A woman sits down in her pew on a Sunday morning in Redding, California. Her phone is in her pocket, on silent, doing what phones do — quietly reporting her location to the apps she’s forgotten are listening. She has no idea that a foreign government may now know she was there, and that her feed is about to start filling with content designed to shape how she feels about a war on the other side of the world.
That isn’t speculation. It’s what a federal filing, signed under penalty of perjury, says is the plan.
Why This Should Matter to You Before You Read Another Word
This isn’t really a story about ad-tech. It’s a story about what a church is. The ekklesia — the called-out, gathered people of God — was never meant to be a demographic to be discovered, geofenced, and quietly monetized by anyone, foreign government or domestic campaign alike. It is the body of Christ, accountable to the gospel it gathers around, not to whichever outside interest finds it useful.
And this particular audience wasn’t chosen at random. Decades of dispensationalist and Christian Zionist teaching — the subject of this blog’s “Reigning Now” series — have made American evangelicals one of the most reliably pro-Israel, most organized, most media-saturated demographics in the country. A foreign ministry doesn’t need to manufacture that sympathy. It only needs to find it, geofence it, and reinforce it. That’s the uncomfortable continuity between this story and the Third Temple material already on this site: the same theological current that sends American money toward Jerusalem also makes American churches an efficient target for money flowing the other way.
With that framing in place, here’s what the actual document says.
What the Filing Actually Says
On September 27, 2025, a San Diego-based LLC called Show Faith by Works registered with the U.S. Department of Justice under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) — the law requiring anyone working on behalf of a foreign government to disclose it publicly. The registrant: Chad Schnitger, who also heads the California chapter of Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition. The foreign principal: Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The budget: reported between $3.2 and $4.1 million.
The plan, in the firm’s own pitch materials, was to geofence the boundaries of major churches in California, Arizona, Nevada, and Colorado during worship times, track phones that entered those boundaries, and continue serving those devices targeted ads afterward. A mobile “October 7th Experience” exhibit would tour church parking lots and Christian college campuses. Pastors — individual guest pastors, bilingual pastors, or pastors matching target demographics — would receive stipends to produce content.
This isn’t a rumor pieced together from anonymous sources. It’s a sworn federal document, publicly filed, because the law requires it to be.
Who’s Behind It, Who’s Caught In It
The campaign is overseen by Eran Shayovich, Chief of Staff at Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, under an initiative he calls “Project 545.” The same week Show Faith by Works registered, a separate firm — Brad Parscale’s Clock Tower X — also registered as an Israeli foreign agent, for a different $6–9 million contract on antisemitism-countering digital content. These are distinct contracts, not one operation, though they share a moment and a funder.
What’s become clear since the filing is which side of the consent line specific churches landed on. Canyon View Vineyard Church in Colorado put out a public statement saying they learned they were on the target list from a concerned community member — not from the campaign, not from their own awareness — and stated plainly they didn’t know about it, didn’t agree to it, and aren’t participating. Churches in Redding, California (Bethel, Pathway, Little Country) and Amarillo, Texas told local reporters the same thing: named in the filing, not consulted.
Verified Reporting & Primary Source
The federal filing itself, plus independent news coverage confirming and detailing it.
FARA Registration Statement (Primary Source)
Description: Show Faith by Works, LLC — sworn federal disclosure filed September 27, 2025, naming Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs as the foreign principal.
Times of Israel — “Israel to spend up to $4.1M in bid to bolster support among Christians in western US”
Description: First major report on the campaign documents and budget figure.
Truthout — “New Campaign Aims to Flood Churches and Christian Colleges With Pro-Israel Ads”
Description: Cites the FARA filing directly and quotes the firm’s own geofencing language.
Responsible Statecraft — “Israel wants to pay US pastors a stipend to spread the word”
Description: Interviews with people who found their churches on the target list; names Eran Shayovich and “Project 545.”
Canyon View Vineyard Church — Public Statement
Description: A targeted church’s own response, stating it had no knowledge of or involvement in the campaign.
What This Is — and Isn’t
It’s worth saying plainly: FARA filings like this aren’t evidence of a crime. They’re evidence of the disclosure law working as intended. Foreign governments running public-diplomacy campaigns in the U.S. is common and, when disclosed, lawful — the U.S. State Department does it abroad, the British Council does it, China’s Confucius Institutes do it. Calling this “spying,” as some commentary has, overstates what a marketing geofence actually is: a digital ad-targeting radius, not a surveillance operation reading anyone’s messages or location history beyond what their own apps already collect and sell.
What’s genuinely notable isn’t that Israel is doing PR in the U.S. It’s where it chose to do it — using attendance at church as the targeting criterion itself, without telling the congregations whose Sunday mornings became the product. And what the filing itself does not say is whether the geofencing has actually started, or which churches — if any — have agreed to the pastor-stipend program. “Listed as a target” and “currently being targeted” aren’t the same claim.
A Closing Word
None of this requires hostility toward Israel or indifference to antisemitism — both are real and worth opposing on their own terms. It requires only one question, asked before any sermon, ad, or “information package” persuades a congregation of anything: is this Christ’s church speaking, or is this someone else speaking through Christ’s church without its knowledge?
📖 Now Available — The Divine Fractal
The Fractal Bible Series by R.M. Mayes
The pattern woven through every page of Scripture — Creation, Fracture, Restoration — is the subject of a new book series rooted in thirty years of reading the Bible cover to cover. If these posts have stirred something in you, the series takes it deeper.
Get your copy — $4.99 → | Visit the Bookstore
Leave a Reply