Long before the recent wave of reporting, a Tucson television station spent a week inside the story. Behind the Door was a late-1980s news series, reported by Sandy Rathman, built around a single question about the Potter’s House and its parent network of Door churches: were these Christians on fire for Jesus, or a destructive cult that controlled the thoughts and lives of its members? The series aired after the talk-show host Geraldo Rivera attacked the Door on national television, and it did the one thing The Fellowship’s own literature never does. It put current members, former members, pastors, and cult specialists on the same screen and let the viewer decide. The surviving parts have been compiled into a single documentary, embedded above.
What Behind the Door set out to do
The series took the fair route, and it is worth conceding what it conceded. It let the church show its appeal first. The Door called itself a charismatic Pentecostal work, heavy on speaking in tongues, healing crusades, and street preaching, and it built its name by reaching young people through plays, movies, and rock music with Christian lyrics, and by going after the addicts and down-and-outs most churches avoid. Founded in Prescott, Arizona, in the 1970s, it had by the time of the broadcast spread to roughly seven hundred congregations in twenty-nine countries, six of them in Tucson, operating under a handful of names including the Door, Praise Chapel, Crossroads, and the Potter’s House. One pastor’s wife told the camera she had been strung out on cocaine and running with bikers before a street preacher reached her. The series did not pretend those conversions were fake. It asked a different question: how the church held people once they were in.
The allegations
The charge that organized the series was mind control, and the specific form it took was isolation. Former members described a church that decided who they could date, what they could read, what they could watch, and whom they could keep in their lives. Debbie Christensen said the members had been “zombies for Christ” who did whatever they were told, and that she had been turned against her family to the point of telling her own mother she was going to hell. When she reported being raped by a fellow member, she said, her pastor blamed her and warned that speaking up would get her expelled. The pastor strongly denied it. The Workman family described watching their son Neal stand up in a Potter’s House service in Flagstaff and disown them from the platform, to applause, and being ordered off church property when they came to see him.
The former members carried specifics. Lou Muccitelli said that after eleven years he was excommunicated as a heretic once he questioned the level of control. David Diver, a thirteen-year member, said he was ostracized for asking about church finances, and described a blacklist of books and a service where members were told to bring their televisions for a bonfire. Steve Schoner said he was discouraged from finishing a college degree, publicly humiliated for arriving late, and worn down by a schedule that kept members at church almost every day, which he came to see as a control technique. One man described burning his own college textbooks. Another, Alan Stein, said the church tried to dictate what a husband and wife could do in their marriage bed. The aftermath the series documented was heavy: recurring nightmares, a need for counseling, and thoughts of suicide, including one woman who said that after years of being told she would die and go to hell if she left, she slept with a Bible on her chest and prayed to live until morning. The series also noted an unsolved 1987 shooting death at a Door Bible conference in Tucson, and a custody battle in which a father took his daughter to force his wife out of the church.
The church’s answer
The broadcast gave the church its reply, and the reply is as revealing as the charges. Founder Wayman Mitchell denied all of it, insisting members were free to come and go, ran their own lives, and made their own decisions, and that the Door was no different in doctrine or practice from the Assemblies of God or the Church of God. On the specific accusations he went after the accusers. He dismissed Christensen’s rape claim by noting she had not filed charges, and he attacked the deprogrammer Rick Ross personally, invoking Ross’s Jewish background and branding him a highly paid religious mercenary. A private investigator surfaced Ross’s own criminal past, a 1970s jewelry theft, which Ross freely admitted on camera while saying he had repented, served his sentence, done community service, and started a prison ministry, and which he called mudslinging meant to divert attention from the issues he had raised. Tucson pastor Harold Warner took the confident route, buying a newspaper ad inviting people to come hear the truth and preaching that reproach is an occupational hazard of serving the Lord. His sharpest retort was that the behavior change the critics flag as brainwashing was simply what happens when people stop lying, cheating, and using drugs. And a family named Dominguez gave the counter-testimony, crediting the Door with pulling relatives out of alcoholism and drug addiction and, in one case, saving a marriage.
What the specialists said
The series then went to the people who study such groups, and their verdict was mixed but pointed. The Cult Awareness Network, which had logged a handful of complaints about the Door that year, said it appeared to fit the criteria of a destructive cult. Fundamentalist Anonymous called it a potential extreme mental-health hazard and said it had counseled around two hundred former members over three years. The Christian Research Institute, which grades churches on doctrine, had earlier recommended the Door with caution and was, at the time of the broadcast, rewriting that assessment to withdraw the recommendation, citing the group’s structural authority, its hyperactive atmosphere, and a weak doctrinal statement. The deprogrammers agreed on one framing that cuts to the center of the whole dispute: the question is not what a member believes but how he was brought into the belief, whether by a conscious decision or by emotional manipulation. The warning signs they listed were isolation, an us-versus-them exclusivity, guilt and peer pressure, and changes in personality and vocabulary. The church’s answer, delivered from the pulpit, was that those same signs are simply the marks of a real conversion.
The faces that would end up in court
There is a detail in Behind the Door that matters more in hindsight than it could have at the time. The ex-members on camera, picketing the crusades and speaking to the reporter, are not random critics. Mark Workman, Lou Muccitelli, David Diver, and Steve Schoner all appear here, and within a few years The Fellowship would take the Flagstaff picketers to court, where these same men became co-defendants in the lawsuit examined in the Steve Schoner case. The documentary is the television record of the people the church would later try to silence with lawyers, filmed while they were still only holding signs.
Why Behind the Door still matters
Strip the broadcast down and it is a time capsule that refuses to age. Filmed more than thirty years ago, by an outside newsroom that gave both sides their say, it recorded the same charges that later reporting would surface again: control of daily life, shunning that reaches into families, secrecy about money, and a trail of former members left with nightmares and worse. It also recorded the response that has not changed either. Faced with an exit counselor’s criticism, Mitchell did not answer the substance; he went after the man’s religion and his record, which is the exact move this site has documented as attacking the critic instead of the criticism. The tape has been sitting there for three decades, saying on camera what the pulpit would not.
Sources and further reading
- Behind the Door, a Tucson television news series reported by Sandy Rathman, late 1980s; the original parts were posted to YouTube by Rhie Hari and are collected on the Behind the Door documentary series page
- On the same people and the litigation that followed, see the Steve Schoner case
- On the response pattern the broadcast captures, see why The Door attacks the critic instead of the criticism
