Go Ye: The Arizona Story, the history of The Fellowship’s founding years that Potters Press published in 1982, names 36 founding pastors and members of the network that became The Potter’s House. Research into what became of them, built on confirmations from people who knew or remember each one, finds that 23 of the 36 left The Fellowship, five stayed, and eight remain unconfirmed — and for most of those eight, the people consulted expect the answer is that they left as well. The book was commissioned to showcase a discipleship system. Read four decades later, the roster it celebrates is chiefly a list of departures, and this article publishes the list, the method behind it, and a standing invitation to correct it.
The claim the roster tests
The count matters because of a specific claim members were taught. Every church had a pastor, every pastor had his own pastor, and at the top stood Wayman Mitchell — who, we were told, submitted in turn to a board of elders that would correct him or remove him if he failed morally or drifted from Scripture. What we were not told is that the board was made up of men Mitchell had personally discipled. A body assembled by the man it exists to check does not function as oversight, and The Fellowship’s governance record shows none: the 1995 Cape Cod Times investigation found that Mitchell answered to no one, and no documented case exists of the board correcting him on anything. The roster below shows the form correction took instead. Men who could not confront the structure walked away from it, in individual resignations and in The Fellowship-scale departures of 1990 and 2001.
The method
The names come from the book: nearly every person named in Go Ye: The Arizona Story was extracted and verified against the text. The classifications come from that research, including direct confirmations from former members who knew the people involved, and they use one definition: “left” means left The Fellowship — it says nothing about anyone’s faith, which many of these men continued in ministry elsewhere. Where there is no solid confirmation, the name stays under unknown rather than being guessed at. Every entry is correctable: if you knew any of these people and can confirm, correct, or complete an entry, use the contact page, and the list will be updated.
Left The Fellowship (23)
- Curt McKiney
- Don McPherson
- Ernie Lister
- Greg Johnson
- Hank Houghton
- Jack Harris
- Jack Neville
- Joe Jones
- Joe Weidinger
- John Holland
- Larry Huch
- Larry Neville (his 1990 resignation letter is documented on this site)
- Lynn Litton
- Manny Vallejos
- Mike Mastin (his and Sharon Mastin’s departure is documented on this site)
- Mike Neville
- Peter Edwards
- Raymond Kirkland
- Ron Jones
- Ron Simpkins
- Rudy van Diermen (the book spells him Vandierman; his 2003 letter is documented on this site)
- Steve Heroux
- Walter Portugal
Two names deserve a sentence. Ron Simpkins, who left, is the author of An Open Door, The Fellowship’s own 1985 official history — both of The Fellowship’s book-length chroniclers ended up outside it. The book also records the young Zwolle, Holland congregation “pastored by a young Dutch disciple, Rudy van Diermen” — a congregation whose founding pastor also left.
Stayed (five)
- Dave Stephenson
- Glen Cluck (deceased)
- Harold Warner
- Ron Burrell
- Tom Drout
Unknown (eight)
- Alex Wilson
- Arjimero Figuera
- Bill Walworth
- Don Madison
- Forrest Johnson
- Fred Cowan
- Sammy Mores
- Warren Issen
What the Go Ye: The Arizona Story roster shows
A fair reader should weigh the obvious objection first: people leave churches over 40 years for every kind of reason, and a founding cohort scattering with time proves little about most organizations. The concession is fair, and it does not cover this case, for one doctrinal reason. The Fellowship teaches that God personally places each member in his congregation and treats leaving as leaving God’s will. Under that teaching, a 23-of-36 departure rate among the founding generation is not ordinary churn; it is the men who built the system, and were named in its own commissioned history as the proof it worked, concluding one by one that they could not remain under it. The board of elders never corrected Wayman Mitchell. The founding roster corrected the record instead, with its feet.
