The authorized history of the Potter’s House gives its origin a single author. In The Fellowship’s own books, the story runs from Wayman Mitchell’s arrival in Prescott to a worldwide network of churches, with Mitchell at the head of it as founder, visionary, and prophet. Concede the part that holds. Mitchell did pastor the Prescott congregation, did adopt the church-planting model that carries his fingerprints, and did break his churches away from Foursquare to run them himself. What the authorized version leaves out is that the name it now carries had an earlier owner and a messier trail. The founding of Christian Fellowship Ministries is well documented, and the documents do not all say the same thing.
Luke opened his Gospel by saying he had traced the whole account from those “which from the beginning were eyewitnesses,” and set it in order (Luke 1:1-4). The method suits a church’s origin as well as a Gospel. Three sources survive for this one: a letter from a man who sat on the original Board of Elders, the Foursquare denomination’s own published history, and a newspaper from December 1978. Read together they establish some things firmly, leave others open, and contradict The Fellowship’s version at the points that matter.
Three sources on the founding of Christian Fellowship Ministries
On the night of Monday, December 18, 1978, during the flooding that killed more than twenty people across Arizona, an Interstate-17 bridge near Black Canyon City collapsed and a car went into the Agua Fria River. The Yuma Daily Sun, carrying an Associated Press report on December 21, named the dead: the Reverend John W. Metzler, 40, pastor of Christian Fellowship in Scottsdale, and four members of his congregation, Pat Baker, 44; Robert Webb, 20; Bill Willeford, 36; and Anthony C. Webster, 20. They were driving home from a church service in Sedona.
Every account lines up on this. Bill Tubbs’s letter places the crash in December 1978 on the I-17 bridge at Black Canyon City. Foursquare’s history dates Metzler’s death to 1978. The newspaper fixes the date, the ages, and the names. A church in the Phoenix area called Christian Fellowship lost its pastor and four members in a single night, and the pastor who died was John Metzler.
Bill Tubbs: the church was not started by Mitchell
Bill Tubbs wrote as an insider with reason to know. By his account he sat on the original board of Christian Fellowship Church under John Metzler, served six years as an assistant pastor, spent twelve years in the congregation, and was counseled by Mitchell before his marriage and directed by him in ministry. His central claim is blunt: “The Christian Fellowship Church was NOT ! started by Wayman Mitchell.” He credits the founding to Metzler, a LIFE Bible College graduate and Foursquare evangelist who, after a divorce ended his standing in Foursquare, planted a small church on Cave Creek Road in 1976.
The rest of Tubbs’s letter describes a transfer. After Metzler died, he writes, Mitchell came to the church, the congregation voted to affiliate with Foursquare, and the Christian Fellowship nonprofit was held by three people: Mitchell, Metzler’s widow Donna, and a new pastor named Silver Gaddis. When Mitchell later decided to leave Foursquare, Gaddis and Donna Metzler signed the organization’s documents over to him. Tubbs adds that the names “Potter’s House” and “The Door” came from the Saturday-night coffee-house outreaches. If his account is right, the corporate shell that became Christian Fellowship Ministries did not begin with Mitchell.
What Foursquare confirms, and what it corrects
Foursquare was asked directly, and it answered in two directions. It confirmed the load-bearing charge: Wayman Mitchell rebelled against the denomination to start Christian Fellowship Ministries. On the Metzler narrative it was less obliging. According to the denomination’s records, John Metzler graduated from LIFE Bible College in 1961, a year after Mitchell, and left Foursquare before Mitchell did, ahead of 1975. No documents were found tying Mitchell to Metzler’s departure. After Metzler died in 1978, his church voted to rejoin Foursquare rather than to pass into anyone’s hands. The earliest record of the label Foursquare used for Mitchell’s group, “Arizona Fellowship,” dates to 1981, and Mitchell himself stayed a Foursquare-licensed pastor, though never ordained, into the 1980s.
Those corrections leave Metzler’s church and his death untouched, since both stand on the newspaper alone. They work against the mechanism Tubbs describes, in which Mitchell inherits Metzler’s organization. The paper trail Foursquare could find has Metzler leaving on his own years earlier, and his congregation returning to the denomination after his death, not being folded into a future network. Where Tubbs sees one continuous corporate line, the records show two men whose paths crossed at a Bible college and a shared church name, with little documentary evidence of the handover between them.
The 1983 split, in Foursquare’s telling
The denomination’s published history, Nathaniel Van Cleave’s The Vine and the Branches (International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, 1992), tells the origin of Mitchell’s independent network without mentioning Metzler at all. In its account, Mitchell asked for and received the Prescott, Arizona, church in 1969, grew it by pressing every member to witness, and watched converts fan out to plant branches they preferred to call “The Door.” The book grants that the results were worth admiring and worth imitating. It also records the friction: Mitchell discouraged Bible-college training, permitted only what Van Cleave calls “primitive and militant evangelism,” kept his men apart from other Foursquare ministers, and drew maps of Arizona that left every other Foursquare congregation off.
The break came at the 1983 Foursquare convention in Glorieta, New Mexico. A large group of pastors rose to challenge the Prescott group’s methods and attitude. Mitchell did not answer. He read the questions as hostility and left with his followers. The board spent the next year seeking a settlement, held a special meeting with Mitchell that produced none, and within weeks watched him begin withdrawing the churches he had planted. Van Cleave records that when the separation was complete, the denomination had lost no property or assets. This is the origin of the independent fellowship, dated to 1983, five years after Metzler’s death, and rooted in Mitchell’s own Prescott church rather than in any congregation handed to him. It matches the account on this site of how Mitchell took over a Prescott Foursquare congregation and later broke it away.
Where the accounts diverge, and why it matters
Two threads run through these sources, and Tubbs may have braided them into one. There was Metzler’s Christian Fellowship church in the Phoenix and Scottsdale area, founded in the mid-1970s and left without a pastor in 1978. There was Mitchell’s Prescott congregation and its Door branches, running since 1969 and severed from Foursquare in 1983. Both used the “Christian Fellowship” name, both sat inside Arizona Foursquare, and the two stories touch at Donna Metzler and Silver Gaddis, the people Tubbs says signed the papers. What the records do not supply is the deed of transfer that would turn two adjacent stories into one line of succession.
So the honest verdict splits in two. The claim that Mitchell did not personally originate the “Christian Fellowship” name has real support: a church of that name existed under another pastor, and that pastor died before Mitchell’s network became independent. The stronger claim, that Mitchell absorbed Metzler’s specific church and its nonprofit as the seed of Christian Fellowship Ministries, rests on Tubbs’s memory and is not confirmed by the denomination that would hold the paperwork. Both statements can be reported without collapsing them into each other, which is the discipline the authorized history skips.
The reason any of this matters is the use The Fellowship makes of its own beginning. A church that teaches members never to question the pastor, and that treats leaving as leaving God, leans on the authority of the man at the top, and that authority reads better with a clean founding story behind it. When the founding turns out to involve an earlier church, a dead pastor, a disputed handover, and a denominational split the group’s books do not mention, the story loses the seamlessness it depends on. That is why it gets told the short way from the pulpit, and why the long way is worth writing down.
Conclusion
The verifiable core is not in dispute. John Metzler pastored a Christian Fellowship church near Phoenix and died with four of his members on a collapsed I-17 bridge in December 1978. Wayman Mitchell took the Prescott Foursquare church in 1969, built a network of Door churches, and broke them away from Foursquare in 1983 to run them as Christian Fellowship Ministries. The contested core, whether the one story fed the other, is exactly the sort of claim a group’s authorized history omits and that an insider’s letter and a denomination’s records let outsiders test. Trace it to the eyewitnesses and the paper, report what they establish and what they leave open, and the founding of Christian Fellowship Ministries stops being a single-author legend and becomes what the sources show: a contested, human, and partly undocumented affair.
Sources and further reading
- Letter from Bill Tubbs, former board member and assistant pastor
- Nathaniel M. Van Cleave, The Vine and the Branches: A History of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel (Los Angeles: International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, 1992)
- “5 bodies found as flood deaths rise,” Associated Press, Yuma Daily Sun, December 21, 1978 (report of the Black Canyon City I-17 bridge collapse and the death of Rev. John W. Metzler)
- Overview of the Potter’s House, its 1969 origin, and the 1983 Foursquare split
- More on the history of The Fellowship
