In May 2008, New Zealand’s Waikato Times reported on the stabbing death of Richard Watson, a former pastor of The Potter’s House-Christian Fellowship Ministries in Hamilton, and the dispute it reopened between his widow and the congregation’s current leadership. This account gives that current pastor’s response the same weight the original report did, since he answered nearly every specific claim made against the church, by name and in detail.
A death in Perth
Watson died on April 20, 2008, after being stabbed twice at a twenty-first birthday party in Perth, Australia; a thirty-five-year-old Ngaruawahia man faced a charge of wilful murder in connection with the attack. Watson had ministered for The Potter’s House in Hamilton for fourteen years and drew controversy in 1996 when he screened anti-gay films at the congregation’s London Street base.
The widow’s account
Watson’s widow, Louise, told the paper her husband had come to regret both his actions and his teaching from his Hamilton years, and described the network as a cult led by Australian-based clergy who brainwashed its members. She said the couple had left together, alongside what she recalled as hundreds of other departing couples, and that no current members had attended her husband’s funeral or offered condolences, that members were taught to cut off contact with family and friends outside the church, and that her husband’s own strong personality had not changed after he left.
The pastor’s rebuttal, point by point
Scott McGrath, the Hamilton congregation’s current pastor, answered nearly every one of those claims directly. He called the cult label ridiculous and rejected the isolation claim outright, saying the church would never teach that, calling the idea pathetic, and insisting flatly that members were free to come and go as they pleased. On the funeral, he offered specific counter-evidence rather than a general denial: a Potter’s House pastor from Rotorua had contacted the family, a member of his own parish had reached out to Watson’s daughter Lisa, and the network’s Australian leader, David Vicary, had personally attended the funeral. He also disputed the scale of the 1990s departures, though he did not deny they happened.
“The church fell to bits, to tell you the truth”
What makes McGrath’s account more than a simple defense is what he volunteered without being pressed. Reluctant, in his words, to speak ill of a dead man, he nonetheless said plainly that many parishioners left in the late 1990s specifically because of Watson’s own teaching and conduct, which had drifted from what Watson himself had preached earlier and, in McGrath’s account, begun to serve Watson’s own purposes rather than the congregation’s. His summary of that period was blunt: “The church fell to bits, to tell you the truth.” He said Watson had grown increasingly abrupt and confrontational, blamed the church for his own behavior, and that attacking gay people had been Watson’s personal choice rather than anything the fellowship as a whole endorsed. Australian leadership, he added, had asked Watson directly to sort himself out before he eventually left.
A church that says it changed
McGrath was direct about where the congregation stands now: it will accept gay, lesbian, and transgender attendees, and no longer goes looking for a fight over the issue, while still teaching, on its reading of the Bible, that homosexuality is a sin, and describing its aim as trying to help such members toward what it calls salvation rather than confrontation. He described the church as still fundamentalist, still committed to street preaching, and still guided by the principle that whatever the Bible says should simply be done.
What could not be verified
Several attempts by the Times to reach David Vicary, the Australian leader McGrath credited with attending the funeral, went unanswered, and Louise Watson herself could not be reached for further comment beyond her original remarks. McGrath’s own contact with the Watson family was limited to a chance conversation with Watson’s daughter in a Perth shopping mall some years earlier. What this record shows, then, is one detailed account set against another, with the two figures best positioned to corroborate either side unavailable to do so.
Why this report on The Potter’s House still matters
This is a rare instance in this archive where the church’s side is not a brief no comment but an extended, specific, on-the-record answer, complete with names, dates, and a genuine concession that things had gone badly wrong under a previous pastor. That concession does not resolve the wider dispute about the network’s culture the widow raised. It does mean this report is one of the more evenly matched documents gathered here, and it is presented that way rather than favoring either account.
Sources and further reading
- Jeff Neems, “Dead pastor’s past haunts church,” Waikato Times, May 10, 2008; archived at the Cult Education Institute reference files
- On the widow’s fuller account, see Pastor Regretted “Cult” Links
