For twenty years and across three countries, The Potter’s House ran the same haunted house, and the script never changed. The Potter’s House is the Christian Fellowship Ministries network, also called The Fellowship. Its congregations advertised a Halloween attraction in the local paper. But they left their own name and their religious aim out of the advertisement. Then they walked families through staged scenes of abortion, rape, suicide, and murder, and closed with an altar call. Three press accounts, separated by two decades and by oceans, describe one haunted house and one method. The method is the deception.
Las Vegas, 1990: Beyond the Grave
The Las Vegas Review-Journal reported on November 1, 1990 on a free haunted house staged by a Potter’s House congregation on West Charleston Boulevard under the title Beyond the Grave. Alongside the expected scenes of addiction and prostitution, the tour staged a simulated abortion. On the table, an actress screamed, “It is a baby, you’ve killed my baby!” Visitors arrived expecting Halloween and found a sermon. Barbara Humble said her six-year-old had nightmares, waking to ask why the actors told his mother she killed her baby. Rose Piro brought three children, ages six, nine, and eleven, and left feeling tricked. Then pastor Duane Rens said the abortion scene took no stand on abortion, merely one fruit of man’s sin. Yet that same tour placed a nun, a Mormon, a Jehovah’s Witness, and a Bible reader in hell, to argue that going to church saves no one. Rens also admitted he advertised in the paper and deliberately left out what waited at the end.
Santa Fe, 1999: the Columbine re-enactment
Nine years later, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, sheriff’s deputies briefly shut a Potter’s House haunted house and confiscated two prop guns loaded with blanks. The skit re-enacted the Columbine High School shooting, six months after two gunmen murdered thirteen students and a teacher there. So a judge let the attraction reopen once the church removed the real guns and added security. The Associated Press, carried by Fox News on October 29, 1999, quoted pastor Henry Houghton on the earsplitting gunshots and the gunmen sent to hell. His stated purpose was blunt: “Yes, we’re trying to scare them.” The same report noted a 1997 Potter’s House scene in which a boy molested by his father rapes and beheads a girl. It also listed a fatal heroin overdose and a death tied to a Ouija board.
Tasmania, 2010: rape and abortion on stage
A decade after that, a Potter’s House congregation in Tasmania staged a forty-five-minute haunted house under the banner of a “RIOT Theatre.” The advertisement called it MA-rated, named no church and no religion, and said the proceeds would go to the City Mission. Emma Pennington, a childcare worker, went with her family expecting cobwebs and witches. Instead she watched a simulated rape narrated with a line goading the assault, and a drunken doctor performing an abortion without painkillers. Then church members herded the group into a curtained room and pressed them to pray. Afterward she tried and failed to warn the next group at the door. “I feel very deceived,” she told the press. Pastor Michael White defended the show, noting that a press release had warned of violence and death. But that warning appeared nowhere in the newspaper advertisement the public actually read. He also confirmed the church would stage it again the next two nights.
The deception is the haunted house
The defense the pastors offer is consistent and partly fair. Abortion, addiction, suicide, and violence are real and grievous, a church may preach hard things, and White is right that anyone unwilling to have his views challenged can stay home. Concede all of it. Still, none of it answers the charge. The charge is not that the content is dark or the theology unpopular. The charge is that each congregation hid its name and its purpose. They sold a secular night of thrills to families with small children. Then they trapped six-year-olds inside a staged abortion and a narrated rape before working them toward a prayer. A method that cannot fill a room once it is described honestly is a method that depends on the lie. And the men running it admit the aim is fear, since Houghton said plainly they were trying to scare people into a decision. This is also how The Fellowship frames its mandate, treating aggressive recruitment as obedience.
The standard the apostle set
Paul fixed the standard for how the gospel may be carried, and it is the exact inverse of this. Writing to the Corinthians, he says he has renounced “not walking in craftiness, nor handling the word of God deceitfully” (2 Corinthians 4:2). The word rendered “deceitfully” is dolountes, from dolos, which first meant the bait set in a trap. So Paul forbids baiting people toward the word of God. The haunted house is that bait in its plainest form, an advertisement built to conceal the hook. By the measure of the apostle these congregations claim to follow, the method stands condemned in the same breath that defines honest preaching. The Potter’s House did not stumble into this once. It built the haunted house in Las Vegas in 1990, staged it in Santa Fe in 1999, and ran it in Tasmania in 2010. These are just the documented cases, but former members have said these haunted houses are yearly recurring events.
Sources
Marcia Pledge, Church’s free haunted house features graphic abortion scene, Las Vegas Review-Journal, November 1, 1990 (archived). Associated Press, Judge allows controversial haunted house to reopen, carried by Fox News, October 29, 1999 (archived). Rape, abortion in church Haunted House, ninemsn, November 5, 2010.
