The viewer then finds himself outside the gates of Hell. Reality has set in and hope has fled for the characters that chose to reject God's Son. They are addressed and reassured by the character of Satan that they now belong to him. Peering through the abyss, the audience gets an extremely visual as well as physical reminder that Jesus has offered them a way out of this future torment.
Upon leaving hell, one thing is clear. Following Hell, the audience is ushered through the gates of Heaven in to the very presence of Jesus. Each member of the tour will have a sobering encounter with their Lord and Savior as He looks into their eyes and welcomes them home. In this scene the viewer witnesses what has happened to the characters that placed their faith and trust in Jesus Christ. The overwhelming presence of God is often too much to handle as grown men and women burst into tears at the thought of this glorious "homecoming".
The final portion of the presentation gives an overview of the story and provides the individual viewers with the opportunity to accept Christ as their Savior. Those who made decisions or would like to ask questions are then given the chance to speak with a one-on-one encourager to help drive home the commitment that was just made.
The Judgement House presentation takes approximately 1 hour to complete. With new groups launching every 10 to 15 minutes, an average of 75 people can tour the presentation per hour. Skip to main content Menu. Churches used to have revivals for two purposes: Seeing people come to faith in Christ; see the lost get saved.
Seeing God's people revitalized in their spiritual walk. Judgement House fulfills these two purposes by giving its participants an opportunity to experience mission work first hand by: Demonstrating the gospel by participating in the dramas. The ceiling was so high I couldn't see it—high enough to magnify every sound, every scream. The noise kept building and building until it was part of the fabric of the room, inextricable from the air and the smoke. Satan—horned, hooved—strode across a dais, backlit in red.
He looked right at me. When he spoke, his voice seemed to come from everywhere at once—rough and strangely intimate. I felt it in every part of my body. He said that I already belonged to him. He said that he had been waiting for me for a long time. By the time our guide led us toward a softly lit staircase, I could hardly breathe. More than once I nearly tripped and my friend had to support me up the steps. Our final stop was a Sunday school classroom, where a team of "Christian counselors" stood at the ready.
They all wore matching neon green t-shirts with the church's name and logo printed over their hearts. A man with a neat, ice-gray beard and pastorly air about him stepped forward.
He asked us what he called the single most important question of our lives: "Where will you spend eternity? After that night, I joined a church and started reading the Bible every day. My parents were perplexed by my conversion, to say the least. Still, every Wednesday night, my mother drove me to youth group and waited in the car with a stack of Sudoku puzzles until I came back out again, flushed with the Spirit and still humming "Shout to the Lord.
Over the next few months, my beliefs grew more and more extreme. I became fixated on the apocalypse and the Second Coming. I devoured the Book of Revelation.
I looked for clues and ciphers, hoping for proof that Jesus was coming back soon. I convinced myself that the world would end in the year , which meant that the Rapture would happen any day now. I was so certain that I even wrote a letter to my parents for them to find after I disappeared. In it, I explained that Jesus had taken me up into Heaven ahead of the end of the world. I told them how to get saved so that they could join me after the Great Tribulation.
A few days after I wrote the letter, I destroyed it—I was starting to sound unhinged even to myself. Of course, I wasn't raptured. The year came and went and the world didn't end. I started to question the literal interpretations of the Bible that I was taught in church. What if all the talk about angels and trumpets and fire from Heaven was meant to be symbolic? What if it was just another parable like the mustard seed or the pearl of great price? What did that mean about the Hell portrayed in the Judgement House?
Around the same time, I also started to notice some of the un-Christian words and actions of my church's ministry team. Like when youth leaders shamed girls who didn't live up to exacting purity standards, but never the boys. Or when the pastor preached a fiery sermon against homosexuality, with thinly veiled references to my gay best friend, who happened to be sitting in the pew next to me. After that, I stopped going to church altogether.
I still believed in God, but my faith's intensity was gone. Not because I stopped believing—but because I no longer felt at home with other believers. A few years later, when I went to college, I found a community where I did feel at home, a mix of campus queers, sci-fi geeks, goth club kids and literature nerds.
Like me, a lot of them had come from fundamentalist religious backgrounds and had also rejected their faiths' hardline doctrines.
Most of them had renounced religion altogether, seeing it only as a tool of fear and oppression. After my own experience with my former church and the Judgement House, I had to agree with them. Whenever religion came up as a topic of conversation, I would jokingly call myself a "recovering Southern Baptist. With no real models for a healthy spiritual life, I decided it was better to do without religion altogether.
Yet even after I had given up on Christianity, the old fear of the Hell I'd seen in the Judgement House still had a way of popping up again at critical moments of my life. During the months when I started to figure out I was queer, I heard snatches of my old pastor's homophobic sermon in my head.
The first time I flew in an airplane after I came out, every time turbulence rattled the cabin I had to fight back the wild thought that because I was gay now, God would cause the plane to crash.
Rationally, I knew that was nonsense, but everything I learned in church told me that if I embraced my queer identity, I would face some kind of punishment. It was a night flight, and I can still remember looking out of the window at the glowing patchwork of cities and highways down below. The captain kept climbing higher and higher, looking for smoother air.
I was about as close to the mythic heaven as one can get this side of the grave, and instead of wonder or excitement about my life's new possibilities, all I felt was fear of divine recrimination. I knew that something had to change. I didn't want to have to choose between living authentically as myself and having a fulfilling spiritual life anymore. I started looking for an alternative to the fundamentalist doctrine of my former church.
After a lot of research into the histories and beliefs of various church denominations, I decided to visit a Quaker meetinghouse one Sunday morning. I grew curious about Quakers—also known as the Religious Society of Friends—after I learned that Quakers have openly affirmed LGBTQ rights and equality since at least , making them one of the earliest denominations to do so. When I arrived, I found a small group of people gathered together in a small, upstairs room overlooking an oak-lined avenue.
The meeting had already started, and everyone sat in a circle of metal folding chairs, eyes closed in silent meditation. Most Quaker services are "unprogrammed," meaning that there is no sermon, or readings, or hymns.
Instead, members sit together in silence to listen for the "Inward Light.
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