A week before Joel Crosby’s conversation with the researcher John Collins went live, his father, Dennis Crosby, sat down with Collins first. This is the earlier of the two: Dennis Crosby, thirty-seven years inside the Potter’s House, talking with Collins on his William Branham Historical Research podcast. Collins spends most of his time on the Message movement that grew up around the healing evangelist William Branham, which is what makes the pairing matter. When a Potter’s House veteran appears on a Branham researcher’s show, two worlds that seldom share a page get laid over one another, and Dennis Crosby was the first Potter’s House member to come on that podcast. The full interview is embedded above.
Thirty-seven years, and one logo that changed everything
Dennis Crosby is a career soldier with twenty years in the Army. He first walked into a Victory Chapel in Colorado Springs, met the same church again in Arizona in 1980, and finally landed in the Netherlands, where the network had just opened its first Dutch congregation. What drew him was the unrestrained worship, the speaking in tongues, an atmosphere that felt like home to a man raised in Pentecostalism. He decided early that he would not become a pastor, which inside The Door is the whole point of membership: no one goes to Bible school, they are simply sent out to plant churches, in what he describes as a marketing hierarchy more than a seminary. The change he remembers most clearly was small and total. When Wayman Mitchell broke from the Foursquare denomination around 1983 and took his churches independent, a loose fellowship of cooperating pastors suddenly acquired a logo and a letterhead and became an organization, and, Dennis learned only later, a contract that required pastors to surrender their buildings, bank accounts, and equipment if they ever disagreed.
Caught in a lie
The break, when it came, turned on a small thing that revealed a large one. Working on the church’s conference videos, Dennis says, he caught one of the preachers in a lie three years running. When he took it to the council, they were not interested in whether the man had lied. Their concern was that Dennis, who was not a pastor, had questioned a pastor’s authority, and that was the offense. He eventually left in a single burst of anger and never went back. What followed is the pattern this site keeps documenting. He was ostracized; his wife left about six months later; his oldest daughter and her husband had already gone, and his son followed a few years after that. One daughter remained inside. Reaching for the old song about a place you can check out of but never truly leave, Dennis described how a book, chapter, and verse can still fire the old programming in his head years later. The building lets you go; the conditioning does not.
The Branham web
This is where the interview does something the others in this archive cannot, because of who was asking the questions. Collins traces the tangled genealogy of American Pentecostalism: the Foursquare denomination, figures like Gordon Lindsay and Chuck Smith who passed through it, the platforming of William Branham, and the Latter Rain. He keeps returning to the strange gravity of Prescott, Arizona, where Branham kept a compound and where a separate and notorious group led by Jim Gunn and Leo Mercer later imploded in scandal. Into that map Dennis places Mitchell, whom he calls, only half joking, a Chuck Smith imitator locked in a private competition he would never name aloud. He describes what Collins calls prophetic history: the pressure to know the founder’s story as well as the Bible, and sometimes better, and the way that story gets quietly rewritten, most recently in a video series produced by Mitchell’s son Greg that Dennis says glorifies and mythologizes a past that did not happen quite that way. The full lineage from the healing-revival world to CFM is laid out in the study of Wayman Mitchell’s Branham inheritance.
The gospel of fear
The mechanism begins with what the group preached as Fellowship distinctives, the rules that marked them off from everyone else: no television, no beards on the men, relentless evangelism, and the rest. The rules set boundaries, the boundaries breed fear, and the fear is delivered through doctrine, the teaching that breaking the rules or leaving lands you in hell. The compound in Prescott may have had a fence, he says, but the real enclosure was internal; the group builds “a commune of your mind.” He is blunt about the treatment of women, confined in practice to cleaning, serving, and childcare, a burden his wife and daughters resented more than he understood at the time. Mitchell, he says, traced that policy with satisfaction to his revulsion at the women in leadership he had left behind in Foursquare. He describes the machinery of silence with one example that travels: a woman who asked her pastor about another teacher was expelled on Mitchell’s personal instruction, relayed by phone across state lines to a church he had no direct part in, for the offense of asking. Underneath it all, in Dennis’s reading, sits a different gospel, a system in which being slightly stricter than the church down the street becomes a way of earning the salvation the New Testament says cannot be earned.
Copying the New Testament by hand
What makes the interview more than a catalog of grievances is the turn at the end, which is where Dennis Crosby’s faith reappears rather than dissolves. A long and serious illness gave him time, laid up, to think, and a dying friend from the Dutch church put words to what he had been avoiding. When he finally left, he did the most stubborn thing a skeptic of translations can do: he copied out most of the Greek New Testament by hand, and found that the group’s teaching simply was not in the text it claimed. His counsel to anyone leaving is the same, read the Bible for yourself and you will not need a deprogrammer. He describes the terror of the exit in an image from Dances with Wolves, the tall grass you fear because you have been taught that everything beyond your own church is infected, and then the discovery, slow and disorienting, that the far side of the grass was full of ordinary Christians whose lives put his own to shame. He landed, in the end, in a small home Bible study reading whole books at a sitting, which is where he still is.
Why the Dennis Crosby interview matters
Two things give this conversation weight beyond one man’s story. It connects CFM to the wider Message and Latter Rain world that Collins documents, showing that the Potter’s House is not a sealed anomaly but a branch on a much older and stranger tree. And it is the setup for the interview with Joel Crosby that ran a week later, which means the two Crosby chapters that open a published anthology of former-member memoirs now have their spoken counterpart on video. Dennis ends where the honest ones always seem to, refusing both bitterness and denial. He says plainly that the group misrepresents God, that he has helped people leave it and is glad of it, and that the evidence, once you look, cannot be unseen. He also points listeners to the Leaving the Potter’s House support community, some three thousand former members worldwide, which is the right place for that first conversation after the grass.
Sources and further reading
- Dennis Crosby, interview with John Collins, William Branham Historical Research (“Leaving the Message”) podcast (embedded above)
- On the healing-revival lineage Collins traces, see Wayman Mitchell’s Branham inheritance and the founding of Christian Fellowship Ministries
- On the contract Dennis describes, see the Potter’s House contracts
