Twelve years before The Door carried burning-twin-towers imagery down a Chandler parade route, it was already testing the patience of a different Phoenix-area town with a different shock tactic. On March 9, 1992, the Arizona Republic’s Edythe Jensen reported on a standoff at the Lost Dutchman Days parade in Apache Junction, where Door members shut out of the official lineup showed up anyway and preached loudly along the route, under negotiated police terms that gave them exactly ten minutes to finish. It is a small story next to the church’s later controversies, but it captures, in miniature, a tactic that would still be running at a family festival more than a decade later.
Lost Dutchman Days: ten minutes, then leave
The Apache Junction Chamber of Commerce had denied The Door a spot in the parade that year. Members came anyway and preached along the route, and by the police captain’s account, a group gathered at the finish line, under an inflated Budweiser can display, and began shouting in spectators’ faces closely enough to alarm the crowd. Rather than move to arrests, Capt. Reed Cox negotiated a deadline, telling the group, in his own recollection, that they had “10 minutes to say what they had to say” before facing arrest. Both sides filmed the standoff, police taping the preachers and the preachers taping the police, and when the ten minutes ran out, the group walked away without incident. Of the roughly 150,000 people who attended the three-day event, the report noted only one arrest all weekend, an intoxicated man who broke a truck’s side mirror and apologized the next day.
A pattern already a year old
The negotiated exit was itself a sign of how far the relationship had already soured. The year before, at the same parade, Door members had been arrested and charged with disorderly conduct for the same behavior, shouting in spectators’ faces and refusing police orders to stop. Randy Sanders, the Door’s pastor, told the Republic that those arrested had been members standing in the crowd rather than participants in an official entry, and that the church had actually hoped to enter its own float with live musicians that year. He was direct about why the church valued the parade regardless of whether it marched officially: it put a great many people in one place to hear what the church wanted to say about Jesus Christ. That reasoning, spectators as an evangelism opportunity too valuable to pass up, is the same logic that would put Door members back on a parade route in Chandler in 2004, waving a different kind of shock imagery at a different crowd.
The Gilbert Days precedent
Lost Dutchman Days was not the only parade on the report’s list, and the earlier incidents show the tactic escalating before it settled into ordinary loud preaching. Three years before the 1992 standoff, members of The Door’s Gilbert church dressed one of their own as a blood-spattered, cross-carrying Christ for the Gilbert Days Parade and marched him down Gilbert Road, unauthorized, alongside the horses, school bands, and floats, with other members following and screaming as they walked. Gilbert’s police chief, Fred Dees, had to send officers to physically remove the display from the parade route. And at an earlier Lost Dutchman Days parade, the report noted, the church had entered a float showing someone dressed as Santa Claus tied to a cross and whipped by another performer, a stunt calculated to offend a crowd that had come to watch a holiday parade rather than receive a rebuke for celebrating one.
Why this small story still matters
None of this rises to the scale of the church’s later legal or financial controversies, and Capt. Cox’s own account credits The Door’s members with obeying orders and leaving peacefully once their ten minutes were spent. That restraint is worth conceding. But the report is useful precisely because it is small and local, a police blotter rather than an exposé, which means it was not written to make a case against the church; it simply recorded what happened at a small-town parade three years running. What it shows is a consistent choice of method: co-opt a public gathering the church did not organize, force a confrontation designed to be either broadcast or remembered, and treat the resulting friction with police or spectators as beside the point. The blood-spattered Christ, the whipped Santa, the ten-minutes-then-arrest standoff, and the twin towers in Chandler are not four unrelated incidents. They are one tactic, tried in the same corner of Arizona across more than a decade, each time using a crowd that had gathered for something else entirely. The 2004 Ostrich Festival Parade is where the same idea shows up last, dressed in a different costume, at a bigger event, for a newer generation of spectators who had no idea the church had already been doing this since before some of them were born.
Sources and further reading
- Edythe Jensen, “Loud church members got their 10 minutes, then leave,” The Arizona Republic, March 9, 1992; archived in the Cult Education Institute reference files
- On the same tactic twelve years later, see The Door, 9/11, and the Ostrich Festival Parade
