24th Jan, 2026 – Lighthouse Saturday Update – When ‘Journalists’ Become Predators: Don Lemon’s Church Invasion and Catrin Nye’s Attack on Paul S Waugh and Lighthouse Global

Lighthouse Daily – 24th January 2026..

By Paul S. Waugh

In the following update, you will find:

1. Today’s Update
2. Daily Prayer – A Prayer Praising God’s Regenerating Spirit
3. Today’s Daily “Citizen/Christian and The Establishment Problem” Example – When Comedy Starts Looking Like Modern Policing
4. Lighthouse Associates Consensus Feedback

1. Today’s Update

Good day everyone,

In today’s Lighthouse Daily, we look at a moment that has shocked many people of faith in the United States: Don Lemon storming into a live church service with cameras rolling and confrontation loaded. For countless believers watching around the world, this was not “robust journalism.” It was a brazen invasion of worship, family, and conscience.

For those of us at Lighthouse, it is impossible to watch this unfold without seeing the same pattern that played out through BBC journalist Catrin Nye’s attacks on Lighthouse Global in A Very British Cult. Once again we see media figures claiming to “hold power to account” while, in reality, trampling on ordinary people, children, and vulnerable adults who have no platform to defend themselves.

Today’s update sets these two cases side by side. Drawing on mainstream research into “corporate psychopathy” and our own lived experience at Lighthouse, we ask a simple but uncomfortable question: what happens when newsrooms start rewarding the very dark traits that Scripture calls “hardness of heart” – and then dress them up as courage, compassion, and public service?

👉 READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE: When ‘Journalists’ Become Predators: Don Lemon’s Church Invasion and Catrin Nye’s Attack on Paul S Waugh and Lighthouse Global 

God bless

Paul S. Waugh, Chris Nash, Shaun Cooper

2. Daily Prayer

Today’s Daily Prayer is a heartfelt expression of praise for God’s regenerating Spirit, the One who renews our hearts, restores our courage, and revives our hope. It invites us to celebrate the transformative work of the Spirit in our lives — bringing life from death, clarity from confusion, and strength from weakness. May this prayer uplift your soul and deepen your trust in God’s renewing power.

👉 Paul S. Waugh’s Daily Prayer – A Prayer Praising God’s Regenerating Spirit 

3. Today’s Daily “Citizen/Christian and the Establishment Problem” Example

When Comedy Starts Looking Like Modern Policing

There’s a short comedy sketch doing the rounds that would be hilarious if it didn’t feel so uncomfortably close to reality. Please watch it first and then we’ll add some commentary afterwards.

The joke lands because it reflects a truth many people already sense but struggle to articulate: modern policing is increasingly less concerned with what you do and more concerned with what you say.

Comedy has always been a way of exposing power by exaggerating it. This sketch works because the exaggeration is minimal. We are living in a moment where speech is treated as evidence, humour is treated as intent, and online expression is treated as a public order issue. The physical threat becomes secondary to the ideological one.

In the sketch, the knife is obvious, visible, and tangible. The phone is opaque, interpretive, and endlessly exploitable. That is the point. A weapon can be assessed quickly. A social media history can be mined indefinitely, reframed, stripped of context, and repackaged as suspicion. One requires judgment in the moment. The other offers control after the fact.

What the sketch really warns us about is a reversal of priorities. Policing used to be about preventing harm. Increasingly, it looks like it’s about managing narratives, opinions, and attitudes. The crime is no longer the act but the possibility that someone, somewhere, might find your words offensive, alarming, or politically inconvenient.

This is not just about humour. It is about the slow normalisation of thought-policing. When speech becomes easier to police than behaviour, institutions will naturally gravitate towards it. Phones don’t resist. Tweets don’t argue back. Context can always be “investigated.”

The danger is not that this sketch exaggerates reality. The danger is that it doesn’t need to. Once society accepts that scrolling through someone’s opinions is a legitimate substitute for addressing real-world threats, the line between safety and control disappears. Policing becomes less about protecting the public and more about regulating acceptable thought. 

The sketch is funny. But laughter, in this case, should come with unease. Because when jokes about policing feel plausible, it’s usually a sign that something has already gone badly wrong. 

This is why you need to learn to protect yourself and just one of the reasons we are launching the inaugural edition of The Lighthouse Magazine within the next few weeks. It is crucial Citizens and Christians alike are not deceived by the Establishment and the strength that we could have by coming together is instead currently being dissipated and disunified by their tactics and strategies they employ.

4. Lighthouse Associates Consensus Feedback

The following feedback was shared with Paul by our associates at Lighthouse in response to yesterday’s daily update.

Over these last days, and particularly through the recent calls, we are becoming aware that something new has quietly but decisively shifted in how we understand ourselves, our histories, and the forces that have shaped us. What Paulie has been helping us see is not simply another layer of information, but a framework that suddenly makes sense of why so many of us have felt stalled, hesitant, passive, or reactive even when we sincerely wanted to live differently. There is a growing recognition that much of what we assumed was personal weakness or failure is actually the result of having been raised, educated, and conditioned inside systems of control that trained us to comply, endure, and wait rather than initiate, lead, and act.

As this has settled in, many of us are noticing patterns in our own lives that we had previously excused or misunderstood — moments where we freeze instead of stepping forward, where we underestimate threat, delay response, or where we hope problems will resolve themselves if we stay quiet or inappropriately agreeable. Seeing this clearly has been uncomfortable, but also strangely clarifying, because it reveals how deeply learned helplessness and dependency can embed themselves, not just through institutions, but through families, schooling, culture, and even ideas about morality and goodness. We are starting to grasp more how passivity can masquerade as virtue, and how waiting to be acted upon can feel safer than taking responsibility, even when the cost is high.

Alongside all of this, there is a growing appreciation for what The Lighthouse represents. Not simply as a publication or project, but as a living work aimed at addressing the very places where people have been starved of understanding, guidance, and value. We are struck by the wisdom of approaching it incrementally, prioritising reach, depth, and substance over speed or spectacle, and allowing it to grow in response to real hunger rather than artificial deadlines. Many of us see that this is not about producing content for consumption, but about creating something true blues can engage with, wrestle with, and be changed by — something that speaks to the heart, the mind, and the soul.

We are also becoming more aware that work like this will not go unnoticed or unchallenged. When value, meaning, and agency are reclaimed, systems built on over-control and dependency react. Yet this does not feel like a reason to shrink back; if anything, it underscores the importance of grounding ourselves more firmly in truth, in God, and in one another. There is a shared sense that this moment requires steadiness rather than noise, discernment rather than outrage, and responsibility rather than reaction.

What has stood out just as strongly as the teaching itself is the care with which it has been given. Moments of personal encouragement, prayer, and quiet support have mattered more than we can easily articulate. Being seen, believed in, and called forward has stirred something many of us had forgotten or never experienced — the sense that our lives are meant to count, that our potential is not theoretical, and that God has not finished with us, regardless of how long parts of us have lain dormant.

We know we are still early in this journey, with much to process and integrate, and plenty of questions still forming. Yet we can already say that this is changing how we see ourselves, how we understand others, and how we relate to the world around us. We feel grateful — deeply and sincerely — for the clarity, patience, and faithfulness being shown to us, and above all for God’s mercy in meeting us where we are and drawing us toward who He intends us to become.

God bless us all.

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