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A city council meeting in Iowa took a dark turn earlier this week when a former member opened the meeting by praising Satan in his invocation.

One-time Ottumwa City Council member Matt Dalbey began the meeting by praying to the “dark father” to “embrace the Luciferian impulse to eat from the tree of knowledge” before concluding his prayer with “Hail Satan.” 

But New Life Center Pastor Rick Bick did not go along to get along. As soon as the council concluded their recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance following the demonic prayer, Bick interrupted the meeting by demanding that Dalbey’s evil prayer be renounced.

“Let’s just reverse this curse that was put on our city,” Bick exclaimed. “That ending with ‘Hail Satan’ or ‘Hail dark god,’ that’s not welcome here.”

City Council member Cara Galloway asked Bick to refrain from further comments until such time scheduled later in the meeting for public feedback. But Bick refused.

“It needs to be done now,” he said. “I appreciate what Ms. Galloway is saying, but that was a curse put on the city. When he said, ‘Hail Satan’… most of you know that, and we need to just stop and reverse it.”

Mayor Benjamin Foote responded by overruling Galloway and asked for 30 seconds of silence to allow for prayer and reflection.

What does the town believe?

Foote told Fox News Digital: “This is not a reflection of our community. As the mayor of my hometown in Iowa, I know the people of Ottumwa, and the invocation read at the start of Tuesday’s meeting does not represent the faith or the values of families who call this city home.”

The Ottumwa Courier reports that the city’s invocation policy, adopted in January, does not endorse any faith or religious denomination but is intended “to acknowledge and express the City Council’s respect for the diversity of both organized and unorganized religious denominations, as well as other faiths, belief systems, or the lack thereof, represented and practiced among the citizens of the City of Ottumwa.”

After the meeting, Galloway said that facilitating an invocation before city council meetings invites such controversy.

“I just want to remind us that again, sometimes things are said that we may not agree with … and while you’re allowed to do the moment of silence and that kind of thing too, I think we’ve opened ourselves up for others to object or respond to others’ invocations,” she continued. “And we need to remember that we are up here to be neutral and allow viewpoints because we’ve opened up invocations.”

Council member Bill Hoffman told Fox News Digital that he left the meeting once Dalbey began his remarks and returned in time for the Pledge of Allegiance.

“I’m a Christian, with Christian values,” Hoffman said. “That doesn’t mean I don’t want to observe his First Amendment right. It just means that I want to use my rights not to observe that.”

Relevant Bible passages to ponder: Genesis 3:1-15, Matthew 4:1-11, Revelation 12:7-12