Colorado’s second-largest megachurch has officially joined the push to get anti-LGBTQ measures on the 2026 ballot. The lead pastor at Flatirons Community Church, which has five campuses across the state and plans to expand, called on congregants to sign petitions for the initiatives during a Nov. 2 sermon, which promoted a conspiracy that ties LGBTQ people with sex trafficking.
“In every one of our campus lobbies, we are partnering with Protect Colorado Kids [sic], right, where you can sign a petition to get three proposals on the upcoming ballot next year,” said Jim Burgen, Flatirons’s lead pastor, during the sermon. “All spiritual matters, because they all are centered around the identity and safety of our children, it’s nonpartisan, it’s nonpolitical. It’s a spiritual matter.”
Beyond just promoting the ballot measures, Burgen’s sermon veered into conspiratorial rhetoric, in which he insinuated, without evidence, that abortion, gay marriage, and transgender rights are all part of a series of intentional attacks on Christianity. He went on to imply those issues were connected with human trafficking.
“And the result is the government will take over,” said Burgen. “The government decided when life began. Now millions of babies get slaughtered every year. Where are the Christians, right? Or the government decided this is what marriage is.
“And now the government has decided that they can determine what gender and sex really are. And now your children are being made to sit through gender pronoun awareness puppet shows on the first day of kindergarten. Or your school library, it’s filled with pornographic how-to instruction books. And the largest, fastest growing industry in the world is the sexual exploitation and sale of children, which is a spiritual issue, not a political issue.”
Though in 2020, Flatirons was noted by Outreach Magazine as the 8th-largest megachurch in the country, as of 2025 it ranks at 63rd. In Colorado, though, it is the second-largest church, behind New Life Church in Colorado Springs. It reportedly boasts an attendance of over 10,000 people across its several campuses, including its main location in Lafayette and four more in Denver, Aurora, Longmont, and Golden. The Nov. 2 sermon was viewed on Youtube by over 9,000 people; Flatirons’ channel is listed as having more than 62,000 subscribers.
Those numbers could be valuable for Protect Kids Colorado, an organization launched last year to push anti-LGBTQ policies through Colorado’s citizen ballot initiative process. For anti-LGBTQ activists, this allows them to circumvent the legislature, where Democrats hold a majority in both houses. The organization launched its all-volunteer signature-gathering campaign in September and has three more months to collect the required 124,238 valid signatures from Colorado voters to place the measure on the ballot.
Earlier this year, Colorado Catholic bishops called for all parishes in the state to collect signatures for these measures.
Protect Kids Colorado is attempting to get three measures on the ballot. Two of them aim to legislate away transgender rights in Colorado: #109 would effectively ban students who are trans from playing sports, and #110 would ban certain gender-affirming care procedures from being performed on anyone under 18.
The other, #108, would increase the penalty for child sex trafficking to mandatory life imprisonment. Though it was the only one of the measures to concern trafficking, Burgen’s sermon conflated all three as being part of the same mission.
“Our children are being hunted and consumed by predators and pedophiles,” Burgen said. “Our children begin surgery to alter their bodies, to align with their misguided feelings and biology and boys are unfairly competing against our daughters. Let me say it this way. Our churches might be full and our Bible studies at capacity, but our children are being slaughtered, stolen, killed and destroyed.”
Burgen’s rhetoric plays into longstanding disinformation that falsely brands LGBTQ people as a threat to children. This idea has been pushed for years by Christian-right groups like Alliance Defending Freedom and Colorado’s Focus on the Family, and has since been taken up by newer organizations like Moms for Liberty, along with conservative political operatives who aim to weaponize the existence of trans people as a wedge issue to galvanize voters.
Trans people are just the most recent target of this type of fearmongering by Christian conservatives, said Dr. Antony Alumkal, a professor of sociology and religion at the Iliff School of Theology in Denver.
“This goes back to the rise of the Christian right in the late seventies. Their first target were feminists who were, you know, not keeping men and women in their separate lanes. Then they started targeting gays and lesbians and gay marriage, as that becomes more talked about,” Alumkal said. “Now, you know, gays and lesbians aren’t scary anymore. And gay marriage isn’t scary anymore because people see it and the world didn’t come to an end. So [transgender people] were the next scapegoats.”
‘I say you are a traitor’
Burgen’s messaging throughout the sermon was overtly political; he railed against the idea of separating church and state. He listed the reasons – which he described as illegitimate – why Christians don’t get engaged in politics.
“‘Because I’m really, really, busy. Because I don’t want to push my belief system on anybody else.’ And here’s the one I hear all the time. ‘Because especially, God forbid, if it looks like I violate the separation of church and state.’ Which, if you read your Bible, that’s not even in the Bible,” Burgen said. “If you read the Constitution, that’s not what it meant. All right, Christians, we need to wise up and educate ourselves on what’s really true.”
This line of thinking has become increasingly prevalent among the Christian Right, guided by pseudohistorians such as David Barton, who use selective retellings of American history to claim that the founding fathers intended the country as a nation run by and for Christians. While this was true about some of the founding fathers, Alumkal said, others disagreed on the subject during the nation’s founding.
“It has a history going back to the founding, where this is something being fought over. There were people there were Christians who wanted to impose Christianity on the entire Republic. But you had other people pushing back, saying we want room for the religious dissenters, which should be people like Unitarians or Deists. You know, the founding fathers had several Deists among them,” Alumkal told the Colorado Times Recorder. “So it was something that’s just basically never been settled, that’s been fought over for two hundred years.”
He continued, “[Burgen is] correct that the First Amendment does not forbid people from bringing religious views into the political sphere. Where I think it gets more of a problem later on in the sermon, he’s clearly trying to use the state to impose his particular views of gender and sexuality on the entire population.”
Even among his own congregation, Burgen left little room for dissent. He attempted to quash any potential hesitation in the audience by accusing anyone who did not sign the petitions of betraying Jesus.
“Listen, sidebar — I don’t care if you’re a Republican or Democrat. If you’re a Christian, to not take up your shield of faith and your sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God, of truth, to engage in this spiritual battle to protect kids, to me, is the equivalent of mutiny and deserting your post,” Burgen told the audience. “I say you are a traitor to your first allegiance: Jesus. And let me remind you, Jesus is the one who said, anyone who hurts one of these children of mine, it would be better if you had a millstone around your neck and thrown in the sea.”
Americans overall tend to be split on some elements of transgender issues. A Data for Progress survey earlier this year showed that 45% of those surveyed oppose a government ban on trans people participating in sports, with 42% supporting. But the difference was more stark when it came to opinions on trans healthcare. The survey found a majority of Americans, at 55%, support allowing doctors to providing gender-affirming care to transgender youth, compared to 33% who support a ban. Overall, though, other polls have shown that these issues are not a priority for most voters.
Even Flatirons’ pastor has not always been hostile towards LGBTQ people. In 2013, one of Burgen’s sermons spotlighted a transgender woman who attended Flatirons’s services, saying, “We don’t have an official stance on anything except this — point people toward Jesus and what he said, open our arms wide and love everybody that God brings into this place.”
But that stance seemed to abruptly reverse in 2015, when that congregant was reportedly told she was banned from attending a women’s retreat, and that she should “return to being a male.”
A later official post from Flatirons in 2019 declared in writing that the church would not support same-sex relationships or transgender people, saying that these people engage in “sexual misconduct.” The post likened this “misconduct” to adultery and even murder.
“Gay people are more than welcome in our church, just as greedy people are, just as adulterous people are, just as liars are, just as murderers are, etc. But, just as we will not condone the behavior of those sins, we will also not condone the behavior of homosexuality or agree that it is within God’s parameters for marriage. The same goes for transgender people and any other form of “sexual misconduct.” And we do this BECAUSE of love, not in spite of it,” the post reads.
‘A holy warrior’?
Burgen listed his ministry’s support for Protect Kids Colorado’s ballot measures as just one part of Flatirons’ “Rescue to Restore” initiative. Flatirons pitches “Rescue to Restore” as part of a spiritual war against human trafficking; along with Protect Kids Colorado, the megachurch is also partnering with Agape International Ministries and OneChild, two nonprofits that do international anti-trafficking work, the latter of which is based in Gleneagle, Colorado.
Burgen introduced “Rescue to Restore” at the start of the sermon as being focused on human trafficking: “I need you to know that today we’re going to be talking about Rescue to Restore, which is how we’re gonna get involved in sex trafficking, anti-sex trafficking around the world.”
But later, he expanded the bounds of the initiative to include pushing back on social acceptance of trans people, as well as pornography.
“Rescue to Restore is our response to the spirit leading us to engage in the fight for the most vulnerable women and children by engaging in the fighting against the darkest forces of evil who are attacking, mutilating, exploiting, abusing, destroying our women and our children,” Burgen said. “We’re going after human sex trafficking, pornography, and gender distorting ideology.”
This allowed “Rescue to Restore” to encompass Protect Kids Colorado’s anti-LGBTQ ballot measures. Burgen insisted that Flatirons would refuse to carry petitions for any causes that did not relate to the goals of “Rescue to Restore.”
“Don’t email me about this because I won’t answer you. I don’t care, all right? Don’t corner me in the lobby, ‘how about this, hey, I tried to get a petition in the lobby and I was told no,’ right. Right, ‘if I have a good cause, can I put a petition to lobby in the future?’ No,” said Burgen. “Don’t ask, right? This petition is very specific and lines up with our value of the Rescue to Restore initiative to protect the most vulnerable.”
Burgen called on true believers to donate to Flatirons to support the Rescue to Restore initiative – specifically calling on parishioners to donate more than they are sure they can afford.
“If you really wanna go to war against the powers and principalities of darkness who are stealing, killing, buying, selling, destroying our women and children, the next weekend is commitment weekend. Put your money where your mouth is,” Burgen told the audience. “Commit financially on a sacrificial, like, ‘I’m gonna write a number on that card that, I don’t know, I don’t know how we’re gonna afford that but I’m just trusting God for this. But this is more important than anything else I could spend my money on or invest my limited resources on. So I’m gonna take a step of faith next weekend, trusting that God will supply the need. I’m going to commit for the next two years to financially fund a war against evil.’”
This echoes the prosperity gospel common among American televangelists – faith leaders who often have a reputation among non-Christians as using their ministry to get rich. But Alumkal’s assessment of Burgen’s rhetoric was that his call for donations came from true belief, rather than monetary incentive.
“My sense here though is, you know, with Burgen, this is a holy war. … I don’t think he’s in it for the money,” Alumkal told the Colorado Times Recorder. “I think he’s in it as a holy warrior who sees this as, you know, black and white, good versus evil.”
Burgen did not respond to a request for comment. This story will be updated with any response received.
