Not every testimony gathered on this site arrives angry, and this one, written in July 2001 by a man who belonged to the Potter’s House in Australia from 1992 to 1996 before returning home to Samoa, is worth including precisely because it does not. He loved his pastor. He calls his years in the church a positive experience. He refuses, explicitly and repeatedly, to declare the Potter’s House evil. What makes his account valuable is not that it breaks from everything else in this archive. It is that even this gentlest and most forgiving of testimonies still concludes the church is here to serve, not to control, after naming, in its own words, the identical pattern harsher accounts describe as spiritual abuse.
What he still names, even while forgiving it
He is specific about what troubled him, even as he frames it as a personal disagreement rather than a grievance. He believed in free will and thought every Christian should retain a real choice, and found instead that his pastor held something close to a monopoly over how members used their time and their money. He objects, on plainly biblical grounds, to teaching personal opinion as though it were the Word of God, treating the two as separate things Scripture itself distinguishes. And he describes the intended result of the pastor’s influence in a phrase that deserves to be read carefully: members were shaped into “little replicas of himself.” That is not incidental language. It is the same mechanism, described independently and without any accusation of malice attached to it.
A theology of non-judgment
His response to all of this is not indictment but restraint, and he grounds that restraint in Scripture rather than avoidance. He leans on the warning not to judge lest one be judged, and on Paul’s image of the body of Christ, where the feet cannot claim superiority over the eyes, nor the mouth over the knees, each part suited to its own function (1 Corinthians 12:14-21). Christ alone, in his reading, is head of the church and fit to judge it; the task left to believers is simply to serve as well as they know how, and to examine their own house before passing judgment on anyone else’s. It is a serious theological position, not a dodge, and it deserves to be engaged as one.
Same facts, different verdict
What makes this testimony genuinely useful, set beside the others gathered here, is the gap between what he observed and what he concluded from it. He names a pastor with an effective monopoly over members’ time and money. He names a culture that pressed converts into uniform copies of the man who led them. He names doctrine delivered with the authority of Scripture despite being one man’s opinion. Every one of those specific claims appears, sometimes almost word for word, in testimonies elsewhere in this archive that go on to call the same organization abusive. What differs is not the description. It is the conclusion he draws from it, that imperfection is common to every congregation, that his pastor’s heart was sincerely set on winning converts even if his methods were open to question, and that the choice to stay or leave belongs to individual conscience rather than outside verdict. Readers can weigh his conclusion against the harsher ones elsewhere in this archive with the underlying facts, unusually, not seriously in dispute between them.
Wayman Mitchell in Perth, and a pastor who moved on
He recalls hearing Wayman Mitchell preach in person at a conference in Perth and describes feeling a genuine and powerful sense of God’s presence in the room. He also mentions, almost in passing, that his own former pastor eventually left the Christian Fellowship Churches altogether and was last known to be serving at an Assemblies of God congregation instead, a detail worth noting since it shows that even pastors this author remembers warmly were not necessarily permanent fixtures of The Fellowship themselves.
Why this testimony still matters: to serve, not to control
An archive that only collected outrage would be easy to dismiss as one-sided. This testimony is the opposite kind of evidence, offered freely by someone with every reason to defend the years he spent in the church, and it still confirms the specific mechanics other, angrier accounts describe. The church, in his own closing words, is here to serve, not to control its members’ lives. He believed the Potter’s House had drifted from that principle in practice while declining to condemn it in judgment. Both things can be true in the same testimony, and readers are better served weighing his generosity honestly than dismissing it because it does not match the tone of the testimonies around it.
Sources and further reading
- “The church is here to serve not to control its members lives,” testimony by a former Potter’s House member, July 2001; archived in the Cult Education Institute reference files
