A note before this one. This was the first time Joel Crosby was ever interviewed on this subject, and it ran under the headline “I realized: I grew up in a cult.” At the time, he had not published his book and was not yet public about any of it. So when the Leeuwarder Courant needed a former member willing to describe growing up inside The Door under a fictitious name, he gave his account as “Chris.” He is no longer hiding that, and the record here says so plainly rather than letting an old byline stand in for the truth.
A Church Still Growing While Members Leave
The report ran in August 2023, and it opened with an observation worth sitting with. The Door in Leeuwarden was one of the few churches still gaining members, especially young people, at the same time former members were speaking up in growing numbers. The international Facebook group Escaping the Potter’s House had, by the paper’s count, nearly two thousand members worldwide. The Dutch group Close the Door had just over a hundred. Growth on one side of the ledger and departures on the other are not a contradiction. A recruitment pipeline and an exit pipeline can both run at full capacity inside the same organization, and CFM’s history shows exactly that pattern repeating across decades and continents.
Two Names, Two Fears
The paper spoke to two former members willing to talk only under invented names. One, called Frits, had belonged to a Utrecht congregation from 1987 until 2002, joining at sixteen alongside his twin brother. He described an easy, welcoming start that escalated into an expectation of near-total weekly attendance, thirty to forty hours some weeks, until, in his words, they “got drawn into it.” His reason for anonymity was concrete: his daughter attended an evangelical school alongside Door members, and he did not want her treated differently because of what he said.
His reason, at the time, was just as concrete. He was afraid of jeopardizing his family ties if his name appeared, since his relationship with relatives still inside The Door was already fragile. That fear was real, and protecting it then was understandable. But an old fear does not have to run the rest of the story, and the pseudonym no longer needs to do that job.
What He Told Them: Growing Up in a Cult
His parents had already been members of The Door in Zwolle when he was born, and he attended faithfully until he was twenty-five, even after his parents left following thirty-seven years of membership. Their departure cost him status inside the church immediately. When a whole family belongs, it carries a certain standing. The moment that changed, people who had known him his whole life started looking down on him. He went from being part of a respected family to being, as members put it, the son of a rebel, their word for anyone who asks questions.
He had said his whole life that he would never leave. Everyone inside believes the same thing, and he believed it as strongly as anyone. The idea was that members were different from the rest of the world, that they belonged to the one movement that had actually found its purpose. Dating required the pastor’s permission. Marriage required it again. The pastor had agreed to marry him and his fiancée, then withdrew that agreement when he started asking too many questions. They waited six months before the pastor would proceed.
Prove All Things
“Rebel” is not a neutral word inside CFM. Frits knew it too, from the other direction. His twin brother leaned into the church and got put on a pedestal as a promising disciple, while Frits himself was cast as the rebel simply for keeping his distance. A label applied that easily, to that wide a range of behavior, from Crosby’s to Frits’s, is not describing an actual pattern of rebellion. It is describing anyone the system currently needs to discourage.
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thessalonians 5:21, KJV)
Paul commands exactly the behavior CFM punishes. Testing a teaching, checking a claim, asking a question before accepting an answer, is the explicit instruction Scripture gives every believer, not a symptom of a bad attitude. A system that brands the people who ask questions as rebels has inverted this verse rather than followed it, the same inversion documented in this site’s earlier look at CFM’s headship doctrine. It has replaced testing with obedience and called the swap discipleship.
Not a Splinter, Just a Different Name
Leeuwarden’s pastor, Dirk van Rijn, told the paper he found it hard to imagine a member recognizing themselves in this criticism. He said he tries to lead without the manipulation he experienced under his own pastor twenty years earlier. He described favoring positive appeals over pressure and instructing his own people not to manipulate. Whatever his intentions, the structure he leads inside has not changed. Every Door congregation answers to a guiding church that trained its pastor, a written and unwritten obligation one former pastor described in detail after he left. Leeuwarden answers to Zwolle, which carries the financial responsibility and, in van Rijn’s own words, is where a member could seek recourse if he were unreasonable. Zwolle in turn answers to Prescott, Arizona. Van Rijn called the network self-determining and autonomous in practice, then confirmed, in the same conversation, that no Door church actually decides differently from Zwolle or Prescott. “We’re not a splinter group,” he said, “it’s just a different name.”
Frits named the fear that structure produces better than any summary could. Once a problem reaches Prescott, the whole worldwide network knows about it, and there is no local court of appeal above the pastor who already reports upward. Every layer of accountability in that chain points away from the member and toward the next man up the ladder, all the way to Arizona. That is the same one-way chain documented in this site’s account of Wayman Mitchell’s control over the network.
