In December 1999, a woman who had spent four years in the Potter’s House in her twenties wrote about the church discipline that followed an affair she had with a pastor, an experience that left her disfellowshipped and branded in terms far harsher than the man involved ever faced. She does not ask to be excused. She says plainly that she was in sin and deserved consequences. What she disputes, and what makes this testimony worth including, is everything that happened after the two of them were judged for the same act.
An affair, and how a disfellowshipped woman was treated differently
By her account, the pastor approached her first, and the relationship that followed was the basis for her being disfellowshipped soon after. He was not asked to leave. He was sent to what she calls the organization’s headquarters and was back in a pulpit within the year. She writes that she later learned of two further affairs on his part, the last of which ended his marriage. This account rests on her testimony alone and could not be independently verified for this article, but the asymmetry it describes, one party publicly and permanently marked, the other quietly relocated and restored to ministry, is the entire subject of what follows.
Branded a witch
The label attached to her was not simply sinner. She writes that she was accused of having seduced the pastor through the use of witchcraft, a specific supernatural framing that recast a relationship she says he initiated as something she had occultly engineered. Years later, she says, people in her former circle were still warned to have nothing to do with her, told she was a known witch and a deceiver, and warned that associating with her risked their own damnation. The area overseer, by her account, was still personally calling pastors to warn them about her four years after she had left, and when she sought what she calls biblical reconciliation, she was told it was not possible. No form of redemption, on her telling, was ever extended.
The specific charge of witchcraft is not incidental. This site has already documented, in a separate testimony about returning curses, a practice inside this same network of casting departed members and critics in explicitly occult terms, and 1 Samuel 15:23, which likens rebellion to the sin of witchcraft, is the kind of verse that framing tends to lean on. Applied here, it did something more specific than shame a woman for an affair. It supplied a supernatural explanation for a male pastor’s own choice, which is a considerably heavier accusation than the one leveled at him.
What Scripture actually says about disciplining leaders
Set against the text it claims to honor, the disparity runs backward. Paul instructs Timothy that an accusation against an elder requires multiple witnesses, but adds that elders who do sin are to be rebuked openly, “that others also may fear” (1 Timothy 5:19-20), a standard of greater public accountability for leaders, not less. The gospels record Jesus’s own response to a woman caught in the act of adultery, refusing the crowd’s demand for stones and sending her away with a charge to sin no more, not a lifetime sentence with no path back (John 8:3-11). Measured against either text, a woman warned against for a decade while the man involved is quietly restored and, by her account, permitted to repeat the pattern, is not biblical discipline. It is a system protecting itself along the lines of gender rather than the lines of sin.
From calling to compliance
She is candid that she was, by her own description, a rebel for the whole of her time in the church, and equally candid that she brought more people into the congregation than most. What she traces is a slow shift in her own motivation, from taking people into her home and witnessing to them out of love for Christ, to simply serving the organization instead. She argued doctrine with her pastor constantly enough that he told her directly she would eventually have to leave, because the organization would never make room for what he himself recognized as her calling. That is a striking admission from inside the system, that its own structure could not accommodate a gift its own leadership acknowledged.
The aftermath, and a claim worth naming carefully
Being put out left her, in her words, with nowhere to go and, for months, unable to trust her own judgment enough to make ordinary decisions. Other members told her she had lost her destiny in God, a verdict she says she never accepted, and years later she describes a genuine healing and a vitality she says she never had inside the organization. She also makes a broader claim that deserves to be stated exactly as she frames it rather than as established fact: she says she personally knows of roughly half a dozen other women involved with pastors in this network, and that the organization tends to shield the men involved unless the situation becomes too public to manage quietly. That figure and that pattern come from her own reported knowledge alone, cannot be verified from this document, and are presented here as her testimony, not as a confirmed count.
Why this testimony still matters
Whatever cannot be verified about the wider pattern she describes, her own account of the disparity in her case stands on its own, and it echoes a shape this site has documented elsewhere: institutions that protect the men at the center of them, as in the Steve Schoner case, at the cost of the people around them. Her closing assessment is blunt and, on the strength of everything she describes, hard to dismiss: in the Potter’s House, the woman is made to carry the blame in sexual sin, and the men are treated as helpless victims of it.
Sources and further reading
- “Disfellowshipped,” testimony by a woman accused of “witchcraft,” December 1999; archived in the Cult Education Institute reference files
- On the same witchcraft framing used against critics, see returning curses
- On institutional protection of male leadership, see the Steve Schoner case
