Popular strip club is now a church offering salvation

Linda Dunegan believes divine intervention played a hand in transforming the building that housed Fantasies on 5th into the start-up Open Door Baptist Church, turning the show floor into a sanctuary and trading the dancer’s pole with a pulpit.

“This church came about because I prayed for five years,” said Dunegan. When the owner gave a real estate agent a week to sell it and suggested the agent call Dunegan. This time, the deal went through.

The journey to savvy real estate investor with 19 properties in three States seems implausible for a girl barely surviving on a daily bowl of rice in her native Vietnam.

Pastor Kenny Menendez said God called him to start a new church in Anchorage; he just didn’t know he and others would have to excavate through the detritus of a strip club to find it.

The electricity was off on his first visit, but cellphone flashlights exposed black and red carpeting, booth seating, private showrooms, poles, a catwalk, a stage, huge bar tables and chairs among the Halloween decorations still displayed after the club abruptly closed a few years ago.

Seventy-six people showed up for the grand opening, some to see what a church inside a former strip club looks like. Now they average about 45 people every Sunday, a decent crowd given it’s competing with about three dozen or so other Baptist churches in Anchorage.

“I would say God is pleased to have a change, a transformation in the building, a place that really ultimately points more people towards him instead of away,” he said.

He has hopes that the church — which is situated between a marijuana retail store, a sex shop and downtrodden motels — will help improve the neighbourhood. Dunegan intends to use the second floor for fundraisers and as a reception rental location, and the third floor as a base for her Children’s Benefit Foundation.

Here, she plans to bridge the gap for Anchorage youth, setting up cultural exchanges for them to visit Vietnam. “We’re starting out small,” Dunegan said, “but our heart is big.”