Ask a longtime member of Christian Fellowship Ministries what they believe, and the answer sounds like standard Pentecostal doctrine: salvation by grace, an inerrant Bible, the soon return of Christ. Ask what they do, and a different list appears. It covers television, alcohol, cinema, and dozens of smaller behaviors nobody ever put in writing but every member learned anyway. Inside CFM, the network of congregations known internally as The Fellowship, this unwritten code goes by different names depending on the decade and the country. In the Dutch churches it became known simply as Fellowship principles, and for years it decided more about a member’s standing than any Bible study ever did.
Christian Fellowship Ministries operates under several public names, including the Potter’s House, The Door, Victory Chapel, and Lighthouse. Roughly 4,500 congregations worldwide trace back to founder Wayman Mitchell, and members typically refer to the whole network simply as the Fellowship. Doctrinally, CFM churches look like many other Pentecostal congregations. What sets daily life apart, according to Dennis Crosby, part of the Zwolle The Door church for decades, is a behavioral code that never appears in a statement of faith but governs almost everything else.
From “Distinctives” to “Principles”
Crosby remembers the language shifting under his feet. Early on, leaders spoke of “Fellowship distinctives,” a term with a specific job: naming the traits that separated CFM churches from other Pentecostal congregations holding nearly identical doctrine. Distinctives justified staying apart. They explained why the Fellowship never partnered with outside churches on local evangelism, even churches preaching the same gospel.
Somewhere along the way, “distinctives” gave way to “principles.” Crosby isn’t certain whether the change happened Fellowship-wide or only inside the Dutch branch of the organization. What he’s certain of is that the shift in function outlasted the shift in name. A word that once described what made CFM different became a word that prescribed what CFM members had to do.
A Code Nobody Has to Write Down
Fellowship principles exist almost nowhere on paper. Crosby says the only written trace he ever encountered was a contract members sign before joining a drama or music group, since CFM churches lean heavily on theatrical and musical outreach. Everyone else absorbs the expectations by attendance alone. Stay long enough, and the rules become obvious without ever being read.
That informality isn’t an accident. Separate reporting on CFM’s broader rule system found that the organization’s behavioral code was deliberately kept off any policy document, even as it shaped sermons and Bible studies week after week. An unwritten rule is harder to challenge than a published one. There’s no clause to quote back to a pastor, no text to hold up against Scripture and compare. The rule simply is, because everyone agrees it is, and agreement gets enforced long before anyone thinks to ask where it came from.
Unwritten rules also give leadership room to move. A published code can be quoted, dated, and held against a pastor who breaks his own standard. An oral one can flex from congregation to congregation, or from one pastor’s tenure to the next, without anyone having to admit the standard changed at all. Members experience this as consistency, since the atmosphere always feels the same. What actually stayed consistent was the expectation of compliance, not the content of any single rule.
None of this requires a conspiracy at the top. Oral codes spread the way institutional habits usually do. Pastors repeat what they were taught, and congregations absorb what gets repeated. Nobody along the chain necessarily sets out to build a shadow authority alongside the Bible. The outcome is the same either way.
When Rule-Following Becomes the Measure of Faith
The practical effect matters more than the label. Crosby says that eventually, a member’s standing in the church, and even their walk with God, got evaluated on whether they kept the rules. Not on character. Not on fruit. On compliance.
The content of those rules will sound familiar to anyone who has left a Fellowship congregation. Members were expected to avoid owning a television, going to a movie theater, smoking, or drinking. A separate account from a former Potter’s House member describes the identical list, adding cinemas, beards, and mandatory signed contracts to the roster of things the network prohibited across its congregations. Two members, writing years apart and without coordinating, describe the same code down to the details. That convergence is itself evidence the rules were never local eccentricities. They were Fellowship-wide policy, just never filed as one.
When compliance becomes the measure of faith, assurance stops resting on the finished work of Christ and starts resting on a checklist. Members learn to track their own conduct against a standard nobody can point to in writing, which makes the standard impossible to satisfy with confidence and easy for leadership to move. That’s a recognizable feature of performance-based religious systems generally, not something unique to CFM. What makes the Fellowship version notable is how thoroughly the performance list crowded out the doctrine it claimed to protect.
What the Follow-Up Teaches, and What It Skips
Crosby watched this play out from the pulpit. Pastor Evert Valk, longtime leader of the Zwolle congregation, devoted entire runs of Bible study to reinforcing Fellowship principles, returning to the subject on a regular cycle. Valk marshaled verse after verse to explain why members shouldn’t smoke, drink, own a television, or visit a movie theater, according to Crosby.
Meanwhile, follow-up for new converts changed shape. After someone prayed the sinner’s prayer, the material that came next centered on behavioral rules, water baptism, and end-times prophecy. Baptism of the Holy Spirit, once a defining emphasis in Pentecostal churches like this one, receded into the background. Other Fellowship veterans have made a related point about the cost of that shift: obedience to the organization’s leadership structure crowded out a direct, unmediated relationship with Christ.
The Principles That Never Made the List
Crosby’s sharpest observation may be his shortest one: “Honesty and fairness aren’t Fellowship principles.” The list covered what members watched, drank, and smoked. It never covered what leaders said to members’ faces or promised behind closed doors. A code that regulates a television set but stays silent on truthfulness reveals its actual priority. It was never really about holiness. It was about visible, checkable conformity.
Testing Fellowship Principles Against Scripture
None of this means every church rule is illegitimate. Paul gave the Corinthian church specific, practical instructions on worship conduct, and no one calls that legalism. Congregations are allowed structure. The problem in CFM was never that Fellowship principles existed. The problem is what they replaced.
Jesus confronted a nearly identical pattern in the religious leaders of his own day. The Pharisees had built an oral tradition around the Torah, a hedge of extra rules meant to protect the Law but that, in practice, buried it. Christ’s rebuke in Matthew 15 still reads as a direct diagnosis of what Crosby describes decades later:
“This people draweth nigh unto me with their mouth, and honoureth me with their lips; but their heart is far from me. But in vain they do worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men.” (Matthew 15:8-9, KJV)
Paul made the same point to the Colossian church, warning against submitting to human ordinances “which all are to perish with the using; after the commandments and doctrines of men” (Colossians 2:22, KJV). Rules about touching, tasting, and handling, he wrote, “have indeed a shew of wisdom” but carry no power to restrain actual sin. Galatians 5:1 goes further, calling the freedom Christ purchased a thing to stand fast in rather than trade back for “a yoke of bondage.”
That’s the trap Crosby describes. Fellowship principles function like the Pharisees’ hedge: a system of external markers that stands in for the harder work of biblical discernment. People who examine Scripture too closely inside CFM, Crosby says, start noticing the gap between what the Bible actually emphasizes and what the church enforces. They start asking questions the organization would rather they didn’t ask. That isn’t an accident of a legalistic culture. It’s the design of one. 2 Timothy 3:16-17 says Scripture itself is sufficient to make a believer “throughly furnished unto all good works.” A church that needs a second, unwritten list to do that job has quietly demoted the first one.
Know the Book, Not the List
Crosby’s conclusion is worth taking at face value. He isn’t much of a fan of creeds and statements of faith, not because they’re useless to study, but because it’s a mistake to follow them instead of Scripture. Know what a group teaches, including groups you don’t belong to. Just don’t let a Fellowship principle, or any other human summary, stand in for the text it claims to interpret.
If you grew up inside CFM, or you’re still there now, that’s a workable test for any rule you were taught to keep without question. Open the passage it supposedly comes from. Read the whole context, not the verse fragment. Crosby’s own summary of the danger is blunt: summaries miss too much of what the text actually says.
