This report ran in the Waikato Times on May 8, 2008, two days before the fuller account examined in Dead Pastor’s Past Haunts Church, and it captures Louise Watson’s first extended interview after her husband Richard’s stabbing death in Perth. Where the later piece is dominated by the current Hamilton pastor’s rebuttal, this one is almost entirely her own voice, and it is more complicated, and more human, than a simple denunciation of Potter’s House CFM.
Disputing how the stabbing happened
Watson pushed back directly on a suggestion, attributed to a source the paper did not name, that her husband may have provoked the confrontation that killed him. She said the couple had been invited guests at the party, held for her daughter’s partner’s cousin’s twenty-first birthday, that there had been no fight beforehand, and that her fifty-year-old husband and the man later held on a wilful murder charge had never met before that night.
Twenty years, and a change of heart
She described her husband as calm, kind, and gentle, a loving father and grandfather who had come to recognize, in hindsight, that his own 1990s teaching in Hamilton, including the anti-gay film screenings that first drew public attention to the congregation, had caused real harm. The couple had spent twenty years total with Potter’s House CFM, fourteen of them building the Hamilton congregation from nothing to roughly two hundred parishioners, before leaving in 1998 around the same time as what she recalled as hundreds of other departing couples. Before they left, she said, they had confronted church leaders about certain teachings, and that confrontation, in her words, did not go down well; she declined to say specifically what those teachings were.
“Very controlling, to the point of being a cult”
Her own summary of why they finally left was direct: the fellowship, in her words, had become “very controlling, to the point of being a cult.” That, she said, was the reason they resigned from the organisation. Asked whether she and her husband had been brainwashed by the network’s leadership, she answered plainly that they largely had been, while still noting that the church’s evangelical intensity, preaching the gospel in forms other congregations did not attempt, was part of what had drawn them in originally.
Genuine good, and the wrong way to do it
She was careful not to reduce twenty years to a single verdict. Her husband had labored for very little money, and the couple had done real good for people struggling with drug addiction and for those in prison. Her own summary held both halves together without flinching from either: they had done real Christian work, and they had gone about it the wrong way. She added that her husband was no longer anti-gay by the time of his death, and that the couple had made gay friends of their own in Perth, describing themselves as far more open than they had once been.
An apology, and a hard road afterward
Watson offered an apology, on her own behalf and her late husband’s, to anyone connected to Potter’s House, whether inside the church or among its critics, whom they had harmed while ministering there, saying they had acted with good intentions even where the results had not matched them. She said the couple had found it very difficult to rebuild their lives in Perth after leaving the congregation behind.
The funeral, and an unexpected testimony
She said no one from Potter’s House or CFM leadership had offered the family condolences after her husband’s death, though some former members of the congregation did attend the funeral. What moved her most, she said, came from an unlikely direction: people her husband had previously had serious fallings out with called the family, devastated by the news, saying that without him they would not still be alive. Whatever the record shows about his later teaching and the harm he came to regret, that testimony stands alongside it, offered by people with no reason to flatter his memory.
Why this Potters House CFM account still matters
Read next to the current pastor’s rebuttal published two days later, this earlier interview leaves at least one genuine discrepancy on the record rather than resolving it. Watson says no one from the church’s leadership reached out after her husband’s death, while the later report has the current pastor naming a Rotorua pastor and a parish member who did make contact. Both accounts cannot be entirely correct as stated, and this record does not adjudicate between them. What this earlier piece adds that the later one does not is the fuller, more conflicted human account: a woman describing real love, real regret, a real apology, and a genuinely startling word from people her husband had once fallen out with, that he had saved their lives.
A note on this article’s date
This report is dated here to its verified original publication of May 8, 2008, rather than the January 2009 date that appears on some archived copies of the page, which reflects a later editorial update to the article rather than its original run.
Sources and further reading
- “Pastor regretted ‘cult’ links,” Waikato Times, via Stuff.co.nz, May 8, 2008
- On the current pastor’s rebuttal two days later, see Dead Pastor’s Past Haunts Church
