Graham who said that [when] one man stands up, it stiffens the spines of everyone else,” Harper continued. “And I think that is what we’ve seen here. And I also appreciate really the spiritual acumen of … Pastor Bick, because power — the power of life and death — is in the tongue.”

Perkins insists that Dalbey’s invocation shows that evil is being emboldened. “It’s growing. But as we saw with Pastor Bick, so is the good, the bold [are] standing up. … Don’t get preoccupied with the evil. Nurture the good.”