Blind Faith was a two-night investigation that a Boston newsroom aired in the mid-1990s, and it is the East Coast bookend to the Arizona and Indianapolis stories told elsewhere on this site. The News 7 Investigators at WHDH, reported by Hank Phillippi Ryan, looked into a cluster of Cape Cod churches, a Victory Chapel in South Dennis and a Potter’s House, that ex-members said had wrecked their families and their finances. The first night followed the families. The second followed the money, up the tithe chain to Prescott, Arizona, and to Wayman Mitchell. What ties the whole thing to the rest of this archive is a pair of names the broadcast leaned on, Dave Diver and Chris Turner, the same Flagstaff men who took the Potter’s House to the IRS. The two parts have been compiled into a single documentary, embedded below.
Night one: the families
The series opened on a grandmother. Patty Heap could see her grandchildren only on videotape, though they lived five miles away, because after their mother joined a Potter’s House church the children were taught that Patty was possessed by the devil and could not be visited. Her son Doug was still inside, the report said, under an ultimatum from Pastor Steve Johnson to stay in the church or lose his own children. A teenager who had attended the South Dennis Victory Chapel for seven years described choosing the church over her parents and believing they would go to hell, and coming home to find that her old church friends now treated her as if she were dead. Another couple, Ed and Alice DeCosta, said their daughter, still in the church, had told them they were no longer her family and were bound for hell.
The former members reached for the same violent word more than one of them used, saying they felt spiritually raped and that it was among the most dangerous places a person could walk into. A local Lutheran minister, the Reverend George Mather, and other experts told the reporter the group functioned as a cult on sociological, psychological, and behavioral measures, and that members had been religiously hoodwinked by their pastors. One former member said the Victory Chapel pastor, Paul Campo, described as a high-school dropout and former nightclub musician with no formal religious training, had told the congregation that when he stood to preach it was as if Jesus Christ himself were speaking to them. Members, she said, came to believe that disobeying the pastor was disobeying God. When the crew approached the churches, Pastor Johnson had members photograph them and asked them to leave, and Campo hurried into his office and left an assistant to turn them away. Current members would not go on camera, though the report noted they said they were happy and that the church had changed their lives for the better.
Night two: the money trail to Prescott
The second night did what the title promised and followed the money. The report laid out the pyramid: each of the roughly seven hundred churches sends ten percent up to its parent church, and the chain ends at Mitchell’s headquarters in Prescott, which grows richer with every new congregation planted below it. Arizona law required the church to file a yearly balance sheet, and the investigation found that Mitchell’s had quadrupled over a few years, though no one audited it and, as one source put it, the church could file whatever it wanted. Members were told the money funded outreach and church planting. A disciple who had filmed a church-financed crusade in India said the ministers those funds were supposed to reach never saw the money. A former assistant pastor at the Cape Cod Victory Chapel said he would raise ten or twelve thousand dollars to send a church overseas and watch only a fraction of it leave, the rest going to new equipment and carpet.
The pressure to give was the engine. A former insider said the message was that failing to tithe sent you to hell, and that people were tithing on their Social Security, their welfare, and their food stamps. The investigation compared members’ own check ledgers against the church’s statements and reported that the numbers did not match: the DeCostas and at least half a dozen others said they had given hundreds of dollars more than the church acknowledged, which one ex-member called fleecing the flock. Exit counselor Rick Ross called the arrangement spiritual blackmail bordering on extortion. Another former member summed up the transformation in a line that stuck: they had gone looking for a compassionate Jesus and ended up, he said, with a Jesus carrying a machine gun.
The Arizona whistleblowers
To show that the Cape Cod money story was not local, the report went to the men in Arizona who had asked the same questions first. Chris Turner had trained for the ministry for ten years and tithed thousands of dollars, and when he asked his Flagstaff pastor where the money went, he got a phone call from Wayman Mitchell himself, which he taped, and the lesson that to question the church was to go too far; he now worked at a convenience store. Paul Reese, who had sat on a church council, acknowledged that the policy forbade members from examining the finances. Dave Diver said he had given close to sixty thousand dollars and was expelled as a heretic when he asked to see the books, and that not even the treasurer had access to them, a claim a former treasurer confirmed by saying the pastor alone controlled the checkbook. Diver told the camera he regretted his part in building the network and wanted to apologize to the people in Massachusetts, because he had helped start it. Turner and Diver are not incidental here. They are the same Flagstaff whistleblowers whose demand to see the books, and whose referral to the IRS, are documented in the Steve Schoner case. Blind Faith is the television record of that same fight, told from the receiving end in Massachusetts.
The church’s answer
The church’s reply was mostly silence, and then attack. Pastors Johnson and Campo refused the cameras and, when the reporter asked where the money went, Campo laughed and hung up. The Evangelical Association of New England, which represents twelve hundred churches, told the reporter that a church with nothing to hide should have no trouble answering the question and recommended independent audits. From the pulpit, according to the report, the response was to tell congregations that Channel 7 was serving the devil and that the stories themselves proved the devil was angry about the church’s good works, a message most members would never test against the broadcast, since they were taught that television is unacceptable. In fairness, the report aired the other side: a member who declined an interview faxed that she was disgusted with the story and that the church works hard to help people, and the reporter granted that people who need help do go to the church, adding only that some say they trade their old problems for new ones. Mitchell, for his part, was caught on a hidden camera mocking Rick Ross from the platform of his own service.
Why Blind Faith still matters
Set the three broadcasts side by side and the value of this one becomes clear. The 1980s Tucson series Behind the Door and the 1996 Indianapolis series on a four-year-old girl documented the human damage; Blind Faith documented the accounting. Its money-gap findings, its picture of a treasurer barred from the books, and its filing that no one audits are the financial reality that the group’s own signed covenants, examined elsewhere, were built to protect. And its two Arizona witnesses tie the Cape Cod collection plate directly to the Prescott headquarters and to the IRS file that followed. Concede the church’s point that real people do get real help there; the broadcast conceded it too. The question Blind Faith could never get answered, and that the pastors laughed off or hung up on, was a simple one about where the money goes, and Ezekiel had already described the shepherds who “feed not the flock” but themselves (Ezekiel 34:3).
Sources and further reading
- Blind Faith, a two-part investigation by Hank Phillippi Ryan, News 7 Investigators, WHDH Boston, mid-1990s; the parts were posted to YouTube by Slave Obeys as Blind Faith 1 and Blind Faith 2
- On Dave Diver, Chris Turner, and the IRS referral, see the Steve Schoner case
- On the same charges in other broadcasts, see Behind the Door and The Struggle for Courtney’s Soul
