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Letter from AmericaHell HouseHalloween, just past, is an American institution, with its kid-friendly ‘Trick or Treat’ tradition, in a way beyond what we experience in England. Some churches respond to what children’s books call ‘my favourite holiday’ by putting on alternative Halloween events, a Harvest Festival for instance, with sweets and games, where children dress up as they would at Halloween. Other churches, apparently, stage ‘Hell Houses’. These are similar to Haunted Houses but depict with frightening intensity the woes of sins like drugs or alcohol or extra-marital sex and the terminal destination with Lucifer. Regular featureThe first such Hell House may be the responsibility of Pat Robertson in the late 1970s, though similar events began in several regions during that period. More recently, Pastor Keenan Roberts started a well-known Hell House in Arvada, Colorado, in 1995. He is now the Senior Pastor of Destiny Church of the Assemblies of God, and a Hell House is performed there each October. They have become regular fixtures on church calendars in some parts of America. Roberts has produced a Hell House kit which sells for about $199. Apparently this kit is now used by 500 churches in 14 countries. Some excerpts from the 1997 Hell House Outreach Manual are: ‘Pieces of meat placed in a glass bowl to look like pieces of a baby…purchase a meat product that closely resembles pieces of a baby.’ And ‘Chrissy [the woman having an abortion] starts crying. She is extremely distraught… the medical staff is cold, uncaring, abrupt, and completely insensitive.’ On BroadwayNow, believe it or not, this Hell House kit was purchased by a New York Theatre Company called Les Freres Corbusier and was performed this October in an off-Broadway show. Unlike a 2004 mock version staged in California with comedian Bill Maher, Les Freres performed it straight. It was, said one critic, a ‘bring-your-own-irony’ kind of affair. As if the absurdity, insensitivity, and crass manipulation of the piece was simply so bad, that any irony added to it was at least unnecessary and might indeed spoil the total ironic effect. In the reception room, there is a cardboard cut out of Jesus on which people are encouraged to pin pieces of paper on which they have written their sins. Among the confessions reported in New York were, ‘I am a man and I wear Capri pants’, ‘I think Jesus is hot’, and (ironically?), ‘I kill people in the name of religion’. Communicating the terrorIt’s hard to imagine that this is doing much good. Nor is it likely to catch on as a craze in suburban London. But it does raise a pressing point: if not this then what? How are we to communicate the frightening terror of hell? Paul has two principles which appear to work in tandem in his philosophy of ministry in this respect, for they occur next to each in the same passage. Given this reality of judgement, ‘Since, then, we know what it is to fear the Lord, we try to persuade men’ (2 Corinthians 5.11). Fear functions as a motivation to the speaker to encourage us to do our very best to persuade our hearers of the reality of judgement to come. I doubt not many already convinced of hell left a Hell House with changed minds, and perhaps a few departed with furthered hardness towards such inane insensitivity. Biblical persuasion is, Paul has already explained in the previous chapter, a straightforward plainness, not ‘secret and shameful’ ways, not ‘deception’, not to ‘distort’ the word of God (2 Corinthians 4.2). We are to explain the word, honestly and openly. But also, for Paul, there is a further motivation that needs to function. ‘For Christ’s love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died’ (2 Corinthians 5.14). So the Christian is to be charged with a right sense of fear-given judgement, but also a compassionate compulsion of love. None of the sinners in Hell House appear to have been dramatised in a loving way. It goes to show that it does not only matter what we say but also how we say it. For hell is real, of that we can be sure. Josh Moody,
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