Christmas in Hell

 Four years ago, Jesus flew for the first time.

It was just another gig for the muscular, ponytailed Rebmann, whose ZFX Flying Illusions Inc. supplied the wires, cables, harnesses and lessons to theaters when, say, Peter Pan was required to alight on a bedroom windowsill or flying monkeys needed to descend upon Dorothy. But increasingly, Rebmann was being hired for religious productions, which is how he ended up backstage in the Sheffield Family Life Center's sanctuary on 5700 Winner Road.

The Sheffield Family Life Center's $18 million home stretches out like an airline terminal, with a parking lot as big as a football field. The neighborhood's other nearby landmarks include an Inner City Oil Co. gas station and fenced-in lots for the husks of wrecked cars. Soggy teddy bears and a rose-covered cross mark one street corner as the site of random violence. Heavy, screeching coal cars ride the rails just behind Sheffield's bright lot. A relatively small cross above the main entrance is the building's sole hint of religious affiliation.

There aren't any crosses inside the main sanctuary, a cream-colored expanse with 3,000 cushy seats and two giant video screens. Touring the facilities, Rebmann saw all the familiar equipment behind the theater-scale stage: pulleys to open and close the curtains; a props table; and some large, thronelike set pieces. He knew his job was to make Jesus and some angels fly to the stage, but he didn't know much else. Didn't need to, really.

Then he rounded a corner and stopped short in front of two dozen black machine guns.

These people are nut cases, Rebmann thought.

If it's crazy to stage a Christmas play about the apocalyptic end times, complete with plastic-machine-gun-toting soldiers, the arrival of the Antichrist, the second coming of Jesus and fiery scenes of H-E-double-hockey sticks, then Sheffield pastors Felicito Bagunu and Roger Horne don't want to be sane.

Each year, Sheffield spends around $60,000 to produce six performances of Tribulation Christmas, the congregation's largest outreach event of the year. On average, church officials say, 1,400 souls come forward to devote their lives to Christ after watching it.

The unusual form of recruitment is fitting for such an odd congregation. Though Kansas City often feels like a grid of boundary lines where well-known streets separate black from white, rich from poor, Sheffield has managed to fill its green seats with an astonishingly diverse assortment of people. Church administrators estimate the Sunday crowds are 40 percent black and 40 percent white, with the remaining 20 percent made up of Hispanics and Asians; it's also a nearly even mix of suburbanites and those who live in the urban core. Nonmembers might recognize Sheffield's senior pastor, 73-year-old George Westlake II, he of the loud sweaters, whose Bible question-and-answer show airs on KPXE Channel 50 at 12:30 p.m. on Saturdays. It's taped in Sheffield's basement, where there's a fully equipped television studio.

Because Sheffield's is an Assembly of God congregation, at any time during one of the two Sunday sermons a forceful voice may rise out of the audience, speaking in English or an indecipherable language that Westlake calls "the movement of the Holy Spirit." Churchgoers consider themselves citizens of heaven who will disappear in the rapture, a prelude to the apocalypse as prophesied in Revelation -- a chapter of the New Testament embraced by some sects of Christianity and considered rogue text by others.

But while heaven waits, more earthly matters arise. For instance: Couldn't the flying Jesus be black?

The only thing black about this year's Jesus is his Harley jacket.

Jimmy Shrader was cast as Jesus because he looks the part, with his shoulder-length, caramel-colored hair and beard.

His one line: "Satan, come here."

"I'm really nervous, man. It's some big shoes to fill, you know?" Shrader says shyly, speaking with the laid-back tone of a professional stoner. Shrader doesn't get high anymore, though he still snaps to attention when, in a recent prayer circle, an arthritic woman asks God for help with her joints. "I still think like a heathen, man," Shrader says, shaking his head.

Like more than a few of Sheffield's congregants, Shrader used to be a bad man. In high school, he bashed a bully's face against a metal truck bumper until the kid's mother couldn't recognize him. He rode with biker gangs and once was arrested for attempted armed robbery when he pulled a knife on an undercover cop in the parking lot of a bar.

"It was whiskey, wine, weed, women and song," the 41-year-old Shrader says, a little wistfully. "Now I gotta be careful who I ride with. I don't want to mess my life up, and I don't want to go back.... I've been sober, been working out, eating good, taking my vitamins, and I've got a good prayer life. I'm making $18 an hour now."