Net 99: the Doug Batchelor video series in 1999
Memories of the Net 99 video series Doug Bachelor did, and how my church did the series.
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These are a few memories from the Amazing Facts Doug Batchelor (Batchelor) live video videocasts from the 1990s.
In the 1990s, there was an End Times fervor. There was the Left Behind series, and the Y2K scare.
Adventists glommed onto the fervor by a bunch of live videocasts hosted by Doug Batchelor, an American who runs American religious business “ministry” called Amazing Facts.
Batchelor still does similar video casts. They're about three months long. always hide that they’re Adventist until late in the series.
He definitely did a Net 98 and a Net 99. I think he did it in 1996, 1997, and a few times in 2000s too. He was spawning off the “God will come in 2000!” energy fundamentalist Christians had.
Amazing Facts still has video Bible study series. Oh No Ross and Carrie podcast went to every single one of one of these series and reported on it in a series of podcasts beginning here:
https://ohnopodcast.com/investigations/2017/2/3/ross-and-carrie-await-the-end-times-part-1-amazing-facts-edition?rq=End%20times
About Amazing Facts: Amazing Facts is SDA-supporting, not official SDA. This means it converts people to Adventism, while keeping all the money it collects. The SDA Church recommends lots of SDA-supporting organizations. Whenever SDA-supporting organizations do unsavory things, the SDA Church says “Well, they aren't an official SDA Church organization, so we aren't responsible for what they do”.
It’s a handy way for Adventists get tithe-paying butts-in-pews without having responsibility for the behavior of an organization. (Tithe-paying butts-in-pews is a term from Roll to Disbelieve blog.)
In 2023, Amazing Facts had a revenue of $32.8 million with assets of $105 million. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/822966470
How it works for SDA churches:
Ok, so there is a precast or live series. Sometimes it’s live video, like Doug Batchelor did in his Net 90s series.
All an SDA church has to do is mail a bunch of shiny pamphlets advertising the series, have a screen to watch from, a space for people to sit and watch. And usually, there's a draw. Free childcare. Free food.
My little church I grew up in was all in. The meetings were in the evenings, twice a week as I recall. All members volunteered; the sound guys did their thing with the roll-down screen projector our church had to play Doug Batchelor at church upstairs. The women in the church cooled up a kids’s arts and crafts program (untold, unthanked, for free, paying for supplies out of pocket).
I volunteered in my stiff itchy Pathfinder outfit downstairs.
I remember one infant peed through his diaper soaking my Pathfinder skirt. I was so brainwashed by “Jesus first, Others second, Yourself last” that I told no one.
I believed I was following God’s will.
My logic went: I live ten minutes away from church. My Mom is busy teaching the other kids. I can't interrupt her, the children need to learn about Jesus. They can't miss twenty minutes of learning about Jesus.
So I didn't tell anyone. I endured that peed-on wet skirt for the remainder of the several-hours-long program For Jesus like the tough little martyr I hoped could be once End Times started.
Prioritizing self-care? That was not a thing in Adventism.
The next year, my church rented a venue in another town, playing Doug Batchelor on a pop-up screen that folded down after we were done.
They sent out mailers to every house in town about their End Times series.
And we Adventists all drove 30 minutes twice a week to go to the series.
The venue was a grungy mortuary in a converted Victorian Era town home. All the adults watched Doug Batchelor upstairs. All of us kids—about five of us—were free to wander as long as we didn't mess things up.
This meant free exploration of the mortuary downstairs. There was ground-in dirt throughout all the carpets. There holes worn the carpets. There was mysterious locked doors—we tried every door.
There was a tall tall chimney jutting up into the sky—the tallest chimney in the entire town. Downstairs was a huge fireplace we assumed cremation was performed in. And there were coffins. A rotating selection. Generally 3-7 coffins sat in the main basement room, mainly adult size, but a few child and infant sizes ones showed up one week. Those coffins weren't there the next week.
Downstairs mortuary was interesting for about 20 minutes. We teens tried all the doors, investigated all the unlocked side rooms (they held ground in dirt, adult coffins), checked if the stove was warm, and speculated if any of the closed coffins had bodies in them.
Then I went somewhere comfy to sit, and folded modular origami spike balls from whatever paper was to hand. It passed the time.
As I folded paper, half-listening to Doug Batchelor preaching, I wondered why The Adventist Truth attracted only grungy-looking outcast sorts of people? At the mortuary Net 90-something series, about three nonAdventists showed up. One smelled. One was very, very old. The third appeared to be homeless.
They never came to our regular church.
And that's some of my random memories of my church’s Net 90s.