In February 1999, someone who had grown up inside the Potter’s House in Albuquerque, New Mexico, wrote down what the church had taught her, or him, to believe about God, and what it took, afterward, to unlearn it. Most testimonies gathered on this site document what an organization did. This one documents what a doctrine does, quietly, to a child’s whole conception of who God is, and it closes in a place rare in this archive: grace, both received and extended, and a message the author wanted other leavers to hear before anything else, that God is always there.
A childhood consumed by the church
The author’s picture of adolescence inside the Potter’s House is one of near-total scheduling. Wanting to go skating instead of street preaching, outreach, or handing out flyers earned open disapproval from other members. College outside Albuquerque and other personal ambitions felt foreclosed before they could be considered. High school athletics and activities were treated as competing claims on time that belonged, by the church’s own accounting, to whichever door happened to be open that day, prayer meetings, music practice, and the rest of the schedule included. What comes through is not one dramatic prohibition but the accumulation of a life with almost no room left in it for anything the church itself had not assigned.
A God who required 100 percent
The deepest damage, in the author’s own account, was theological rather than practical. God’s love came to feel entirely conditional, available only if the author performed correctly without fail, and prayer for healing felt useless in advance, since any lack of result was blamed on a personal deficit of faith rather than treated as an open question. Evangelism became a quota rather than an invitation, carrying the constant threat that failing to bring in a convert made someone a bad Christian. Speaking in tongues was treated as the only visible proof of being filled with the Spirit at all, regardless of what a person actually experienced in prayer. Every one of these teachings runs against the plainest readings of the text it claims to represent. Paul’s own rhetorical question, do all speak with tongues, expects the answer no (1 Corinthians 12:30). James ties healing prayer to the faith of the praying elders as much as the one being prayed for, not to a private faith quota the sick person must independently clear (James 5:14-15). And grace, by definition, is a gift that cannot be earned by performance in the first place (Ephesians 2:8-9). The habit of explaining unanswered prayer as somebody’s insufficient faith is not incidental to this network; it traces to the same healing-revival lineage examined in Wayman Mitchell’s Branham inheritance, where the same formula already had decades of use before it reached Albuquerque.
Rebellion as the honest byproduct of control
The author is candid about the anger that built up under all of this, admitting to feeling rebellious and wanting to get back at people who were, in the author’s own later judgment, controlling a life that should have been her or his own. That the author now recognizes the impulse as wrong does not make it dishonest reporting; a young person boxed in this completely would be unusual not to resent it, and naming that resentment plainly, rather than pretending it was never felt, is part of what makes this account trustworthy.
Grace even for the gatekeepers
One of the testimony’s more striking moves is its refusal to make the local pastor and his wife the villains of the story. The author explicitly declines to hold them personally responsible, describing them instead as victims of the same system, people who suffered real pain themselves and simply did not know better. That reading does not excuse what was taught or enforced, but it correctly locates the deeper problem in the system that shaped the shapers, the same dynamic Dennis Crosby described when he admitted absorbing a personality from the environment he served rather than choosing it deliberately. Blaming a doctrine is not the same as excusing it, and this author manages to do the first without pretending the second.
Want to serve Him, not be coerced: God is always there
The line that carries the whole testimony is short enough to stand on its own: people should want to serve God, not be coerced into serving him. That single sentence separates every distortion catalogued above from the actual gospel it was dressed up as. A relationship secured by performance is not a relationship; it is a transaction with God cast as a demanding employer rather than a loving Father. The author’s closing message to anyone who has left a church like this one is worth repeating in full rather than summarizing: God is always there, He loves you, He wants to heal you, and His patience and grace remain even for someone still working through the aftermath. That is not a bitter document. It is a recovered one.
Sources and further reading
- “The message is that God is always there,” testimony by a former Potter’s House member, February 1999; archived in the Cult Education Institute reference files
- On the faith-healing formula this testimony describes, see Wayman Mitchell’s Branham inheritance
