The Wenatchee rainbow response team, an interfaith crew of about 25 people, has been meeting anti-LGBTQ protesters at churches and at Wenatchee Pride with music and dancing, FāVS News reported Tuesday, Nov. 3. It’s a project of the Interfaith Justice Coalition, whose website says the effort “is focused on addressing the ongoing targeting of the 2LGBTQIA+ community.”
“We bring a speaker, and we play music, and we have a dance party,” Sunnyslope Church’s pastor, the Rev. Dane Breslin, told FāVS. “It drowns out whatever harmful or hurtful thing is being said by the protesters.”
Zoe Jaspers, the church’s education chair, and Andrea Despian, a Latter-day Saint, are on the team, too. The coalition calls itself “made up of diverse voices of faith and conscience,” and it lists Latter-day Saint and Buddhist backgrounds next to Methodist and Lutheran ones.
The playlist has included Chappell Roan (who just played two Los Angeles benefit shows for trans youth), ABBA and Jack Johnson’s “Banana Pancakes,” according to FāVS.
How a Loudspeaker at Sunnyslope Church Started the Party
The team took shape after Christian podcaster Dillion Pastors and others brought a loudspeaker to Sunnyslope last fall, FāVS reported. At first, four of them came to a gender-affirming swap meet that Wenatchee and Chelan Pride groups held at the church, Jaspers told Source ONE News, and they took an invitation inside “under false pretenses,” posing as people hunting for a new church.
“It kind of became clear that they weren’t looking for a conversation,” said Jaspers, who co-chairs education at Sunnyslope. “They were there to represent their beliefs and not really to listen.”
Jaspers recalled telling them it wasn’t the time or the place, and the group left, then regrouped outside. “At that point they had set up on the sidewalk with a loudspeaker blasting contemporary Christian music and just kind of shouting over a microphone and claiming things like our church is full of demons and claiming that we’re taking children,” Jaspers said.
Church leaders talked it over and put on music instead. “It took what was a pretty tense and scary moment and made it something that we can figure out how to roll with, and have compassion for the folks who wanted to kind of set themselves up in opposition,” Jaspers told FāVS.
“The goal was to fight against the principalities of darkness,” Pastors, a Christian rapper and podcaster from Indiana, told Source ONE columnist Dominick Bonny. “What that pastor is doing is leading people to hell.” He called Breslin’s preaching “complete blasphemy.”
Pastors said his group isn’t tied to any local church and he isn’t ordained, though he described himself as “a pastor in Christ.” His group had come by the church the night before, and he rubbed oil on its door, Source ONE reported. “It’s not trespassing if it’s a church,” Pastors said. He also called the group “100 percent nonviolent.”
Who’s on the Wenatchee Rainbow Response Team?
Breslin was ordained as an Evangelical Lutheran Church in America pastor in December 2022 and once directed an ecumenical LGBTQIA+ youth group in Bend, Oregon, the United Church of Christ’s Pacific Northwest Conference News reported in 2024. “With the Interfaith Justice Coalition we also focus on narratives of Christian nationalism in the Wenatchee Valley,” he told the newsletter.
The coalition does that work alongside the Cascade Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, he said. “We need to create a louder counter narrative to get people of faith and conscience together in the coalition,” Breslin said.
Jaspers was on the coalition’s steering committee as of July 2025, Bonny reported. The group, formed in summer 2023, says it was created “to gather diverse faith communities in North Central WA to build relationship across difference and organize for justice.”
Anti-LGBTQ Protesters at Wenatchee Pride and Affirming Churches
At this year’s Wenatchee Pride, protesters set up in the middle of the food court with a camera and anti-LGBTQ+ signs, Despian told FāVS, and the team answered with ABBA. “We just played music, and we just danced,” Despian said. The protesters eventually left.
“Hurt people hurt people,” Despian said. “We want to respond to this with compassion.”
Wenatchee Pride has drawn protesters before. During the June 2024 festival in Memorial Park, a street preacher recited Bible verses near the edge of the park and someone held up a sign about “traditional” gender roles, KPQ reported.
Pastors told Bonny he’d found a list of open and affirming Christian churches nearby online, and his group meant to visit those, too. “I plan on doing this more often,” he said.
