When someone leaves a church and immediately needs a survival guide, the existence of the guide is itself evidence. In June 2015 a British pastor named Clement Okusi published one. He had planted a Potter’s House church in Croydon, held degrees in theology, and had just been formally ex-communicated, that January, from the Potter’s House. His post on surviving separation was written for the pastors and members he knew would follow him out. A decade on it has been read tens of thousands of times and still draws comments from people in crisis, which makes it less a blog entry than a standing piece of aftercare. This is what Clement Okusi set down, and why it belongs in this archive.
The scale Clement Okusi documented
Okusi opened with a list, and the list is the argument. From memory he named dozens of pastors across the United Kingdom who were no longer in the Potter’s House or whose churches had closed, a tally that stood at 32 when he wrote and that he later updated past 65, which by his reckoning was more than sixty percent of the country’s Potter’s House pastors. He did not present it as gossip but as a statistical warning: a current pastor reading the list should assume a real chance of one day appearing on it. In replies over the years he set the British numbers inside a global picture, noting that the network itself was born when Wayman Mitchell pulled roughly three hundred churches out of the Foursquare denomination in the early 1980s. He estimated that thousands of churches have since left, among them large blocs led by Larry Neville, Tommy Alvarez, Ron Jones, and Rudy van Diermen. Those departures are documented elsewhere on this site, in the reporting on the Potter’s House exodus and in Larry Neville’s own 1990 letter.
Okusi’s seven questions
The body of the guide is organized under seven headings, each chosen to begin with the letter F: freedom, faith, finances, friends, family, forgiveness, and facts. It is a pastoral structure rather than a polemical one. Okusi is not writing to talk anyone out of Christianity; he is writing to keep people in it after the institution that introduced them to it has cut them off. Each section names a specific danger of the exit and offers a Scriptural and practical response, and the cumulative effect is a map of exactly what a person loses, and risks, when they leave a high-control church.
Freedom, and the rules that made it necessary
The first danger Okusi names is the intoxication of sudden freedom. He describes going out to restaurants, shows, and family gatherings more in his first nine months out than in the previous five years inside, and warns that this rush can lead a person to drop every guard at once and fall into damage the network will then point to as proof that leaving is ruin. Along the way he catalogs the standards that made the freedom feel so foreign: by his account the Potter’s House discourages or forbids televisions, social media, cinema, alcohol, beards on pastors, brides walking themselves up the aisle, holidays without permission, contact with ex-members, Bible college, and fellowship with churches outside the network, and it asks people to sign contracts. He notes that one of the first questions a departed member gets from those still inside is whether they now own a television, treated as a marker of backsliding. The contracts are not a rhetorical flourish; they are documented in the study of the Potter’s House contracts.
Finances
The financial section is the one that lingers. Okusi writes that a member’s money becomes entangled with the network through tithes, offerings, pledges, conference giving, and mission appeals, and he estimates that he and his wife gave the network more than four hundred thousand pounds across twenty years. He describes the deeper trap for pastors, whose income comes from the church they serve, so that leaving stops being a theological decision and becomes a question of economic survival, sharpest for the older minister. He alleges a recurring pressure on working pastors to give up their careers and go full-time, framed in noble terms but functioning, in his telling, as a lever of control, and he points to a hypocrisy in which leaders press others toward sacrifice while themselves holding significant wealth. His practical counsel is drawn from the four rivers of Eden: build income streams outside the reach of any network, so that if one dries up the others remain. The financial questions he raises are the same ones that ended careers in the Blind Faith investigation and the Steve Schoner case.
Friends and family
Under friends and family Okusi describes the machinery of shunning without using the clinical word for it. Friendships inside the network, he writes, are conditional on staying, and people who were best men and bridesmaids at each other’s weddings are dropped once one of them leaves, the refrain being righteousness over relationships. Family is worse, because whole families are often drawn in together and then divided when one member leaves, with leaders known to work on a wife to keep a husband from going. His starkest illustration is a claim about the founder himself: that Wayman Mitchell declined to attend the funeral of his own daughter, Sharon Mastin, who had left The Fellowship with her husband, though he was a short drive away, and that this set an example for others to skip the funerals of relatives who had left. It is presented as Okusi’s account, and it belongs to the same shunning culture visible in Thomas Cunningham’s 2023 letter.
The pastoral core
What separates Clement Okusi’s guide from ordinary anti-cult writing is its aim. He is not steering anyone away from faith. The forgiveness section refuses to tell the wounded to simply get over it, while still urging them not to let bitterness harden. The facts section counsels people to state their side of the story once, to the people who need it, and then to leave vindication to God rather than fighting every distortion. His summary of the whole enterprise is that separation from a controlling network is painful and traumatic but, in his coinage, “survivable and thrivable,” because life and calling in Christ are never confined to one organization. It is the same faith-affirming posture that distinguishes serious accounts of leaving The Fellowship from mere deconstruction, and it is why his guide has aged into a resource rather than a rant.
Why leaving the Potter’s House needs a guide like this
Concede the fairest version of the other side, which Okusi himself concedes: not every congregation enforces every rule, some who left did so over genuine sin, and real people have found real help in these churches. Grant all of it, and the guide still stands, because its usefulness depends only on the pattern being common enough to need a manual, and the comment thread beneath it, still filling a decade later with members quietly asking how to get out, answers that question on its own. Okusi leaned on Proverbs 18:17, that any story sounds true until the other side is heard, and then he told his side and stopped. The most honest thing this site can do is point to it. His full guide is worth reading in one sitting by anyone weighing the same decision.
Sources and further reading
- Clement Okusi, “Surviving Ex Communication and Separation from the Potters House Network of Churches,” June 2015
- On the scale of departures, see the Potter’s House exodus and Larry Neville’s 1990 letter
- On the contracts and the finances he describes, see the Potter’s House contracts, Blind Faith, and the Steve Schoner case
