The Sunshine Party

By, Michael Richmond, Sunshine Evangelistic Association:

In these pages, but primarily through photos, you will learn about the Sunshine Party. The Sunshine Party consisted of Bruce Thum, (Chief Thum, American Indian Evangelist) Ruth Thum, and Charles Verness, the creators of the drama Heaven's Gates and Hell's Flames. Over the years a number of people traveled with them including Wayne Benson, Vi Whited (Chuck's Sister) and others, I will try and note them in the photos..

Why a web-page devoted to the Sunshine Party? Quite frankly I'm not sure anyone realizes, including the Thums and Chuck, how much they did for the North American Church and evangelism in general.

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Sunshine Party Promo:

Today it's no big deal to present a drama in the conservative Protestant church, but this wasn't always the case. In fact, in years past church people got downright indignant if you mixed theater with religion, the idea of being entertained while in church hit many people wrong.

Through the 1940's and 1950's the church was in a slump of sorts, still feeling the effects of the Scopes Trials, an event that happened in the mid-1920's but had a lingering effect on American religion and is the basis for the mad zeal of many of today's separation of church and state arguments. America was also swelled with a worldly pride at winning WW2, and enjoying expanding prosperity .The message of the cross was lost amidst the easy religion of the day.

Evangelism was mainly conducted on a very narrow basis, person to person - certainly an effective and scriptural way, but only one color in the coloring box. The practice of a church pooling resources and presenting an entertaining and compelling evangelism service had fallen out of favor, and the word evangelism began to be replaced with revival. A revival was normally conducted by preaching evangelists, but some question if this was even evangelism at all since the services were intended for church members, it was difficult to invite a non-Christian to such an event. The time was ripe for God to raise up something new to shake the church.

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The Sunshine Party, Chuck, Vi, Ruth, Bruce in Indian dress. March 1957.

The Sunshine Party had a vision of evangelism through visual and musical means that had all but died with Aimee Semple McPherson. Indeed, Aimee Semple McPherson was a lightning rod of controversy and if one thing hasn't changed over the years it's the notion of guilt by association. Chief Thum has told me of times in those early days when an actor would come on stage dressed like Jesus, scores of people would walk out of the church, that sort of thing wasn't done in the 1950's. It is impossible to separate Heaven's Gates and Hell's Flames, the Sunshine Party's crowning achievement, from all the things they did and experienced through the years.

Had the Sunshine Party not worked so hard to overcome this bias against drama it might still be with us today. Consider dancing, I can come up with no logical reason why dance is so frowned on by Christians, to this day. Certainly an argument can be made for slow-dancing between a man and a woman, but this is a very minor side-note to dance as a whole, in which touching is impractical. Dance, after all, is rooted not only in early church and Jewish tradition, but by every people group on earth. Perhaps it is because there has been no Sunshine Party in the Christian dance community, no one who had the courage to plow on year after year making people examine what they believe about dance.

It's a big country and the Sunshine Party only made it to a small percentage of Canadian and American churches. However, news of their events, people who saw the plays as youngsters, people who heard about it from others had a rippling effect felt through all of North America. Rex Humbard certainly had a large part of spreading the Sunshine Party's message in the 1960's and the Sunshine Party helped The Cathedral of Tomorrow grow and flourish as well.

Related Links (things I have found surfing)

Who invented scalping, Indian or European (references Bruce Thum) Should this page go down I have the article here