85 thoughts on “FWOTW: Open Door Baptist Church”

      3. As a relatively young person with failing eyesight, I agree with that. And also take the opportunity to remind you that there are several vision conditions that do not discriminate based on age. Particularly diseases of the retina which tend to affect people we would not consider “older”.

  4. The “See something wrong in this site? Click HERE to make a comment or suggestion!” box on the left side made me LOL.

    1. Along with the one just above it: “Updates
      Want to be updated when we have changes to our webpage?
      click here to send a blank email and we will add you to our mailing list.

      Page Last Updated 01/2005”

      When jokes are too easy, they’re no fun. 😥

    1. Dear Persnickety Polecat:

      Ah yes — the good Rev. A! LOL!

      And now thanks to you, I’ll never be able to look at a wall the same way again!

      Christian Socialist

  13. Darrell, I bet you’ll miss having this as your home church when SFL relocates its World Headquarters to Florida. 😆

  17. I live in Dothan, AL and am pretty familiar with this church. Although this website is up, the church is no longer in existence.

    The pastor was caught with a minor and confessed and went to jail. The church was already pretty small, and they ended up merging with another Indy, Fundy down the road and selling the church property to another group who started a different church at the facility.

    The Dothan, AL area still has several other IFB churches that indeed fit the mold you expect from typical IFB churches.

    1. I wonder who’s paying to keep the site up and why. Or did the scandal happen recently enough that they’re paid up for the next month?

    2. I too live in the area and am familiar with the former Open Door and other IFB churches in the area.

    4. If they merged with another Fundy church, I wonder why the other Fundy church didn’t take the website down, or at least have a note: Open Door Baptist has merged with _____ Baptist at ______.

      1. If the previous pastor started the site, he likely has all e-mail addresses and passwords. No one at the current church may be able to access it.

      2. Beth, Open Door merged with Maranatha whose pastor had left to take another church, and they changed the new name of the church to Victory Baptist. (http://www.vbcdothan.com/)

        As far as your question goes of why they didnt take the site down or at least have a disclaimer on the site, my answers would be merely speculation, but….

        1. I knew the pastor, and he was pretty much in complete control of everything. He ran things with an iron fist. So most of those people (very small congregation) have never even looked at the site much less know anything about who is hosting it and how to update it. I am sure he did all of that.

        2. The church was already super small, so when this event happened, I am sure they were trying to distance themselves from the pastors name and the name of the church “Open Door Baptist Church.” It was talked about pretty bad locally.

        3. The Dothan, Al area is flooded with churches. They have over 70 SBC churches in the immediate area. There are 6 Indy Fundy churches just in the Dothan, AL area proper (Not counting several within short driving distance outside) and the average attendance I bet is not over 40 (Maybe less seriously) for all combined. If all the pastors werent from different schools, I have never understood why they didnt all merge, sell the other properties, and combine their resources so they they can actually get somehting done or attempt to in this area.

        1. “If all the pastors werent from different schools, I have never understood why they didnt all merge, sell the other properties, and combine their resources so they they can actually get somehting done or attempt to in this area.”

          If you merge with another church, you can’t build your own empire and be THE man-o-gawd in people’s lives. It doesn’t matter how small the empire is.

        2. Chad…I am considered the “black sheep” amongst the local MOG Fundies 😉 Stay faithful and finish well my friend!

        3. If you merge with another church, you can’t build your own empire and be THE man-o-gawd in people’s lives. It doesn’t matter how small the empire is.

          Even if it’s an Empire of One. (“A.W.Pink Syndrome”, the theoretical end state of this kind of One True Church empire-building.)

  18. The story about Hell has the following sources,(or, as it calls them, “documented evidence”):
    1. A National Geographic article and a PBS show metaphorically referred to volcanic eruptions as “hell,” proving …? I have no idea what.
    2. A Discover Magazine story asked “What’s Really at the Center of the Earth?” (Discover’s answer was not “Hell,” but who cares?)
    3. “The following article appeared in the well respected Finland newspaper, Ammenusastia” (which is obviously identical with the now-defunct U.S. “newspaper” “Weekly World News,” telling how “researchers” “drilled through the gates of hell!”, lowered a microphone, and recorded “the screams of millions of humans!”

    Surprisingly, the piece does not address the well-known Snopes.com examination of the same story:
    http://www.snopes.com/religion/wellhell.asp

    Unfortunately, the linked sound files won’t play on my computer. Anybody know what the recording sounds like?

    1. Sounds roughly like a riot at the mall during the worst of Black Friday 😈 Five will get you ten it includes several tape loops of crowd sounds, carefully listening has the same high screams repeating. Whether you believe it’s from Hell or not it is rather spooky and/or morbid fun, 🙄 😯 😎 worth sniffing out. Just Google “well to Hell” , “sounds” and you should find a workable link.

    2. Here’s the Wikipedia entry on the Well to Hell HOAX:

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well_to_hell

      I remember when this first surfaced in the Eighties. “Rumor Rich” Buhler, host of an afternoon Christian talk show of the time, traced it and exposed it as a hoax. Unfortunately, by then it had developed a life of its own as an urban legend. A couple years later, Rumor Rich lost it on the air when he had to field several Well-to-Hell calls in a row, all of whom accepted the hoax as (almost literally) Gospel truth.

    3. Even without any external fact-checking, there are quite a few internal impossibilities in the story of “The Well to Hell” as stated:

      1. The hole is said to have been bored about nine miles into the earth. Nine miles deep is nowhere near the earth’s core (the radius of the earth– the shortest distance from the earth’s surface to its center– is roughly 8000 miles). It’s not even halfway through the earth’s outer crust. So if Hell is at the other end of that borehole, it’s weirdly near the earth’s surface.
      2. The problems of getting a microphone to work at a temperature said to be 2000 degrees F should be pretty obvious. Even if a microphone could work at 2000 F, presumably there would have to be a nine-mile-long wire leading to the microphone, unless you could somehow transmit radio waves through nine miles of rock and had a 2000-degree resistant transmitter. Conducting metals such as copper, aluminum, brass, silver, and gold all have melting points below 2000 degrees F. Nearly any insulation material on the wire would also melt or burn at less than 2000 F.
      3. It’s not at all clear how the purported recording of the screams could be determined to be voices of “millions of humans” rather than of thousands of humans, hundreds of humans, a handful of humans, a collection of animals, radio static, noise made by cooling and heating of rocks and/or movement of tectonic plates, or a mixture of random noise and staticky voice recordings. Listen to the recording and you’ll see what I mean.

  19. This is sort of classic:

    “Are you ready?
    “For the Tomorrow that will Never come?
    “We Will all Have One.”

    😯
    Random capitalization, punctuation, and line breaks, and it makes absolutely no sense. You can’t even say it’s false, it just has no intelligible meaning at all. Maybe they’re doing an experiment with trained monkeys and typewriters.

    Now that I think about it, my cats walking on my keyboard have written more coherent things.

  20. Another church goes by the wayside in the wake of another affair. Why is this so prevalent among our churches and our supposed mog?

  24. How fun. A little banner attaches to your mouse pointer saying “visit our music room.” Fun dragging it over the screen. :mrgreen:

  25. Thanks to Darrell for driving thousands of people to websites that otherwise haven’t had a hit in years. He’s doing his part at increasing IFB web traffic. That is truly his secret agenda behind this whole blog. I have your number, Darrell. 😆

  26. Did none of you catch the fact that the brick background is actually one of those 3D pictures like they used to sell in the mall? If you stare at the big blank spot on the brick wall to the left, and let your eyes get fuzzy, you see the floating head of Jack Hyles.

    1. Was it Jack Hyles? I thought it was Bob Gray (Florida). Maybe I didn’t look at it right.

      1. YAY!! I didn’t mention the 666 because I wanted to see who REALLY loved God enough to go back and check and then stare at the FHH (Floating Head of Hyles) to wait for the 666 to appear)

  27. I love how the screams from hell link in to a 1611 kjv only site, which in turn has the audio clip from Art Bell on Coast to Coast AM. KJV only ppl…

    1. Oh, yeah. Art Bell on Coast to Coast AM. My go-to-source when I need a Weirdness Fix.

      Check them out over Thanksgiving weekend. I think that’s when they have “Ghost to Ghost”, opening up the phone lines for anyone and everyone to phone in their favorite “RL Paranormal Experience” ghost stories. Lotsa good ghost stories.

  28. I’m embarrassed to read this thing about the sounds from Hell. I say so because just before I left fundamentalism, I would, on a daily basis, fear that Obama was the literal Antichrist and use it as part of my “proof” that Jesus’ return was iminent. I also feared when Wells Fargo bought out Wachovia.

    I was a loony toon, and I’m sure had I been around for the “well to hell” thing, I’d have believed that, too.

    1. And before the Well to Hell thing, it would have been Henry Kissinger as the literal Antichrist and the Yom Kippur War and Comet Kohoutek as the “proof”. (I am NOT making that up; I was involved in a Fundy end-of-the-world cult in the Seventies. Thank you Hal Lindsay…)

      1. Comet Kohoutek! How well I remember that, the so-called Comet Of The Century 😳 Which is proof positive that God has a sense of humor. 😀 😆

        1. Did you hear anything about Comet Kohoutek fulfilling End Time Prophecy (i.e. “RAPTURE! THIS IS IT!!!!!”) because the reflection from the comet would make the sun and moon brighten sevenfold as was Prophesied in Isaiah(?)?

          Because that’s what I heard back then.

        2. That reminds me- many years back (20?) I was at a camping event and there was a blood moon. Completely freaked me out. Happily, a friend of mine who teaches astronomy was there, and he explained to us the atmospheric conditions that make it look like that. Boy, what a relief!

  31. So…this is really funny, but I’m from Alabama, and my church played them in the Awana Olympics back in the day. They totally cheated. 🙂

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