Chris Rosebrough attends conference against his will

Rosebrough Abducted

Blogger attends conference against his will

Leo Sánchez

The Steam Tunnel

Blogger and podcaster Chris Rosebrough, host of Fighting for the Faith, the most listened-to Christian podcast in the world, disappeared during a self-imposed ministry hiatus last week.

    Taking some time out after a grueling stretch of programs and conferences, which included being ejected from James MacDonald’s Elephant Room under threat of arrest, the gadfly of the post-Evangelical blogosphere returned to his native Southern California to recharge his batteries and to “put the pirate ship in dry dock for a few days.”

Kidnapped in paradise.  A pirate captain
finds himself landlocked on Tiburón Island

   Thursday afternoon, at approximately 1:45 local time, Rosebrough told friends that he was going to take a long, non-contemplative walk along the beach at San Clemente. He never returned.

  What transpired thereafter was stranger than some of the “guests” on Rosebrough’s daily program.

    Still groggy from an agave-inspired natural sedative, Chris awakened 15 hours later in a one-window room, locked from the outside, overlooking the Gulf of California.  He had a “VIP” identification tag hanging around his neck.





     Following a brief meet-and-greet session, Rosebrough’s captors informed him that he had left the U.S. and was now attending the “Circle the Wagons Conference” put together by a group called “Avengers for the Gospel.”  In fact, he was scheduled as the keynote speaker. 




Mexican federal police in Kino Nuevo prepare
to confront Avengers on Tiburon Island 

     A polyglot consortium of theologically confused men from 33 nations, the A4G contingent had rented out convention facilities on Tiburón Island, opposite the Baja coast.  Unfortunately, none of the aforementioned glots included English. “I first sensed that language might be a barrier when I asked them about the island,” Rosebrough told ST in an exclusive interview.  He noticed that there were no cars or trucks on the island, prompting him to wonder why ferries were incapable of crossing the strait, even though the mainland was clearly visible.  “In somewhat broken English they told me that they had all divested themselves of cars and trucks.”  However, Rosebrough claims, it was not vigorous environmentalism that convinced these guys to take to the streets on foot.  “They told me that they didn’t want to have anything to do with the Motorist Heresy, and that this was one of the reasons they were so eager to have me come down and talk to them.”

   From that point things deteriorated quickly.  “They wanted me to lecture on the Sun-Stand-Still prayer: Normally, I’d have been happy to do so, but these guys were under the impression that I was promoting Sun Stand Still.  They told me they wanted to learn how to do it, reasoning that even a few extra minutes of daylight per 24-hour period could significantly increase tourism in their communities in the off-season winter months.”   



The tipping point came when the group leader, “Céro”—the closest thing Rosebrough ever got to a name while he was in captivity—explained to him that the opening plenary session would be conducted by Dr. Dan Allender, who, by the way, speaks perfect Spanish. 

   “That’s when I knew it was do-or-die for me,” he said.  “The thought of him coming down here and translating words like ‘bruta-ful’ into another language was more than I could bear.  It was bad enough in English.” 

    Despairing even of his life—or at least his sanity—the 43-year-old apologist, who was a varsity swimmer in high school, took to the waves.  Just under two hours later, he had traversed the 1.4-km strait and arrived on the beach at Kino Nuevo, where he was greeted by off-duty agents of the Federales the Mexican Federal Police, who were in the area investigating claims that a young boy had seen something “great and white” moving in the water.  

Rosebrough arrives at U.S. border checkpoint
in Douglas, Arizona, accompanied by Irrigation
and Customs Engagement (ICE) agents.

    Storming the island three hours later, the Federales arrested eight men, including “Céro,” later identified as 34-year-old Paco Warsavian,  whose mixed Mestizo-Slavic family tree is not untainted by international intrigue: a retired Lucha Libre wrestler, Warsavian’s great-grandfather had introduced an ice pick to the “head region” of one Leon Trotsky in Mexico City in 1940.


  An exhausted Chris Rosebrough was escorted by Mexican customs officials to the U.S. border entry at Douglas, Arizona, where he arrived at 5:18 a.m. Mountain Standard Time on Sunday morning.  At an impromptu press conference, Chris reflected on the treatment he received at Circle-the-Wagons.  “Nice guys, for the most part,” he said, explaining that he was taunted at one point by a security guard, who had asked him, “So, how does it feel to be ‘boarded,’ pirate man?”

      “The facilities were actually top-notch.  They even had a gym where I could work out.  And even though this was Mexico, there was always a copy of USAToday outside my door when they came to get me in the morning. The food was good, too. Mexican, mostly. Lots of combo plates—and not one was missing a taco! I don’t know who our chef was, because I never saw him. Whoever he was, though, that man could make a chili relleno like nobody’s business.”