Go Ye: The Arizona Story is worth reading, and for the opposite reason it was written. Steve Cooper’s short history of The Fellowship’s founding years — 18 chapters from a foreword to closing words, published by Potters Press in 1982 — was commissioned to commend The Fellowship’s discipleship system. Read today, the book functions as evidence against its own argument, because Cooper, a trained newspaper reporter, keeps doing what reporters do: he records the objections, the risks, and the failures on his way to overriding them. The structure of the whole book is the structure of its second page. It names the danger, concedes the danger, and proceeds. This Go Ye: The Arizona Story review takes the book on its own terms, chapter by chapter, with the names it celebrates checked against what became of them.
What the book is
The book is brief, closer to a long newspaper feature than a history, which is what its author knew how to write. Cooper was a reporter for the San Bernardino Sun-Telegram who converted inside The Fellowship’s orbit in 1974 and moved to Flagstaff in 1978, and his own story is documented separately, and it matters for reading the book, because Go Ye is a member’s account published on the church’s own imprint, not independent journalism. The craft, though, is professional. The narrative opens not with a triumph but with Harold Warner preaching a farewell sermon in Kearny, Arizona, in 1973, a church plant that folded within five days of his arrival, told with the weather, the Dodge Colt, and the young preacher’s insistence, while packing, that the land was still his. Cooper’s eye for the telling scene is the book’s lasting value. It preserves names, towns, and dates for a period of The Fellowship’s history that nothing else covers.
The argument it makes, and the concessions it records
The thesis is that Jesus trained men by association rather than institution, and that The Fellowship’s pastor-to-disciple pipeline recovers His method. What distinguishes the book from ordinary church promotion is that Cooper states the case against it at every step. On page 2 he introduces the model by noting that many are immediately turned off, that it strikes people as cultism, and that pastors will become spiritual dictators, the passage quoted at length elsewhere on this site. Chapter XII, Ignorant and Unlearned, asks where seminaries and Bible colleges fit and answers in one line: they do not. And in the same chapter Cooper writes the sentence a critic would pay for: because it hinges on the honesty of a single man’s walk with God, discipleship is “easily the riskier proposition.” That is the book’s own summary of the system’s single point of failure — one man, unaccountable, reproduced downward, offered as an acceptable cost. The chapter titled Nothing Is Free makes the demand explicit through Luke 14:28: count the cost, bear the cross, forsake all. The book applies that text to the disciple’s sacrifice. It never once applies it to the institution — what it might cost a church to build every safeguard out of loyalty to one man was a sum nobody sat down to count.
The epistemology underneath
The book’s deepest problem is a principle it attributes to Wayman Mitchell directly and repeats as wisdom: a man cannot be taught above the level of his own experience. As pedagogy it sounds humble. As epistemology it dissolves every possible correction, because any critic — a seminary, a denomination, a former member, a reporter — can be dismissed as speaking above his experience, and the only man whose experience covers the whole system is the man who runs it. Cooper felt the principle’s pull himself: he records Mitchell telling him, during his 1977 reporting tour, that his understanding was incomplete because his experience was, and the resolution of the book’s final chapters is that the reporter stopped observing and joined. The same principle governs how the book handles the miraculous. Healings are reported as witnessed, a feverish baby in Oregon and testimonies from platforms, and never followed up, because within the book’s frame, following up would itself be a symptom of standing outside the experience. What The Fellowship’s healing teaching produced when it met real illness is documented elsewhere on this site.
What time did to the book
Go Ye opens with a chapter titled Will the Vision Die?, the succession question the church posed of itself in 1982. The decades answered. Of the 36 founding pastors and members the book names, research finds 23 left The Fellowship, five stayed, and eight are unconfirmed; the full roster is published here. The departures include the book’s own author, whose later path is unrecorded, and Ron Simpkins, who wrote The Fellowship’s second official history and also left. A book written to prove that the system produces faithful men is now a directory of men the system lost, and the failed Kearny plant of its opening pages reads differently once you know how the roster ends. in this book, no outcome was ever allowed to count against the vision. Failure was giants in the land; departure was rebellion; correction was experience not yet reached.
Verdict
As apologetics, Go Ye refutes itself, and it does so with a candor its successors abandoned — later Fellowship books state the claims without recording the objections. As a primary source, it is indispensable, the earliest inside account of a founding period whose official story has needed checking, written by a professional observer before he fully stopped observing. Read it for the second purpose. The first one, the book handles on its own.
