Writing in September 2002, a woman described twenty-seven years inside Christian Fellowship Churches, from 1976 to 2002, a membership long enough to watch The Fellowship’s own internal politics play out from the inside, including the exodus that split off roughly 160 congregations in 2000. She joined young and naive, with no real background in organized religion, and she is candid that she spent years choosing to ignore problems she now says she can finally see clearly, having, in her own words, taken off the blinders.
A Christian Fellowship Churches pastor cut from Wayman Mitchell’s own mold
She traces her congregation’s lineage directly back to Prescott, Arizona, and to Wayman Mitchell’s own church, and says her pastor was cut from the same cloth, controlling in the same register she associates with Mitchell himself. He told the congregation plainly from the pulpit that anyone who did not like what he said could hit the road and find another church. She recalls him producing real fear, veins visibly rising in his neck whenever someone disagreed with him, capable of making a member feel like a second-class citizen in the Kingdom of God the moment he decided he disliked them.
Two thumbs down
One incident stands out as a small, exact picture of the culture she is describing. A visiting pastor was preaching at their church, and her own pastor sat in the back through the sermon; near the end, in front of the whole congregation, he gave the visiting preacher two thumbs down. She says the man seemed to fall apart on the spot. That is not a policy or a doctrine. It is a single public gesture, and she is right to treat it as characteristic: this is what public humiliation staged as leadership discipline actually looks like from the pew.
The carrot, and the family it cost
She and her husband hoped, as many couples inside The Fellowship did, to one day be sent out to pastor a church of their own, a path that required no formal Bible college, only submission to a pastor’s headship and patience for the day of being sent. That hope, she says, became the lever used against them: the promise of ministry kept them working harder, giving more time and money, and setting their family’s own needs aside, all in the name of what she calls the Kingdom, a Kingdom she came to recognize as The Fellowship’s own rather than God’s. Her husband’s mindset, formed by that hope, did not include questioning the pastor, so the couple did what they were told and stayed quiet, since anyone who asked questions risked being branded a rebel or a witch and, eventually, blacklisted from ministry altogether.
A slush fund, a mutiny, and 160 churches
The pressure finally broke in 2000. She describes a large fund her pastor held that the congregation understood to be earmarked for missionaries in Africa, which she came to believe functioned instead as his own personal reserve. More than two hundred members signed statements documenting his cruelty, and what she calls a mutiny began, coinciding with the wider exodus in which, by her own estimate, some 160 congregations broke from Wayman Mitchell’s organization that year, a figure that matches the count later reported by Charisma magazine’s coverage of the same 2001 exodus. From where she stood as an ordinary member, the resulting fight between her own pastor and Mitchell looked less like a doctrinal dispute than what she calls two big dogs fighting over territory.
A curse for a curse
What departing members were told after leaving is worth recording precisely. Leadership described people who left peacefully as having been purged, framing the exodus as God getting the bad out rather than a body of Christians choosing to walk away. One pastor, in her account, warned that those who sent curses would receive them in return, a threat she read correctly as a warning to anyone tempted to criticize the leadership that had just lost a fifth of its churches. That is the same practice documented independently, and from an entirely different congregation, in the returning curses testimony drawn from Steve Schoner’s archive: a network using the language of spiritual warfare to silence its own critics, confirmed here by a second witness with no connection to the first.
Hero worship, and a woman labeled uncovered
She is direct about the theology underneath all of it: the congregation had, in practice, made a man into an object of hero worship, and in doing so had turned its members into servants of that man rather than of God. She anticipates exactly how her own former pastor would respond to this testimony, by calling her no Christian at all, an “uncovered woman,” rebellious, even Satanic, labels she reports without flinching, since by the time she wrote this she had already decided those words no longer had any power over her.
Why this testimony still matters
What gives her account its particular weight is the length of her own vantage point. Twenty-seven years is long enough to have watched an organization’s founding generation, its first internal fractures, a mass exodus, and the leadership response to all three, and she reports all of it as someone who lived every stage of it rather than someone reconstructing history secondhand. Her closing verdict draws its own sharp contrast, one Paul might have recognized: after decades of what felt like the righteousness of the Pharisees and the control of legalism, she writes that she prefers, simply, to serve God rather than man, and no longer minds what her old pastor thinks of her for saying so.
Sources and further reading
- “I prefer to serve God,” testimony by a former 27-year member of Christian Fellowship Churches, September 2002; archived at the Cult Education Institute reference files
- On the same 2000-2001 exodus from a press vantage point, see the Potter’s House exodus
- On the same curse practice confirmed independently, see returning curses
