How Justin Bieber brought ‘The Chosen’ star to church for the first time

Yoshi Barrigas, who plays Phillip, one of Jesus’ 12 disciples on the crowd-funded television series, ‘The Chosen’, has revealed how he first was introduced to Christianity.

‘The Chosen’, released December 2017 and is currently filming season four, is directed by Dallas Jenkins and stars Jonathan Roumie as Jesus.

What happened on that hike?

Everything changed for Yoshi Barrigas the day he crossed trails with Justin Bieber on a hike in the mountains outside Los Angeles.

In an interview with CBN News, Barrigas said that he never had much of an interest in church or Christianity. But then one day around that time he went on a hike in the nearby mountains and happened across Canadian popstar and practicing Christian, Justin Bieber.

When the interviewer on CBN’s ‘Faithwire’ asked for the story of how Barrigas first got started on ‘The Chosen’, the actor smiled and said: “Well, do you want the long story or the short story?”

Barrigas then describes the day of the hike, recalling that he had found a shaded area to comfortably sit and read.

Not long after he settled into his book, he heard girlish shrieks of excitement, but wasn’t interested enough to investigate what the hype was about.

“Hey, what’re you reading over there?” someone asked through the tress.

“I look over, and it was Justin Bieber,” Barrigas said. “I told him what I was reading, and we started conversing from afar.”

Justine Bieber invites him to church

Then Bieber walked over to join Barrigas, sitting down with him as the two men immediately connected and began discussing their personal struggles as well as the ups and downs of the world in general.

“He interrupted me at one point and said, ‘You know, I’m sorry to interrupt, but I really feel in my bones that I’m meant to introduce you to my church, so would you come?’”

“At the time,” the actor explained, “I had no real interest in any kind of church, but, as I said to him, ‘I’m not gonna say no to you, man. You’re Justin Bieber. So let’s go.’”

“He was really cool about it,” Barrigas continued. “He was like, ‘If you like it, we’ll stay, and, if you don’t, we can go grab a beer.’ So I was like, ‘Alright, cool. No pressure. Let’s go.’”

An introduction to the Gospels

Barrigas then spent the next six months going to the church with Justin Bieber, where he was exposed to the Gospels for the first time.

He said that the church “wasn’t trying to pull me in” or “convert me.” Instead, “[t]hey were just teaching the parables of the New Testament,” he said.

It was right after the initial encounter with Bieber that he was offered the chance to audition for the role of Jesus’ disciple in ‘the Chosen’.

“I felt very prepared for it and it felt like something I really wanted and [was] really motivated to get,” Barrigas confided. “And here we are.”