Every cult needs a doctrine that explains why one person’s word overrides everyone else’s. Inside Christian Fellowship Ministries (CFM), that doctrine travels under the banner of pastoral authority. CFM pastoral authority sounds biblical on the surface. Pastors do appear in Scripture, and so does their responsibility toward a flock. But the version preached inside The Fellowship, one man’s rule over a congregation with no working check on his power, does not come from the New Testament. It comes from a selective reading of it.
Dennis Crosby watched that doctrine operate for decades inside a Fellowship congregation in the Netherlands. Once he recognized that the abuses inside the Door were not isolated failures, he saw something bigger. They were predictable results of the system itself. So he started comparing what he had been taught about church leadership to what the Bible actually said. The gap, once he saw it, did not close.
This piece follows that same comparison. It takes CFM’s own proof texts on their own terms first, in the original Greek, before asking what the New Testament actually says elsewhere about apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, teachers, elders, and bishops. Set side by side, the picture that emerges looks nothing like the pastor-centered model CFM built.
The Structure Behind CFM Pastoral Authority
According to Crosby, the shift inside The Fellowship did not happen overnight. Early sermons in Wayman Mitchell’s ministry leaned on a different theme: restoring the dignity of the local church. Over time that theme narrowed. The dignity of the local church gave way to the centrality of the Pastor, and eventually only one man’s judgment carried weight across the entire Fellowship.
Crosby also traced the pattern back further, to Mitchell’s own account of his years pastoring churches before he founded The Fellowship in Prescott. Mitchell often described his frustration at not getting cooperation from those earlier churches, blaming boards of elders who would not simply agree with him. That friction became a founding principle. When Mitchell built his own network, he built it without the kind of elder board that had once slowed him down, and the Fellowship’s church structure never developed a real check on leadership.
That absence shows up elsewhere on this site in strikingly consistent terms. Reporting on the Dutch congregation The Door describes a pastor who answers to no council and no higher authority within his own church, restrained only by informal loyalty to the pastor who trained him. Former pastor Rudy van Diermen made a related complaint in a 2003 letter. He argued that Mitchell’s creation of a single eldership over the whole international network, based in Prescott, broke with The Fellowship’s own founding vision. Congregations, in that original vision, were meant to become self-supporting and locally led. Two former leaders, writing decades apart and describing different countries, arrived at the same structural diagnosis. That convergence is itself evidence.
This is not an abstract quarrel over organization charts. Congregations inside this Fellowship have documented what happens when a pastor’s authority meets no real resistance. That includes former members describing pastors who select their own elders and therefore answer to almost no one outside their own appointees. A doctrine of unchecked pastoral authority rarely stays confined to a sermon. It shapes what a congregation believes it is permitted to ask its own leader.
The Five-Fold Ministry CFM Doesn’t Practice
CFM leans on Ephesians 4:11 as its proof text for church leadership, and the verse is worth reading in full:
“And he gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers.” (Ephesians 4:11, KJV)
The Greek text names five functions: apostolous (apostles), prophetas (prophets), euangelistas (evangelists), and poimenas kai didaskalous (pastors and teachers). Notice the grammar. The first three functions each get their own article, tous men… tous de… tous de, marking them as three distinct offices. Pastors and teachers share a single article between them, tous… poimenas kai didaskalous, which ties the two together as one combined function rather than five equal, independent titles. Grammatically, the verse does not even give “pastor” the same standing as “apostle” or “prophet.” It gives it less.
That detail cuts against CFM’s practice directly. The Fellowship treats every other ministry function as subordinate to the Pastor, with apostles rarely mentioned at all. Ephesians 4:11 does not describe a hierarchy with pastors at the top. Paul states the purpose of the whole list two verses later:
“For the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ: till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.” (Ephesians 4:12-13, KJV)
The five functions exist to equip the congregation for its own work and to grow the whole body toward maturity together. Nothing in that purpose clause describes consolidating decision-making authority in one office. The word poimen, translated “pastor,” appears as a title for a church leader exactly once as a noun in the entire New Testament, right here in verse 11. A structure built almost entirely on a title Scripture uses this sparingly, applied in a passage whose stated goal is shared maturity rather than centralized rule, deserves more scrutiny than CFM gives it.
The List That Doesn’t Mention Pastors
If Ephesians 4:11 weakens CFM’s case, 1 Corinthians 12:28 dismantles it further. Paul lists church functions again, this time in a ranked order:
“And God hath set some in the church, first apostles, secondarily prophets, thirdly teachers, after that miracles, then gifts of healings, helps, governments, diversities of tongues.” (1 Corinthians 12:28, KJV)
Apostles come first. Prophets come second. Teachers come third. Miracles, healing, helps, governments, and tongues follow. Pastors do not appear anywhere in the list. To be fair to CFM’s position, Paul was not attempting an exhaustive inventory of every office in every passage he wrote, and overlap between “teachers” and pastoral function is plausible. Conceding that point changes nothing essential, though: even granting overlap, the passage still does not single out one office and place it above the rest. It ranks apostles first, a function CFM barely acknowledges, and leaves out entirely the title CFM treats as supreme.
The two functions closing out Paul’s list are worth a closer look, since CFM’s model effectively folds both into the Pastor’s job description. “Helps,” antilempseis (Strong’s G484), described in the standard Greek lexicons as the ministrations of those caring for the poor and sick, was its own recognized gift, not something a single office absorbed. “Governments,” kyberneseis (Strong’s G2941), comes from the word for steering a ship. It names a real gift of administrative direction, but Paul lists it eighth, after miracles and healing, not first. CFM effectively promotes this steering function to the top of the list and renames it “Pastor,” while leaving the actual top of Paul’s list, apostles, all but unmentioned.
Titles and positions are a recurring problem across church history, and the New Testament consistently describes functions rather than fixed offices of rank. Someone either does the work of an evangelist, a teacher, or a helper, or they do not. CFM inverts that pattern. It makes one function, “Pastor,” central to everything, and treats nothing as legitimate without that office’s consent. Paul’s own ranked list, the one CFM’s proof text sits beside, does not support that inversion. It contradicts it.
Elders, Not Pastors, Held the Early Church Accountable
CFM pastoral authority sermons frequently draw from passages that name a different office altogether: elders and bishops. Consider three examples.
“And from Miletus he sent to Ephesus, and called the elders of the church.” (Acts 20:17, KJV)
“A bishop then must be blameless, the husband of one wife, vigilant, sober, of good behaviour, given to hospitality, apt to teach.” (1 Timothy 3:2, KJV)
“Against an elder receive not an accusation, but before two or three witnesses.” (1 Timothy 5:19, KJV)
The Greek in each case is specific. Acts 20:17 uses presbyterous, from presbyteros (Strong’s G4245), meaning elder. First Timothy 3:2 uses episkopon, from episkopos (Strong’s G1985), meaning overseer or bishop. Neither word is poimen. Neither refers to a single supreme pastor. Both describe a plural body. Acts 20:17 records Paul summoning multiple elders from a single city, and Titus 1:5 instructs Titus to “ordain elders in every city.” That is plural elders for a single congregation, not one man over many.
CFM resolves this mismatch by treating “elder” and “bishop” as synonyms for “Pastor,” so that every biblical statement about elders becomes, in practice, a statement about the man running the church. That move has no linguistic basis. It also collapses under its own weight in 1 Timothy 5, the very chapter CFM leans on to shield pastors from accusation. Verses 1 and 2 of that chapter read:
“Rebuke not an elder, but intreat him as a father; and the younger men as brethren; the elder women as mothers; the younger as sisters, with all purity.” (1 Timothy 5:1-2, KJV)
If “elder” in verse 19 secretly means “pastor,” then “the elder women” two verses earlier should mean female pastors. CFM does not draw that conclusion, and could not, since The Fellowship does not recognize women in ministry leadership. The word means exactly what it says throughout the chapter: an older member of the congregation, addressed with the respect owed to a parent, not a title reserved for one ordained ruler.
Peter’s own instruction to elders closes the gap CFM’s model leaves open:
“The elders which are among you I exhort, who am also an elder… Feed the flock of God which is among you, taking the oversight thereof, not by constraint, but willingly… Neither as being lords over God’s heritage, but being ensamples to the flock.” (1 Peter 5:1-3, KJV)
One verse brings all three New Testament leadership terms together: elder, feed (the verb form of poimen, shepherd), and oversight (the verb form of episkopos). They describe the same men doing the same work, work Peter explicitly forbids them from turning into lordship over the congregation. Elsewhere on this site, the Fellowship’s own governance shows how far that instruction has drifted. A council of seven pastors, appointed by Mitchell himself, sat above the network. It never functioned as an independent check on him. Calling that body “elders” does not make it one in the biblical sense. Biblical eldership existed to restrain a leader’s power, not to extend it.
Borrowing a King’s Authority
Crosby’s account describes a recurring feature of Fellowship preaching on this subject. Sermons defending CFM pastoral authority lean heavily on Old Testament passages about the authority of kings, rather than on the New Testament passages that actually describe church leadership. That choice of texts is not incidental. Kings in ancient Israel held near-absolute authority over their subjects, backed by the state and, in David’s case, by a direct anointing from God through Samuel. Reaching for that model to describe a pastor’s relationship to a twenty-first century congregation imports an authority structure the New Testament never assigns to church leaders.
There is an irony CFM’s use of these texts skips past entirely. The Old Testament itself does not present the monarchy as God’s ideal form of government. It presents it as a concession. When Israel first demanded a king, God’s own response to Samuel was blunt:
“And the LORD said unto Samuel, Hearken unto the voice of the people in all that they say unto thee: for they have not rejected thee, but they have rejected me, that I should not reign over them.” (1 Samuel 8:7, KJV)
Israel’s request for a king was framed, in the text itself, as a step away from direct dependence on God, not toward it. Before that request, Israel’s leadership had run through judges and elders, a plural, locally rooted structure much closer to what the New Testament later describes for the church than to the monarchy that followed it. Building a doctrine of pastoral authority on the authority of kings does not reach back to Scripture’s ideal model of leadership. It reaches back to the model Scripture itself frames as a compromise.
The New Testament writers had access to Old Testament kingship language and did not use it to describe church leaders. Peter, writing to elders, explicitly ruled out “lording it over” the flock, the opposite instruction a king-modeled pastorate would need. Paul described his own apostolic authority not as royal prerogative but as service, and reserved his sharpest warnings for leaders who lord authority over believers’ faith. Grounding a pastor’s authority in Old Testament kingship is not a neutral interpretive choice. It requires skipping past why the Old Testament says Israel got a king in the first place, and past what the New Testament actually says about elders and overseers. It produces exactly the outcome CFM’s structure needs: a congregation trained to treat questioning its leader as something close to treason, rather than the ordinary accountability the New Testament describes among a plurality of elders.
Derived Authority, Not Ownership
The clearest evidence that CFM’s own leadership does not believe in pastoral ownership of a local church comes from the Fellowship’s internal governing documents. According to Crosby, bylaws issued in 2004 state that pastors of local churches hold their congregations on behalf of The Fellowship, not for themselves. Under that language, a local pastor has no personal claim to the church he leads. He functions entirely on derived authority, authority granted by the network and revocable by it.
That detail deserves acknowledgment on its own terms, since it complicates a simple “pastor as king” narrative: officially, a CFM pastor is not sovereign either. He answers upward, not to a congregation or a council of genuine peers, but to the network’s central leadership in Prescott. Conceding that point does not rescue the model, though. It only relocates the problem. Authority in CFM does not flow from a congregation’s elders and does not rest with a single accountable local leader. It flows from the top of a network structure downward, through pastors who hold no personal stake in the churches they run and answer to no body their own congregation elected or could remove. The Christian Research Institute’s evaluation of the Potter’s House network reached a similar conclusion decades ago. It noted that biblical qualifications for eldership, found in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1, call for men who have “walked with God for some time” and developed real spiritual maturity. That is a standard the young, informally trained church councils inside Potter’s House congregations rarely met.
Scripture never authorizes that kind of structure, at the congregational level or the network level. The New Testament model is plural, local, and accountable. Elders were raised up from within a congregation and recognized for demonstrated character, not installed from outside. They answered to the flock they served, not to a hierarchy above them. CFM’s bylaws describe something closer to a corporate franchise, with the local pastor as a licensed operator rather than a shepherd raised from among his own sheep.
The practical effect of “derived authority” is that discipline, when it happens at all, moves through the same closed channel as everything else. When a Fellowship pastor is removed for misconduct, the process runs through The Fellowship’s own internal structure. It does not run through any body the congregation elected or could hold to account. Restoration, when it happens, can follow The Fellowship’s own timeline rather than the congregation’s. A biblical eldership answerable to the flock it serves would not need to work that way. It would already include the people best positioned to know whether a leader had genuinely changed, because they were never excluded from the process in the first place.
What Real Headship Looks Like
None of this argues that church leadership is unbiblical. Elders held real authority in the early church, and the New Testament expects congregations to respect it. What Scripture never authorizes is what CFM built: one office, “Pastor,” elevated above every other function named in Ephesians 4:11 and 1 Corinthians 12:28. That office is insulated from correction by a mistranslation of “elder,” and modeled on Old Testament kings rather than the plural, accountable eldership the New Testament actually describes. Peter’s instruction stands as the corrective The Fellowship never absorbed: elders are called to feed the flock willingly, not to lord it over God’s heritage.
The test Scripture offers is a simple one. Biblical eldership is plural, so no single man’s judgment stands unchecked. It is local, raised up from within a congregation rather than installed by a distant headquarters. And it is accountable to the flock it serves, not the other way around. Measured against that standard, CFM’s structure does not pass. One Pastor’s consent is required for everything. “Elder” quietly means “Pastor” whenever Scripture would otherwise limit him. And a leader’s authority flows down from an organization rather than up from the trust of his own congregation.
Text without context is pretext, and CFM’s pastoral authority doctrine is built almost entirely out of context. A single, once-used noun gets stretched to override councils of elders. Ranked lists that leave that noun out get waved past. Old Testament kingship texts describing a form of government Scripture itself calls a concession get treated as a pattern to imitate.
For anyone still inside a Fellowship congregation and wondering why questioning a pastor feels like questioning God, this is the mechanism. It was never a biblical requirement. It was a structural choice, defended with texts that do not say what they are made to say once someone reads them in context.
