Open Door Christian Church

09/04/2026

Celebrating 40 Years of Faith, Family & Community!

Open Door Christian Church is turning 40—and we're celebrating in a BIG way!

For four decades, Open Door Christian Church has been a place where people have gathered, grown in faith, gotten married, built friendships, raised families, served others, and experienced God at work.

This October, we invite our entire community to join us as we celebrate 40 incredible years at our FREE Family Fall Festival!

📅 Saturday, October 17 | 9:00 AM–3:00 PM
📍 Open Door Christian Church
1700 South Clara Ave., DeLand, FL 32720

And when we say FREE, we mean it! There is no charge for the food, activities, games, or family fun. Come hungry, because we'll be serving up delicious smoked brisket, pork, and chicken, along with a variety of hot and cold sides.

🌶️ Calling All Junior Chefs!
Our Junior Chili Cook-Off adds some friendly competition to the celebration! Young chefs ages 7–12 and 13–19 will show off their best recipes. Families can cheer them on, and everyone can sample the entries and vote for their favorite.

Bring your chili by 11:45 AM

Voting: Noon–2:00 PM (or while supplies last)

Pre-register by Monday, October 12 at https://opendoorchristian.church/chili-cookoff

Walk-ins welcome if space allows

🎪 40 Years of Good Old-Fashioned Fun
We're bringing back some classic fun as we celebrate the decades! Families can enjoy activities including hopscotch, co****le, ladder ball, Jenga, face painting, bounce houses, and more. Whether you're 4 or 94, there will be something to make you smile!

❤️ Take a Walk Through 40 Years of Open Door
One of the most special parts of our celebration will be a walk-through experience highlighting the last 40 years of Open Door Christian Church. You'll have the opportunity to walk through memories, photographs, milestones, ministries, and special moments that tell the story of where we've been and the people who have been part of it.

But this celebration isn't only about looking back.
We're also looking forward.

We are grateful for everything God has done through Open Door over the past 40 years, and we're excited about what He has in store for the years ahead.

Whether you've been part of Open Door for decades, attended years ago, recently found us, or have never stepped through our doors before—you are invited.

Bring your children. Bring your grandchildren. Call an old friend. Invite your neighbors.

Come eat, play, laugh, remember, reconnect, and celebrate with us.

Fun • Faith • Community

08/31/2026

Three Things Nobody Disputes

The Case for Christ — Sermon 14: The Aftermath | Open Door Christian Church

Nobody reading this saw Jesus walk out of the tomb.

Neither did I. Neither did your parents, or their parents, or anyone you have ever met. So when a skeptic says, "You weren't there," he is right. We weren't.

But suppose you run into Publix on a July afternoon with the parking lot bone dry, and twenty minutes later you come out to water standing in the low spots and steam coming up off the asphalt. You didn't see a drop of rain fall. Nobody came and got you to watch. You have no eyewitness at all — and you know exactly what happened.

That is circumstantial evidence. It is not a weaker kind of proof. It is a different kind. Direct evidence is somebody standing up and saying, "I saw it." Circumstantial evidence is a set of facts nobody argues about, and the honest question of what could possibly account for them. Juries are told plainly that it is not inferior to eyewitness testimony, and cases are won on it every week.

For thirteen Sundays we have been calling direct witnesses. This Sunday we do something different. We stop asking who saw Jesus alive and start asking what happened to the people who did.

Because if a man really did come out of a grave in Jerusalem, that is not the sort of event that leaves the world exactly as it found it. It would leave marks. This Sunday we go looking for them.

Lee Strobel's final interview was with Dr. J.P. Moreland, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Talbot School of Theology, and he asked for facts nobody disputes. We are going to take three of them.

The men who would not take it back. On Friday they scattered. On Saturday they hid. On Sunday night the doors were locked. Within weeks those same men were standing in front of the council that had condemned Jesus, telling them to their faces that they had killed the wrong man. They were flogged for it and ordered to stop — and the next verse says they went back the following morning. Every one of them had a way out, and it was one sentence long.

The two who changed sides. The early church did not only persuade people sitting on the fence. It picked up two men who were on the other side: a man who hunted Christians for a living, and a brother who had not believed a word of it while Jesus was alive. Both paid dearly for switching. One of them we can confirm from a historian who was not a Christian and had no reason to make Christians look good.

The things that should not have changed. The first believers were devout Jews with fourteen centuries of practice behind them — practice their people had died rather than surrender. Within a few years they had changed how they dealt with sin, what day they gathered, and what they were willing to say about God himself. Then they started two rituals that are stranger than most of us notice: a meal commemorating an ex*****on, and a washing that acts out a burial.

Take any one of those alone and there is something a skeptic can offer. Stack all three in the same direction and the explanations stop adding up.

Join us this Sunday at Open Door Christian Church as we look at the aftermath.

For thirteen Sundays we have been calling direct witnesses. This Sunday we do something different. We stop asking who saw Jesus alive and start asking what happened to the people who did.

08/25/2026

The Case for Christ — Sermon 13 | This Sunday at Open Door Christian Church

Last Sunday we stood in front of an empty tomb, and the evidence held. The tomb was empty.

But an empty tomb does not prove a resurrection. It proves a missing body.

An empty grave is a question. This Sunday we ask the question that turns it into an answer: was Jesus of Nazareth actually seen alive?

Not sensed. Not remembered fondly. Not felt in somebody's heart on a hard night. Seen — with eyes, in daylight, by people who can be named and counted and questioned.

It begins with a woman crying in a garden who looked straight at the risen Christ and thought He was the gardener. Nobody inventing a religion starts it that way.

Then it becomes something stranger. It becomes a list.

In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul is not telling a story. He is producing names. Peter. The Twelve. More than five hundred people at one time. James — the brother who did not believe Him while He was alive. And finally Paul himself, a man who had been hunting Christians.

There is no scenery in that list. No dialogue. No description of how anybody felt. Storytellers add detail. Witness lists strip it away, because a list is not trying to move you. It is giving you something to check.

And then Paul adds a line that changes what kind of claim this is. He says the witnesses are "most of whom are still living" (1 Corinthians 15:6).

He is writing to a real congregation in a real port city, roughly twenty-five years after the crucifixion, and he is telling them that hundreds of the people who saw this are walking around right now.

That is not a claim. That is an invitation. Go ask them.

There is an objection here, and it deserves a fair hearing. Most serious skeptics today do not say the disciples lied. They say the disciples were sincere and mistaken — that grief did what grief sometimes does to people who have buried someone they love. That is not a foolish suggestion.

So we will take it seriously, and then we will take it to the text.

Two men walking seven miles who did not recognize Him for hours. A room full of frightened men who assumed they were seeing a ghost — until He asked whether there was anything to eat and ate a piece of broiled fish in front of them. And Thomas, who heard it from his closest friends and still would not believe until he could put his hand in the wound.

These are not people primed to believe. They are people who kept refusing to believe until they were forced to.

Luke, who wrote like an investigator, put it in one sentence. Jesus "presented himself to them and gave many convincing proofs that he was alive" (Acts 1:3).

Not one proof. Many. Not a moment. Forty days.

The tomb was empty. This Sunday we find out why.

Join us Sunday at Open Door Christian Church for "Did Anybody Actually See Him?" — the thirteenth message in The Case for Christ. Bring your questions. This series was built for them.

Welcome to Open Door Christian Church in DeLand, Florida. Join us for worship services, community events, and fellowship.

08/18/2026

Exhibit I: The Empty Tomb

The Case for Christ, Sermon 12 — Open Door Christian Church, DeLand

Last Sunday we settled one question. Jesus of Nazareth died on that cross. Not fainted. Not slipped into a coma. Died.

That answer opens the next question, and it is a question of fact, not of feeling. Three days later, the tomb was empty. So where did the body go?

A body does not simply stop existing. Either someone moved it, or God raised it. There is no third option that fits the evidence we actually have.

This Sunday we open Exhibit I in The Case for Christ: the empty tomb. Lee Strobel's witness for this chapter is Dr. William Lane Craig, who wrote his doctoral dissertation on the historical argument for the resurrection at the University of Munich. He told Strobel the empty tomb rests on evidence most historians take seriously, believing or not.

We will call three witnesses.

The first is the tomb itself. This was not a legend with no address. It was a piece of property with a known owner, a member of the Jewish ruling council, in a garden a short walk from the city gate. Anyone who wanted to check the story could have. Many had every reason to.

The second is the people who found it empty. All four Gospels agree on who got there first, and it is not who you would expect. If you were inventing a resurrection story in the first century, you would never have chosen these witnesses. That is precisely why historians take them seriously.

The third is the enemies of Jesus. The same men who engineered his arrest, his trial, and his death had one easy way to end the movement before it started: produce the body. They never did. What they did instead tells you what they already knew.

Then we go to Jerusalem, seven weeks after the crucifixion, where Peter stood up a short walk from that tomb and staked his life on the claim that it was empty. He was speaking to people who could have walked to the garden that afternoon. No one ever produced a body. No one, in two thousand years, has been able to point to one.

An empty tomb by itself does not prove a resurrection. It proves a missing body, and missing bodies have explanations. This Sunday we put every explanation on the table and ask which one survives all three witnesses at once.

If you have ever wondered whether the resurrection is something Christians simply take on faith, come and see the evidence for yourself. It has been sitting in plain sight for two thousand years.

Sunday morning at Open Door Christian Church. Bring your questions.

08/12/2026

The Case for Christ — Week 11 | This Sunday at Open Door Christian Church

For ten weeks we have been building a case. This Sunday we cross into the last section of it — the resurrection.

But we cannot get to an empty tomb yet. Something is standing in the way, and honest people have to move it first.

Some out there say Jesus never actually died. He was beaten nearly to death, He passed out on that cross, everyone assumed the worst, and the cool air of a stone tomb revived Him. He came to. He got up. He walked out. No resurrection — just a man who fainted and woke up.

They call it the swoon theory, and it is not a silly question. If Jesus did not die, there is nothing to raise.

So this Sunday we do something we have not done in this series. We call a medical doctor to the stand.

When a person dies, somebody has to sign the death certificate — and not just anybody is allowed to sign it. Somebody signed for Jesus of Nazareth. This Sunday we find out who it was, and whether the certificate holds up under cross-examination.

Four groups of people had four very different reasons to look closely at that body: the soldiers who carried out the ex*****on, the officer who had to answer for it to the governor’s face, the enemies who wanted Him gone, and the friends who wrapped Him for burial. They agreed on almost nothing else in this world.

They all signed the same certificate.

A word of warning, and I mean it kindly: this will not be an easy hour. We are going to talk plainly about what Roman ex*****on did to a human body. We will not dwell there and we will not make a show of it — but we will not soften it either, because softening it is how people end up with a comfortable cross that never actually killed anybody.

Bring your Bible, and bring a friend.

Anchor text: Mark 15:42–45 | Memory verse: 1 Corinthians 15:3–4

“For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures.” (1 Corinthians 15:3–4, NIV)

Died. Buried. Raised. This Sunday we settle the first two.

08/04/2026

Exhibit G: The Fingerprint Evidence — this Sunday at Open Door Christian Church

Here is why detectives love fingerprints. Out of all the people who have ever lived — every one of them — no two have ever shared a print. Not even identical twins. So a clear print at the scene does something almost no other evidence can do: it points to one person, and rules out everybody else on earth.

Now hold that thought.

Centuries before Jesus was born, the prophets of Israel wrote down a set of prints. Not vague hopes. Specifics. The town the Messiah would be born in — one little village, named seven hundred years early. The family line He would come from. How He would be betrayed, and for exactly how much — down to the coin. How He would suffer, how He would die, and even what would happen to His body afterward.

One set of prints. One question: whose fingerprints are these?

For nine weeks we've been building a case. We cross-examined the eyewitnesses. We held the manuscripts up to the light. We found Jesus in the writings of Romans and Jews who had no love for Him. We let the stones cry out. And over the last three Sundays we tested the man Himself — His claim, His mind, His match against God's own self-description.

This Sunday we open a file that was written before the suspect was ever born.

And we're not going to duck the hard questions, because you know by now that's not how we do things. How do we know these prophecies weren't written after Jesus and slipped into the record? (There's an answer, and it was found sealed in a clay jar in the Judean desert in 1947.) Couldn't a clever man arrange his life to fit? (Try arranging your own birthplace — or what the soldiers at the foot of your cross decide to do with your clothes.) Couldn't the Gospel writers have just made the details up? We'll take every objection at full strength, and then we'll hold Jesus of Nazareth up against the prints, one line at a time.

And you will hear about a Jewish kid from Newark, New Jersey — a Vietnam veteran who had never once heard the word "Messiah" in all his years of synagogue — who was dared on the Sunset Strip in 1969 to read these prophecies for himself. Just the Old Testament. Nothing else. What he found in Isaiah chapter 53 stopped him cold, and what he did about it will stay with you.

Because here's the thing about fingerprints: they don't care what you were expecting. They just identify one man.

Join us this Sunday as The Case for Christ continues. Bring your Bible, bring your questions — and bring somebody who thinks faith can't survive an honest look at the evidence.

This week's memory verse: "But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed." — Isaiah 53:5 (NIV)

Centuries before Jesus was born, the prophets of Israel wrote down a set of prints. Not vague hopes. Specifics. The town the Messiah would be born in — one little village, named seven hundred years early. The family line He would come from. How He would be betrayed, and for exactly how much, down ...

07/29/2026

If you are looking for a church with a large stage, a full band, smoke machines, and club lighting, Open Door Christian Church is not the place. We would rather say that plainly on the front end than have somebody drive out to 1700 S Clara Ave expecting one thing and finding another.

So here is what you will find instead.

A hymnal in the pew rack
We still sing out of the book. "Great Is Thy Faithfulness." "It Is Well with My Soul." "Blessed Assurance." "The Old Rugged Cross." The words are printed on the page along with the notes, which means if you read music you can find your part.

There is something a hymnal does that a screen cannot. It holds the whole song at once. You can see where the verse is going before you get there. You can flip back to the one we sang last month. You can take it home if you're sick and sing it from your chair. And when the congregation sings together out of the same book, you hear each other — not a soundboard, not a monitor mix, just neighbors.

Paul told the church at Colossae to teach and admonish one another "with psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit, singing to God with gratitude in your hearts" (Colossians 3:16). Notice who is doing the singing in that verse. Not a platform. One another.

Nothing to compete with the preaching
We don't dim the lights. We don't run a haze machine. There is no countdown video. The room stays lit, which means we can see each other's faces, and the preacher can see yours.

None of this is a shot at the churches that do it differently. Plenty of faithful congregations use bands and screens and reach people we will never reach, and we rejoice that the Gospel is being preached. Every generation has to figure out how to put the gospel in front of people, and the New Testament does not hand down a lighting plot. This is simply not who we are.

There is a passage that has always struck us on this point. Elijah is told to stand on the mountain because the Lord is about to pass by. A wind tears the rocks apart — God is not in the wind. An earthquake — God is not in the earthquake. A fire — God is not in the fire. And then, after the fire, "a gentle whisper" (1 Kings 19:11–12). That is where Elijah covered his face.

We are not saying God cannot work through a big production. We are saying He has never needed one.

The Lord's Table every Sunday
We break bread every week, the way the disciples did on the first day of the week at Troas (Acts 20:7). It isn't a special service four times a year. It is the center of what we do on Sunday morning, and it comes before the sermon, because the sermon is not the main event.

You do not have to be a member here to come to the Table. It isn't our table.

People who will know if you're missing
We are a small congregation. That has a cost — we don't have a program for every age and stage, and we won't pretend otherwise. What we do have is a nursery, and a class for the younger ones during the worship service, so parents can settle in and listen. But being small also means you cannot be anonymous here for long. Somebody will learn your name. Somebody will ask about your mother's surgery the following week because they remembered. And if you miss two Sundays in a row, somebody will call.

This congregation was started in 1986 by a small group of believers who wanted a place to worship together. Some of the folks in these pews have been here the whole way. There are families here in their third generation. That kind of thing is not built with a fog machine.

And if you'd rather stay in the car
We hold a Drive-In Service in the Garden, broadcast on FM 87.9. Pull in, roll the windows down or leave them up, tune the radio, and worship right where you're parked. No handshake required. Some people have come that way for years, and some people used that as the front door before they ever walked in the building.

An honest invitation
If what you want is a church that feels like a concert, we understand, and we will happily point you toward one.

But if you have been to the concert and found yourself wanting something older and quieter — a hymnal, a loaf of bread and a cup, a Bible opened and read out loud, and a room full of people who will still be here next week — the door is open.

Open Door Christian Church 1700 S Clara Ave, DeLand, FL 32720

Sunday mornings: 8:30 AM Fellowship time with coffee, juice, donuts, hot breakfast sandwiches and casseroles — 9:00 AM Drive-In Service in the Garden (FM 87.9) — 10:15 AM Bible study — 11:00 AM Indoor chapel

"But the Lord said to Samuel, 'Do not consider his appearance or his height, for I have rejected him. The Lord does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.'" — 1 Samuel 16:7

We don't dim the lights. We don't run a haze machine. There is no countdown video. The room stays lit, which means we can see each other's faces, and the preacher can see yours.

07/28/2026

Exhibit F: The Profile Evidence — this Sunday at Open Door Christian Church

If you were looking for someone, you wouldn't start with the suspect. You'd start with the description.

Height. Build. A scar over the left eye. A limp on the right side. You write it all down first — and only then do you bring somebody in and hold him up against it, one line at a time. If he misses on half the list, you thank him for his time and send him home. But if he matches on every single line, you've found your man.

This Sunday we're going to do exactly that with Jesus of Nazareth.

For eight weeks we've been building a case. We put the eyewitnesses on the stand and cross-examined them the way a hostile attorney would. We held the manuscripts up to the light. We went looking for Jesus outside the Bible and found Him there. We went down into the dirt with the archaeologists. And over the last two Sundays we turned from the record to the man Himself — He did claim to be God, and He showed not one mark of a madman.

Three doors: liar, lunatic, or Lord and Savior. Two of them are bolted shut.

But we said something honest at the end of last week, and it bears repeating. Bolting two doors is not the same thing as walking through the third. Showing that a man isn't lying and isn't crazy doesn't prove that what he says is true.

So this Sunday we stop clearing ground and start building.

Here's how. We are not going to start with Jesus and then go build a description that happens to fit Him — that would be rigging the test, and you'd be right not to trust it. We're going to open the Old Testament first, centuries before Bethlehem, and let God describe Himself. Seven lines, written down before we ever look at Jesus at all.

Then we'll bring Him in.

We're also going to do something plenty of sermons skip. Two of those seven lines create a real problem, and we're going to walk straight into them instead of around them. Jesus got tired. He got hungry. He wept at a graveside. He prayed — to God. And there's a verse where He says plainly that there is something He does not know.

If you've ever wondered about those verses, or had somebody throw one at you and had nothing to say back, this is the Sunday to be here. We're not going to pretend they aren't there.

Lee Strobel took this question to Dr. Donald A. Carson — a chemistry major turned New Testament scholar, with a doctorate from the University of Cambridge, forty years of teaching at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and around sixty books to his name. When the evidence comes down to a single Greek sentence, he's a good man to ask.

Bring your Bible and something to write with. Take the seven lines down as we go. Then judge for yourself whether the man in the record matches the description.

Memory verse — John 14:9: "Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father."

Bible study meets between services, and that's the place for the questions that won't fit inside a sermon. Bring them.

And bring somebody who's still deciding. This is the kind of morning that was made for it.

Does He fit the profile? Come and see.

We're going to open the Old Testament first, centuries before Bethlehem, and let God describe Himself. Seven lines, written down before we ever look at Jesus at all.

07/21/2026

The Case for Christ | Sermon 8 — Was Jesus Out of His Mind?

Last Sunday we reached a turning point in the series. For six weeks we asked whether the record about Jesus could be trusted — the eyewitnesses, the manuscripts, the outside witnesses, the archaeology. Then we finally asked what that record actually says, and we found something that won't let any of us stay comfortable: Jesus claimed to be God. Not in one stray verse, but in His favorite title, in His plainest words, in His actions, and in the trial that sent Him to the cross. His friends heard it. His enemies heard it. The court that killed Him heard it — and tore its robes over it.

Which leaves us somewhere uncomfortable. Because there's a sentence people love to say about Jesus: "I think He was a great moral teacher — I just don't believe He was God." It sounds so reasonable. So respectful. So safe.

This Sunday we're going to look at why that may be the one thing you can't say about Jesus.

A generation ago, an Oxford professor named C.S. Lewis pointed out the problem. A man who claims to be God isn't a candidate for "great moral teacher." He's really only one of three things — and Lewis argued that once you see the three, you can never un-see them. So this week we're going to take the hardest of those options and put it on trial, the same way Lee Strobel did in his own investigation. He didn't ask a preacher whether Jesus was sane. He went and asked a psychologist.

And here's the part that surprises people: the charge that Jesus had lost His mind isn't a modern one. It was leveled against Him while He was still walking the earth — by the people who knew Him best.

Then Jesus entered a house, and again a crowd gathered, so that he and his disciples were not even able to eat. When his family heard about this, they went to take charge of him, for they said, "He is out of his mind." (Mark 3:20–21, NIV)

His own family. So the skeptic who wonders whether Jesus was simply deluded isn't asking anything new. And it deserves an honest answer — not a nervous one.

We won't give away Sunday's answer here. But we'll examine His mind, His emotions, the way He read people, His relationships, and His teaching — and we'll ask, plainly, whether the marks of a broken mind are actually there. Come and see what the evidence says.

Somebody is going to ask you one day why you believe — maybe over coffee, maybe across a hospital bed, maybe from a grandchild home from college. This series is how we get ready to answer, with gentleness and respect.

Join us this Sunday. And if you want to dig deeper, come to Bible study between services — we go further into the questions there, and everyone is welcome.

07/14/2026

The Case for Christ — Week 7: The Identity Evidence

For six weeks now, we have been testing the record. We heard the eyewitnesses and cross-examined them. We held the manuscripts up to the light. We called the hostile witnesses — Romans, Greeks, and a Jewish historian — and last time, the stones themselves cried out from the ground. The record has held, every single week.

But every trial has rebuttal witnesses. And the other side has experts.

Not long ago, a group of scholars gathered in meeting rooms, a couple of times a year, to decide which words of Jesus He actually said. They debated one saying at a time — and then they voted. With colored beads. A red bead meant Jesus said it. Pink meant probably. Gray meant probably not. A black bead meant the church made it up.

They called themselves the Jesus Seminar, and when their verdict was published, the news magazines put them on the cover. Only about 18% of the sayings in your Bible survived their vote. Of the entire Lord's Prayer, they kept two words. And their bottom line was this: the "real" Jesus was a clever traveling teacher, and nothing more. No miracles. No resurrection. And no claim — ever — to be God.

So this Sunday we're going to do two things. First, we're going to cross-examine the voters: who was actually in that room, and what rules did they use to judge the evidence? (Wait until you hear what they printed in the introduction of their own book.)

And then we're going to do what they never honestly did. We're going to throw out the rigged rules, open the record, and let Jesus answer for Himself. Because the record has some surprises in it. A title Jesus loved to use that sounds humble — until you find out where it comes from. A sentence spoken in the temple courts that made a crowd reach for stones. A paralyzed man on a mat, and a claim so enormous the scholars in the room did the math instantly. And a midnight trial where the high priest tore his robes over three words — and a court sentenced Jesus to die, that night, on that charge.

Here's the thing you'll see Sunday: the people who heard Jesus in person — friends and enemies alike — were never confused about what He was claiming. Only His modern editors are.

Two thousand years ago, near a town called Caesarea Philippi, Jesus took this poll Himself: "Who do people say the Son of Man is?" The crowd had its theories then, too — John the Baptist, Elijah, Jeremiah. Every one of them flattering. Every one of them wrong. And then He turned the survey into a summons: "But what about you? Who do you say I am?"

That question is still on the table. This Sunday, it lands on us.

Bring your Bible. Bring your questions. And bring a friend who's been told Jesus never claimed to be anything more than a teacher.

Join us Sunday — and don't miss the Bible study between services, where we dig deeper and take your questions.

Two thousand years ago, near a town called Caesarea Philippi, Jesus took this poll Himself: "Who do people say the Son of Man is?" And then He turned the survey into a summons: "But what about you? Who do you say I am?"