At an Arizona Christmas parade, no later than 1985, a Potter’s House church plant staged a street drama in which an actor played Christ, bloodied and carrying a cross, while a second actor dressed as Santa Claus whipped him in front of the holiday crowd. The primary source for the Potter’s House Christmas parade is the church itself: An Open Door, the official history of Christian Fellowship Ministries written by Ron Simpkins and published in 1985, describes the performance on pages 127 and 128, and presents it as a triumph of the drama ministry. A former member who later sat under the same pastor has described the event directly, adding a bullhorn sermon, a newspaper story, and a parade ban to the picture.
What the church’s own book says
Simpkins places the performance at a local Christmas parade after Peter Edwards, then a newly commissioned Fellowship pastor, had just opened his church and called in the drama team from Prescott, The Fellowship’s mother congregation. The book names Casa Grande as the town. It describes spectators stunned by the sight of Christ walking past covered in blood, and the seasonal addition the team had devised: an actor in a Santa suit, calling out Ho Ho Ho as he whipped the Christ figure, staged as a picture of the secularization of Christmas. The book then records the public’s response in its own celebratory register: the performance “almost got them tarred and feathered and run out of town.” That sentence carries the theology of the whole parade record on this site. The near-riot is not an embarrassment in the church’s telling; it is the proof the drama worked.
What a former member remembers
A former member who attended Edwards’ later congregation in Southern California between 1990 and 1992, after Edwards had left The Fellowship in the January 1990 split, has written about the same performance. In his account the parade was in Cottonwood, Arizona, in the late 1970s or mid-1980s, during Edwards’ first church plant. The team had no float; they walked the parade route, with ketchup standing in for blood on the bare back of the man playing Christ, while Edwards preached through a bullhorn a sermon he called How Santa Claus Stole Christmas. The performance made the local paper, and the church was banned from Cottonwood parades afterward. The witness saw the evidence himself: Edwards kept the clipping framed in his church office into the early 1990s, photo of Santa whipping Jesus included, under a headline he recalls as reading “Pastor’s sermon, ‘How Santa Stole Christmas.'” He adds that the episode also circulated among former members years later, including on Ken Haining’s old Yahoo discussion group.
The discrepancy, stated plainly
The book says Casa Grande; the witness says Cottonwood, and his memory is anchored to a framed clipping he looked at across two years. The towns are 150 miles apart. Either one account misremembers the town, or the team performed the piece more than once — The Fellowship’s drama teams reused their material, and a skit effective enough to enter the official history is exactly the kind that would travel. The dating is loose in the witness’s account but bounded by the book’s publication: the performance Simpkins describes happened by 1985. What would settle both questions is the newspaper itself. A clipping exists; Edwards framed it. If you have it, or can name the paper and date, the contact page is open, and this article will be updated with the citation.
Why the Potter’s House Christmas parade belongs in the record
The point of documenting the performance is not that a church made a crowd uncomfortable at Christmas. The point is the institutional frame around it, stated in the church’s own publication: a Santa whipping a bloodied Christ in front of families was written up, in the official history, as drama ministry at its best, with the public’s fury recorded as evidence of impact. That frame did not retire with the skit. It reappears across the parade record this site documents: at Lost Dutchman Days in 1992, where The Door negotiated ten minutes to preach; at the Ballard parade in Seattle the same year; and at the Ostrich Festival parade. In each case the sequence repeats: a public event, an unrequested confrontation, public anger, and a church that files the anger under persecution. The Christmas performance is the earliest entry in that sequence documented so far, and the only one the church itself wrote up with pride.
