Mark's Notebook


	Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love. - Albert Einstein

Christmas in Hell

The Pitch

Monday 20 December 2004, 2:08 pm
Keywords: Christian Topics , News Articles

By Nadia Pflaum

The Sheffield Family Life Center’s annual pageant is a heartwarming little tale starring machine guns and the Antichrist.

If it's crazy to stage a Christmas play about the apocalyptic end times, complete with plastic-machine-gun-toting soldiers, the arrival of the Antichrist, the second coming of Jesus and fiery scenes of H-E-double-hockey sticks, then Sheffield pastors Felicito Bagunu and Roger Horne don't want to be sane.

Each year, Sheffield spends around $60,000 to produce six performances of Tribulation Christmas, the congregation's largest outreach event of the year. On average, church officials say, 1,400 souls come forward to devote their lives to Christ after watching it.

Sheffield's drama revolves around the plight of a couple, Dave and Lisa, who are running from the Antichrist's soldiers near the end of the Tribulation. They hide out in the cave of another refugee, a survivalist type who doesn't believe in God. There, they reflect on their predicament, flashing back to a scene before the rapture in which Lisa's mom, her wheelchair-bound grandfather and their local pastor all begged Lisa and Dave to become believers before it was too late. Lisa sings a song: "I Wish We'd All Been Ready." Another flashback recalls how the Antichrist came to power, seducing the masses, ascending to the head of the United Nations and decreeing that everyone allow an electronic chip -- UPC code No. 666 -- to be implanted in their hands or foreheads and used to track individuals and their purchased goods. The Antichrist is assassinated at a press conference but comes back to life with Satan's help and declares himself God. Lisa and Dave are captured by soldiers, but Jesus intervenes and banishes Satan, the Antichrist and the cave-dwelling nonbeliever to the Lake of Fire.

The original Tribulation Christmas was written in 1974 by Mike Brown, an evangelist at a church in St. Joseph, Missouri. He and Sheffield's Horne were friends then. When Horne took over as Sheffield's youth pastor in 1980, he remembered Brown's old script. Horne reworked some parts, and his youth groups began performing it in the early '80s.

"I can't talk right now. I'm at church. I'm getting a bullet hole put on my head," Craig A. Hampton says into his cell phone as he waits for his turn onstage at rehearsal. His deep baritone makes his voice audible from every corner of the massive sanctuary as he lounges in one of the folding church seats, cherry-flavored blood flowing from a volcanic wound above his right eye.

"Has anyone seen Jesus?" calls a stagehand. "Yo, son of God."

Jimmy Shrader, in Carhartt overalls over a white undershirt, is wearing his crotch-vise of a harness and taking flight pointers from Rebmann. "If everything's not in the right place [when the lines start lifting], it's too late," Rebmann tells him, motioning around Shrader's pelvis.

Shrader rises off his feet, then about 3 feet in the air. "How does it feel?" a crew member asks. "OK," he replies weakly. He cups both hands around his mouth, hiding his words from the flight technicians, and mouths, "It hurts!"

"I'm going to be singing soprano," he says. "I've just gotta think positive."

http://www.pitch.com/issues/2004-12-16/news/feature.html