The fourth installment of the Reformatorisch Dagblad’s 2020 series on De Deur in Zwolle steps back from the Evert Valk case to ask a wider question: was Zwolle an isolated failure, or a pattern? The reporter’s answer draws on women across the Christian Fellowship Ministries network, in the United States, Australia, and the Netherlands, whose accounts share a structure regardless of country: abuse reported, blame redirected onto the victim, and a leadership that returns to normal while the person who spoke up disappears from the congregation. The report’s own title captures the silence that enforces it: it was my fault, so I kept my mouth shut.
A hashtag, and a pattern beyond one pastor
In mid-2020, a Texas woman named Mandy started a private Facebook group called #BraveToo for women who had experienced boundary-violating behavior inside Christian Fellowship Ministries; she herself described being touched inappropriately and subjected to grooming, the process by which an abuser builds a victim’s trust in order to exploit it. After a call for stories on the Leaving the Potter’s House Facebook page, accounts began arriving, among them one from a Canadian woman the paper calls Jennifer, who had personal, written contact with the reporter and asked to be identified only by that name.
Jennifer came from a broken home and describes herself as already extremely vulnerable when she landed in a Potter’s House congregation, having previously been drugged and raped. Inside the church she secretly began seeing a boy, against the congregation’s rules, and the relationship ended in rape. When she gathered the courage to tell her pastor, he told her she was lying and demon-possessed, so far gone that pastoral help was no longer worth offering, and suggested she had brought this on herself by seducing the boy and had even harmed the church’s finances and growth by doing so. He sided with the boy, telling him he was fortunate the matter had been handled inside the church rather than before a secular court, because, in the pastor’s words, women held the majority there.
Silenced by laughter, then from the pulpit
A second account, from a woman named Amy, describes abuse that began while she was a minor and continued for three years, carried out by a man who held an executive position within Potter’s House. She says that whenever she worked up the nerve to talk about it, the assistant pastors around her responded by laughing and joking. When Amy’s parents eventually left the church, they raised what had happened with Pastor Jeff Rens, son-in-law of the late Wayman Mitchell, and Amy says he responded by angrily accusing her of trying to destroy the congregation; she later learned from friends that Rens had denounced her from the pulpit in vulgar terms. This is Amy’s account of a private confrontation and a secondhand report of pulpit remarks, and Rens is not quoted responding to it. Amy says her abuser continued targeting other girls, who, in her account, stayed silent themselves.
“It was my fault. So I kept my mouth shut.”
The pattern is not new to this decade. As early as the 1980s, Arizona television stations were airing reports of brainwashing and abuse inside Potter’s House and Door congregations, several of which survive today on the YouTube channel Mitchellism, including the five-part 1988 series Behind the Door. In one episode, Debbie Christensen described being raped by a senior member of The Door in El Paso, Texas, and told the paper that when she reported it to her pastor, he blamed her, forced her to promise silence, and warned her that leaving the church at all meant going to hell. Her own summary of the result was blunt: “It was my fault. So I kept my mouth shut.” In the same broadcast, Wayman Mitchell dismissed her account as fabricated, arguing that if her story were true she would have gone to the police, and that her silence on that front was reason enough to disbelieve her. Christensen, who later went by the name Deborah Malone, never brought the matter to court. She died by suicide in 2002; this is reported here as a documented historical fact and not dwelt on further. Decades later, the paper argues, the network’s basic response to accusations like hers has not changed.
The mechanism: total disclosure
What several accounts point to is a structural vulnerability rather than a single bad actor: members, women especially, are expected to share choices, struggles, and sins with their pastor in exhaustive detail, including matters inside marriage. An American woman identified as Hannah says she and her then-husband received marital counseling from their pastor, who asked her to describe her intimate life in specific detail. In her account, she was told she needed to continue having sex with her husband or risk her husband reporting the marriage’s problems to the pastor himself, all while her husband’s own use of pornography went unmentioned in the same sessions. A Dutch former member of a congregation in the southern Netherlands recalled women routinely staying behind after services to discuss deeply personal matters, up to and including their own erotic dreams, with the pastor labeling the content sin and pressing for further detail. The same report describes a practice of church leaders quietly arranging marriages between young members in their twenties, framed as God’s will for the couple, intended in part to keep marriage partners from outside the network out of the community.
Niene, and the altar of power
A woman identified as Niene describes an arranged marriage that became one of ongoing domestic violence, including during pregnancy and after the births of her children, with repeated hospital visits for injuries, alongside sexual abuse from her husband. For years she attributed the violence to demonic interference in a sanctified marriage and tried to follow the network’s counsel: submit to her husband, tithe, and attend services daily. She wrote that believing herself placed by God in that specific congregation made it feel impossible to leave, and that breaking free cost her her entire support network. A former member named Alejandro Flores, writing after his own departure, put the retrospective verdict starkly, saying he had not believed pastors could sexually abuse women during all his years inside, and now sees the network as run by men willing to abuse the power they hold.
No interview
The paper attempted to put these accounts, and the Zwolle case specifically, to Greg Mitchell, pastor of the Prescott mother church and son of Wayman Mitchell, who had died shortly before publication. The Prescott office answering the phone said Greg Mitchell would not address the matter or make time for an interview, and two follow-up emails went unanswered.
Why this reporting still matters
Read against the Zwolle case that opened this series, and against the testimonies gathered separately in a 1999 witchcraft accusation and a 2001 account from Tucson, this report shows the same shape recurring across decades and continents: an allegation is met with blame or spiritual accusation aimed at the accuser, a leader returns to normal standing, and the network’s public face does not change. The RD’s own conclusion is not that every pastor in Christian Fellowship Ministries has done this. It is that when someone has, the system has repeatedly made it easier for him to continue than for her to be believed.
Sources and further reading
- Eunice Hoekman-van Stuijvenberg, “De misbruikzaak in De Deur in Zwolle staat niet op zichzelf” (published in English as “It was my fault. So I kept my mouth shut”), Reformatorisch Dagblad, September 29, 2020; translated and published with the author’s permission
- On the Zwolle case this series opened with, see Evert Valk, The Door Zwolle
- On the same pattern elsewhere in this archive, see Disfellowshipped, Without Love We Have Nothing, and returning curses
