Drenched in his own blood, Cody Coots had to be carried out of the Full Gospel Tabernacle church, one of the few in the country which still allows snake-handling.
Cody's father Jamie, 42, was killed when a rattlesnake bit him in a similar ritual back in 2014 but that does not put him off performing the same death-defying service.
After he was bitten and collapsed on the ground, Cody asked to be taken to the mountaintop where God would judge whether he should live or die.
But his friend, also named Cody, instead drove him to the hospital where a doctor said the snake came close to severing his temporal artery which would have killed him.
Cody's friend said: "Most people bit in the face are dead in five, ten minutes. I mean, his own daddy got bit in the hand and within seven minutes was dead."