In 1992 the cult researcher Ronald Enroth published Churches That Abuse. Among the accounts he recorded was that of Bruce Hogan, who had spent six years inside the Potter’s House. The Potter’s House is the Prescott, Arizona network also known as Christian Fellowship Ministries, The Door, and Victory Chapel. Hogan’s account is one of the earliest careful descriptions of what the church does to a thinking person.
Who Bruce Hogan was
Hogan came to the Potter’s House the way many did, from the outside and unarmed. He had dropped out of high school and grown up in what he called a multidivorce home. He lost his father at the age of three. By his own telling he was looking for a father, and for something like a ready-made family. He had found God at eighteen, after years around drugs and the occult, and he had no grounding in Scripture at all. So when Potter’s House members turned up in his Missouri college town in 1984, their zeal impressed him, and he joined. First, he noticed the heavy stress on authority, submission, and headship from the start. Still, he hoped the church might cure what he considered his rebellious streak.
The machine that wore him down
Bruce Hogan carried a full-time job and a full course load. Even so, he threw himself into every outreach, revival, and service the church ran. Within months of little sleep he collapsed and landed in the hospital from exhaustion. The doctor told him plainly that he would be dead in weeks if he kept the pace. But he kept it, because the church had taught him his salvation depended on it. So the late-night meetings did their work, and by his own account he simply stopped thinking. He said he had handed his critical faculties to the leadership and surrendered his life to what he called a reprobate mind.
Questions treated as rebellion
The structure Hogan describes is the one former members always describe. Hundreds of congregations at its peak, little committed to paper, information kept among a few. Every local pastor came from Prescott, installed by Wayman Mitchell, and the congregation had no say in who led it. So Hogan’s own church cycled through three pastors, all sent from headquarters. He calls the church aggressive, relentless at planting new churches, militant, and openly anti-intellectual. So the leaders read his analytical mind as a spiritual defect. They called him an educated idiot with a high IQ. He once showed an elder that a teaching did not match the Bible. The elder rebuked him hard and reminded him of his place. The elder was the shepherd, the members the sheep, and the elder answered to God alone. This is the reflex documented elsewhere. The church treats questioning the pastor as rebellion against God rather than as a question.
What the church did to those who left
When Bruce Hogan and his wife finally left, after six years, the church did what it does to those who go. The church shunned them, told them they had never truly been saved, and warned them they were bound for hell. It also smeared them with invented sins, including a claim that he sacrificed babies or was secretly homosexual. So they left everything and moved away. What helped him think again was not a sermon but a novel. Reading Orwell’s Animal Farm, a study of totalitarian systems, gave him back the ability to reason for himself. He came to see the Prescott church in its pages.
Recovery, and a line borrowed from Luther
Still, Hogan blamed himself for staying. He had held the Bible and the witness of the Spirit, he said. He had talked himself out of the doubts that could have saved him sooner. Recovery came slowly. A serious back injury laid him up for six months. He spent the time reading Scripture, which he credits with pulling him out. He reached for Hosea’s line that God’s people are destroyed for lack of knowledge. He also cited the warning in Matthew, that God hands the unforgiving man to the tormentors. Then, when he forgave from the heart, he began to heal. His verdict on the church, borrowed from Luther, was blunt: “If there be a hell, Prescott is built over it.”
Enroth set his account down in 1992. The same church, the same authority, and the same treatment of those who leave run through every testimony since. Ronald Enroth got there first. The rest of us have only kept counting.
Source
Ronald M. Enroth, Churches That Abuse (Zondervan and HarperCollins, 1992), pages 197 to 200. The full excerpt is archived at RickRoss.com, where you can read Bruce Hogan’s account in Enroth’s own words.
