The Don’t Drink the Kool-Aid Podcast is a YouTube channel on which former members of The Potter’s House tell their stories, hosted by Jeremiah Sawyer, himself a former Potter’s House pastor who left the Prescott, Arizona congregation. Joel Crosby appeared on it as a guest for a long-form conversation, and it was one of the first times he told his full story from start to finish in English; the earlier accounts of his 25 years inside The Door, the Dutch branch of The Potter’s House known there as De Deur, had all been in Dutch. This article is a record of that appearance: what the podcast is, what he recounted on it, and why a conversation between a former pastor from the Arizona mother-church side and a former member from the Dutch side kept landing on the same patterns.
What the Don’t Drink the Kool-Aid Podcast is
Don’t Drink the Kool-Aid gives former members of The Potter’s House a place to describe, at length and on camera, what the churches of Christian Fellowship Ministries (CFM) were like from the inside. Sawyer left the Prescott church, the mother congregation of The Potter’s House, and started the podcast to gather these accounts; guests reach out to him with stories that, he notes on the episode, keep matching each other. His own position is measured. He says on the episode that he has not gone so far as to call The Potter’s House a cult, preferring “a church with cult tendencies,” because he believes people inside can still be reached.
What Crosby recounted
He told the arc set down elsewhere on this site, which he had not before narrated in English in one sitting. His American father, moved around by the army, found Victory Chapel, one of the churches of The Potter’s House, in the United States, and the family later settled at the Zwolle congregation in the Netherlands, where Crosby was a member from age three. He described a childhood organized around the fear of losing his salvation, the bullying that followed from not fitting in, and a counseling session in which, depressed as a teenager, he was told by his pastor to laugh rather than referred to care, because depression was treated as a demon. He described his father being labeled a “rebel” for asking questions the pastor could not answer, his pastor instructing him to find another father figure, and the years that instruction cost his relationship with his dad, a relationship he has since rebuilt. And he described the disclosure of an abuse case in the Zwolle congregation that finally led him out, a case documented separately, with its legal history, in the Evert Valk case. What broke his loyalty was watching the aftermath handled to protect the institution rather than the person harmed.
The militarized cast of the culture came up as well, the subject of a video Crosby later made, and it is treated at length in how The Door militarizes Christianity. So did why he began speaking out at all, which was not anger but the recognition that the accounts in the ex-member groups he found were the same story under different names; his fuller reasons are in why he wrote Escaping the Potter’s House.
Why two continents produced one account
The value of the episode is in the convergence. Sawyer spent his years inside the Arizona churches of The Potter’s House; Crosby spent his in a Dutch congregation 5,000 miles away, born into it rather than converted. Neither coordinated their experiences, and the specifics differ. Yet the conversation kept arriving at the same features: a congregation with a poor reputation in its own town, questions treated as rebellion, private counseling turned against members, families shunning those who leave, an elitism that quietly doubts the salvation of Christians outside the church, and a leadership that treats the media as an enemy. When two people who never shared a building describe the same machinery, the agreement is itself a finding, and it is the reason the ex-member accounts read, as Crosby put it on the episode, like the same post written by a different author.
The question the episode circles
Sawyer’s “cult tendencies” and Crosby’s own use of the word cult are less far apart than they sound, and the episode works the difference through rather than papering over it. Crosby’s case is that cultism is a spectrum measured by documented markers rather than a slur, that a healthy but strict church does not produce a steady stream of people who leave and then find each other to compare identical experiences, and that the danger concentrates in the leadership rather than in every local pastor — some of whom are sincere men who do not know what sits above them. Where The Potter’s House falls on that spectrum is examined on its own terms in high-control group versus cult. Sawyer’s hesitation and Crosby’s conclusion are two honest readings of the same evidence, which is what makes the exchange worth watching rather than a pair of people agreeing with themselves.
The full conversation is on the Don’t Drink the Kool-Aid Podcast on YouTube. Credit is due to Jeremiah Sawyer for the platform, and for building one more place where accounts that get dismissed the moment they are spoken inside the church can be heard in full outside it.
