I'd suggest the laying on of hands, first.  When, you can cure cancer and repair a broken leg by prayer quickly, then you might be ready for the snakes.

Oh, yeah, he had faith, but it was just his time to die.

"Wolford died while hosting an outdoor service Sunday at Panther Wildlife Management Area in West Virginia".

"In 1983, when he was 15, he saw his dad die while “taking up serpents.”

http://blogs.ajc.com/news-to-m...e-just-like-his-dad/

Oh goodness, they didn't have enough faith!!!

Either that, or they weren't first century apostles.

How do they know that what the bible tells them to do is a literal instruction? How does any Christian know the difference between the literal and the symbolic? Scriptures do tell us how to do it, but what do others think?

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Just my take on that is because Jesus was the one telling them.

He was just telling the Apostles he would protect them against certain dangers.

This was needed for a short time to have a good start to spread the word.

As generations died out so did the need for it.

Years ago I saw a special on snake handling churches. One ex-member was telling how they made the snakes "safer". Milking the venom, keeping the temperature where they were held at a level that made them lethargic, and he said too, they get used to being handled. OK, fine, but you can still count me out. Ugh!!

I've seen some of those specials and wondered how much faith is involved.

Freeze em and milk em, why don't they just pull their teeth?

Last Spring, while traveling thru some really rural places in LA between Montgomery and Mobile, the churches kept getting smaller and the names of some rather unfamiliar.  After a while, I begin to wonder where a couple of them kept the snakes. 

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They need their teeth to eat. Wouldn't want that job, snake dentist.

Remember this??

Former Snakehandling Preacher Escapes Prison Briefly

Man In Prison For Trying To Kill Wife With Snake

The Associated Press/February 25, 2003

Childersburg, Ala. -- A former snakehandling preacher, serving a 99-year sentence for trying to kill his wife with a rattlesnake, escaped briefly from a work detail.

Prison officials said Glenn Summerford, who has served about 11 years of his sentence, slipped away from the work detail for about 45 minutes Friday before being returned to custody. He then was moved from the work center at Childersburg to the state prison in St. Clair County.

Summerford, 58, was convicted of attempted murder in 1992 after his wife, Darlene, testified that he grabbed her by the hair and forced her to put her hand in a cage of rattlesnakes after hitting it with a pipe to make the snakes mad. She was bitten twice but survived.

Summerford at the time handled snakes as pastor of the Church of Jesus With Signs Following near Scottsboro. 

Indirectly a snake is killing the preacher.

99 years for attempted murder is a good sentence, but people slaughter their entire family and get less time. 

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You will  NOT see them handling diamondback rattlesnakes or cottonmouths .  Those snakes can not be tamed down like the timber rattlers these nuts prefer. They will BITECHA!

What I would do is take a Garter snake and paint yellow and red rings

on it.

LOL!  Well, now days you can probably find fake snakes that look pretty real. With all the oogy boogy dancing around and fainting, speaking in tongues, they'd never notice.