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THIS GOES WITH MY POST FROM YESTERDAY AND WHAT PRESIDENT TRUMP HAD SAID ABOUT VOTINGThis is a 3 minute read….History Remembered the Rider. It Forgot the Church.Paul Revere Never ReachedConcord, but His Warning Did. Pastors, Parishioners, and a Network of Riders Carried it Forward.The famous lanterns were not intended to send a message to him. The warning was carried by a network of riders, bell ringers, pastors, militia captains, farmers, craftsmen, and families who had prepared long before the crisis arrived.And when Revere reached Lexington, Massachusetts he did not deliver his warning to a military headquarters.He delivered it to a pastor’s house.Within hours, members of that pastor’s congregation would stand armed on the village green. Before the morning was over, seven of his parishioners would be dead.This is not merely the story of a famous ride. It is the story of a Christian community awakening, a countryside answering the alarm, and ordinary people standing between their homes and the most powerful military empire on earth.This is the true story of the midnight mission that helped save a revolution.Paul Revere Did Not Ride AlonePaul Revere never reached Concord.British officers surrounded him in a dark pasture, pressed pistols toward his chest, threatened to blow out his brains, and took the horse he had borrowed. By nearly every modern measure, the most famous rider in American history failed to finish his ride.Yet the mission succeeded.It succeeded because the Revolution did not depend on one man. By the time the British stopped Paul Revere, church bells were already ringing, alarm guns were firing, drums were beating, and other riders were carrying the warning into the countryside.The horse could be taken. The rider could be captured. The warning could no longer be stopped.That is the story most of us were never taught.We were given a lone hero galloping through the darkness and shouting, “The British are coming!” It is a thrilling story. It is also largely the creation of a poem written eighty-five years later.The true story is even better.It is the story of a silversmith shaped by a Protestant family, a teenage church bell ringer who became a trusted patriot messenger, a pastor who sheltered two endangered patriot leaders, a congregation that stood armed on the village green, and ordinary families who turned a secret British raid into the opening battle of the American Revolution.Paul Revere deserves to be remembered. But he did not ride alone.And America was not founded by spectatorsPaul Revere was born in Boston’s North End in late 1734, the eldest surviving son in a crowded artisan household.His father, Apollos Rivoire, came from France’s persecuted Huguenot Protestant minority. He arrived in Boston as a boy, learned the goldsmith’s trade, anglicized his name to Paul Revere, and built a new life where the king could not dictate his worship.Revere’s mother, Deborah Hichborn, descended from English Puritan immigrants. He therefore inherited the Huguenot memory of persecution and the New England conviction that civil authority stood beneath the authority of God.Revere was baptized at Boston’s New Brick Congregational Church and left school around thirteen to apprentice under his father. He later served briefly as an artillery officer during the French and Indian War.Across two marriages, first to Sarah Orne and then Rachel Walker, he fathered sixteen children.The man who mounted a horse on April 18, 1775, was not a reckless teenager.He was a forty year old husband, father, craftsman, veteran, and businessman.He had something to lose, which made his courage costlyEvangelist Tim Hall