Most of the documents in this archive concern policy, money, or doctrine. This one, submitted in December 1998 by an Australian who had just walked away from seven years in the Potter’s House, concerns none of those things. It is about the weeks right after leaving, when the institutional questions stop mattering and the only question left is whether a person can rebuild a life on the other side of the front door. Leaving the Potter’s House is rarely a single clean decision, and this testimony, later updated by its own author, shows why.
Harassment dressed as concern
The author left in October 1998 and heard secondhand that the pastor had told the congregation to leave her alone and let her sort things out. Some members did not. A couple she describes as the main instigators arrived at her home unannounced one evening, opening with the kind of line designed to sound like affection rather than pressure, that the church missed her and felt her absence like a missing part of its own body. The timing could not have been worse. She had been managing a difficult week and had invited a friend over specifically for support, and the visit undid what ground she had gained, sending her back into a depression she had only just begun to climb out of. The same couple tried again later, more subtly, though by then a move had made her harder to find, which she calls, without qualification, the best decision she made.
The cost of seven years
The author is plain about what leaving actually felt like, and this account keeps to the facts she gave rather than adding detail she did not. She describes depression, loneliness, a sense of rejection, and a broader feeling that years of effort in her life had come to nothing, all compounded by giving seven years to an institution she had believed cared about her. This is offered here as a factual record of a difficult period the author was working through at the time of writing, not as a diagnosis of her, and the account does not indicate any specific danger to herself.
“They’ve destroyed me for everything else, so why not?”
The most striking line in the testimony is the one the author turns on herself. She admits to feeling a pull back toward the very church that had hurt her, reasoning, in a moment of dark honesty, that since it had already ruined everything else in her life she might as well return to it too. What stopped her, she says, was not resolve but fear, the memory of the pain and control strong enough to keep her from the front door even when the urge to go back was strongest. That pull is not unique to this author or this group; exit counselors and researchers of high-control religious systems have long documented the same pattern, a former member drawn back toward the source of harm precisely because the group was, for years, the only place that met needs it had also spent years creating. Naming that pattern here is not a diagnosis of this particular author. It is an acknowledgment that what she describes is a recognized and survivable part of leaving, not a personal failing.
An update on leaving the Potter’s House: undoing the doctrine
The author added a postscript to her own testimony, and it reads as a genuinely different register from the first half, calmer, more forward-looking, still honest about the difficulty. Her core faith, she says, was intact. What she was still working through was everything built on top of it, doctrine she describes as burned into memory and now in need of deliberate unlearning, along with a long list of minor behaviors the church had treated as serious sin without, she notes pointedly, ever actually citing Scripture to support the standard. That detail, rules enforced with the weight of doctrine but without a single supporting verse, is the same complaint documented from an entirely different Door congregation in another 1998 testimony and echoed again in Clement Okusi’s later survival guide. Three witnesses, three continents, one recurring detail: rules that functioned as sin without ever being shown to be sin.
The update ends on genuinely ordinary good news, which is its own kind of evidence: a new job, a new relationship, old friendships maintained, a conscious decision to look forward rather than replay the past. She had searched her own city for a support group and found nothing suitable, a gap this site’s own support resources exist specifically to close. By chance, though, she reconnected with a fellow ex-member she had first met years earlier at a Potter’s House conference, and the prospect of a phone call with someone who understood the experience firsthand was, in her own account, something to look forward to rather than dread.
Why this testimony still matters
There is no lawsuit here, no contract, no named pastor, nothing a reporter could verify against a court file. What there is instead is the part of the record institutional documents cannot supply: what the weeks after leaving actually feel like, the harassment that continues even after leadership claims to have called it off, and the strange gravitational pull back toward the source of the harm. What follows is the slow, unglamorous work of rebuilding a life and a theology on the other side. Read alongside the doctrinal and legal record gathered elsewhere on this site, it is the missing chapter.
Sources and further reading
- “Leaving the Potter’s House,” testimony by a former member from Australia, December 1998; archived at the Cult Education Institute and its companion archive
- On the same undocumented rules elsewhere in the network, see another 1998 Door member testimony and Clement Okusi’s guide
