hell house

[Smalcald]

to answer your question, smalcald, the "dragging off to hell" is shown in the haunted house.

i have to run for a bit, i'm interested in what people discuss in the interim!

ahhhh, wierd.

[bethshemaiah]

Hell House is the same type of production that my church is currently putting on. It is called the Nightmare. The purpose for it is two-fold. First the message of salvation. Teens want a haunted house so they come. "Welcome to your worst Nightmare............". The second, the horrors of the bad choices that they can make and the results of these choice, adults also for that matter. We have been running this production for nine nights so far the cost of the production to date is $65,000 and we do not charge admission. The groups are led through a horrible car crash resulting from the choice to drink and drive. A home scene where the couple where using Meth, and died as a result, the next scene a school shooting, followed by the scene were a young girl ended her life due to the choices she made to have sex before marriage and became pregnant to then have a abortion. The pain from these choices led her to end her life. This is reality and we all know that it happens everyday but teens can be reckless and not think about the ramifications of their actions, this type of haunted house shows them exactly what can happen. Finally the choices of their lives which all end in death lead them to their final destination which is Hell. It is very realistic and very scary and it should be for this is the truth without Jesus. But they are led away from the darkness and into the light, to Jesus dying on the cross for our sin, and His being ressurected. The end of the journey is where they are given the message of salvation and the opportunity to be ministered to. We are a small community and have to date had over 4000 people attend the Nightmare and the total salvations are as of last night are 520,the ninth night of it's running. For those who do not accept Christ the seed as been sown. There is not a High School within 60 miles of here where this event is not being talked about and God is in the midst of it. The Bible commands us to go out into the highways and byways and preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ, many of these teens wouldn't step foot in a church otherwise. So God bring the resources for more of these houses to open. I can guarantee that the devil is getting no "glory" in any of this. And should I mention the profound impact that participating in a production like this has on the teens who are in the dramas? I have two teens in this production and they are markedly changed by their participation in this event.

I am aware of the controversy that this Halloween activity and others sometimes bring but can one put a price tag on a soul and can one argue with the results?

[KarenJo5]

There is a church near here that does something simular,I think it is called Judgement House and the year I went it was awesome.They have different senarios of death set up in different rooms such as a serious car accident, an older man in a hospital bed.

Then they have a huge area set up as hell, smokey, red strobe lights,hot, even the stink of sulfer,people crawling and running around screaming, begging for relief. It really gives you pause it is so close to what we could imagine hell being like.Without the true torment of course.

Then they have the gym all in white with a Huge platform and throne symblizing the white throne judgement with a man dressed in white robes, long white beard, reading names out of a book in a huge voice.

Another room with a man standing in the light but with shadows somehow across his face with arms stretched wide and Bible verses like John 3:16 and others about coming to Jesus being played over the sound system.

They warn you not to go in if you have certain medical conditions.Yhey do it every night the week of Halloween.Quite a production.

[georgesbluegirl]

other than the problems i have that i stated before, such as the one-sidedness of many of the scenarios...i just don't see this as an effective way to get people to legitimately experience anything real. i think if you freak people out enough, maybe they will decide to join the church - but how many of them are actually going to continue to want to be there? i think in the long run, positive action rather than negative action like these "scare tactics" makes a much more lasting impression, and thus leads to committments that are more real.

[AndrewA]

it's an interesting idea, absolutely. however, for me, its execution was extremely problematic - for example, a girl who is given a date-rape drug at a rave, is (we are told) brutally raped, wakes up and remembers her father abusing her, then commits suicide with a demon over her shoulder whispering that she is worth nothing, etc. why do the rapists vanish with no admonishment in this production? why do those who taunt a shy boy and call him "retard" get off scot-free when he commits suicide and gets dragged off to hell?

This is plain and simple truth, these two examples are exactly what goes on just about daily somewhere around the world. Victims are abused and broken by often unidentified tormentors, the victim ends up committing suicide. Because they are not Christians they will go off to Hell and the people who ended up putting the victim there often get away without any punishment The people who drove the victim to suicide will also go to hell, however If they do become Christians they will be saved regardless of what they did in their past

People say all this is not at all fair, but then life isn

[bethshemaiah]

other than the problems i have that i stated before, such as the one-sidedness of many of the scenarios...i just don't see this as an effective way to get people to legitimately experience anything real. i think if you freak people out enough, maybe they will decide to join the church - but how many of them are actually going to continue to want to be there? i think in the long run, positive action rather than negative action like these "scare tactics" makes a much more lasting impression, and thus leads to committments that are more real.

I agree that not all who accept salvation as a result of the visit to the Nightmare will immediately be converted, it is a process of change for many, but the seeds are planted and our job is to water them. These people who visited the Nightmare came to be scared, it is what they wanted, people seek out this stuff intentionally. So we give them something that is TRULY scary to think about. So lets put the focus on the ministry time that occurs after the journey ends. There is a ministry team of anointed and trained youth pastors waiting to minister to the teens that visit. The point not to bang on and a pulpit and scream "sinner repent" but to love and show support for these teens who Jesus loves especially after many of these kids just faced many of their own sins. These kids have real issues and really need someone to show them they are loved and to be shown a better and different way. What if the teen in our community who died in a car crash last week while out partying had been to the Nightmare instead? The shock factor of the Nightmare itself is not what will cause someone "newly saved" to stick around, but the love and acceptance they receive from God's people. In addition, there are many adults who have received salvation as a result of the Nightmare as well, the salvations in our church services right now is double what it ordinarily is.. WHY, because these visitors are coming to church. Our church will be simultaneously putting on a Halleliua Harvest Festival and the Nightmare on Tuesday night. We are a small town and the number of Halleliua Harvest Festival attendees each year is over 3000 from surrounding communities, no one is preached to during Halleliua Harvest Fest we show them a good time and give families an alternative to traditional Halloween activities, we triple our security bringing in law enforcement volunteers from all over the surrounding counties (oh if I could explain the impact being around "church people" like us has on these cops), they come and they help out and they see Jesus in us (we pray).

Thanks for all the opportunity to share my views of this type of ministry effort. We sow the seed as many before us have and now the fields are truly ripe and ready for harvest.

We trust God in this effort and it has been bathed in much prayer, He has made a way financially and has blessed this entire effort. Thank you Jesus, You deserve all the praise for this Nightmare for You have truly blessed it.

Blessings, Beth

[mikado5001]

I am very much intrigued by Hell House. There is, or was, one here in Brooklyn NY at St. Anns Warehouse in the DUMBO Section. I very much want to, wanted to, go to this. Heck, next year sign me up for it. I would very much like to act in this production.

As to using a Pagan holiday to spread the Gospels. I thinks it's a good, not great idea. I agree with it if it presents, for lack of a better term, equal time for JESUS. Does this event have a conclusion that gives Jesus and Heaven a place? Or does it just have a "You're going to Hell if you don't accept Jesus!" message? If the former is YES than I am in favor of it 100%.

[Matthitjah]

Grace to you,

I'm not advocating this practice nor taking a stand against it.

The question I have is this to GBG.

What's wrong with being Truthful with these teens? They are quite likely to see more and worse types of depictions in the movie "Saw". This is not so shocking to them to keep them from seeing it. The fact that these depictions are real and face some of the more realistic challenges of their lives should not prevent the Truth from being told.

It is more shocking to imagine the Lord Jesus Christ with His back ripped off and His eyes beat out for their Salvation.

These kids are very often living in the cold stark reality of a Secular Relativistic society. They are being told all manner of things are acceptable and just a matter of personal preference and morality. However the Truth of a life outside of Gods Word has left them often in situations of death and the destroyer is at the door. Cold hard reality they understand. Yet no one is willing to tell them the Truth so that they may be set Free.

Again I ask which Production company and which Network published this piece on the subject. I would gamble it is probably the same people who are busy handing needles to Heroin addicts as well as condoms to teens. They make the road to hell wide and complicate the lives of these children. Yet no one will speak the Truth to them. However they long for someone to be Real.

How dare those Christians strive to save souls from their secular nightmare?

Peace,

Dave

[Smalcald]

I have not seen one and there are none in this area.

However I do think that things which realistically show death and the reality of hell are a good thing for our society in general. Americans because of our culture don't really deal with death well nor do we want to talk of it and the reality of it. Death is the most real thing we will experience it is coming to us all and all of our family like a truck, as Luther said it sits on our shoulders every day. Thinking of mortality is shocking and good.

If it dispells false myths that some teens and adults have about the "dark" side being cool and good that would be a good thing.

[georgesbluegirl]

matt, why would you attack the production of the film without having seen it?

the film is presented with NO narrative. directed by george ratliff out of cantina productions, this was an indie flick. if you look at reviews for it, you'll see that it got many extremely positive reviews from christian audiences/reviewers - in other words, the doc simply presents an event as best in its power and lets the audience be the judge of the subtext, consequences, and overall meaning. which is what more documentaries should seek to do. the film "hell house" is extremely level. i actually thought that it may have been produced by trinity church itself at the end of it.

basically, i just don't think that scaring people into religion is an incredibly worthwhile tactic, nor, in this instance, a way to generate compassion for those struggling. i still have very big problems with depicting an anguished, mentally unstable girl being dragged off to hell when her rapists totally disappear from the picture.

plus i just helped run/acted in a haunted house for the local community, and there were multiple scenes in "hell house" that we wouldn't have DREAMED of depicting. granted, hell house charged admission, but still...there were some kids in there that i thought were way too young to be seeing some of it.