Written in November 2002 and subtitled “tale of an Aussie who escaped from the clutches of Yankee Imperialist religion,” this is one of the more detailed testimonies gathered from Potter’s House church Australia, spanning twelve years and two congregations. It was told by a man converted in the early 1970s who arrived at The Fellowship already an ordained pastor rather than a young convert looking for his first faith.
An appealing movement, and a friend’s early irritation
He had pioneered a Foursquare congregation in a small coastal town in Western Australia, back when The Potter’s House was still part of the Foursquare Gospel movement and growing faster than any other Foursquare congregation nearby. The preaching was sharp, the converts genuinely zealous, and the whole atmosphere appealed to a young pastor shaped by 1970s culture. He eventually handed his own church to a Potter’s House-trained disciple and spent several years simply attending the first Perth assembly. He and his wife kept their early reservations to themselves rather than unsettle others: they noticed the group’s habit of labeling anyone from another congregation religious or a Lukie, sometimes doubting outright whether Christians elsewhere were even saved, which stung him personally, since his own years of prior ministry were waved off with the same dismissive label.
Twelve years, and a family stretched thin
Those doubts were mostly set aside in the drive to prove himself worthy of being sent out to pioneer a Potter’s House congregation, an honor conferred at highly motivational annual conferences. He and his wife were eventually planted on Australia’s East Coast, well resourced with equipment and advertising funds, and the church grew quickly under a schedule he calls frenetic: two Sunday services, a midweek service, Tuesday Bible study, Friday and Saturday outreaches, and regular weeklong revival meetings, all while raising four children. After eight years of that pace, and some internal conflict, he and his wife stepped back and returned to the Perth mother church to rest, and it was only once they had the free time to actually look at what surrounded them that the discomfort he had suppressed for years came into focus.
Marriage by decree, neckties, and a television ban
What crystallized his discomfort were the specific rules he had quietly ignored while pastoring, which he watched enforced with real rigor once he was back under direct oversight. Private wedding receptions were barred; couples were required to marry during a Sunday service, and brides were even forbidden to walk down the aisle. Neckties were compulsory for every man on the platform, down to the band and the ushers. Leaders, their wives, and even chorus members were forbidden to own a television or attend a movie, with any ordinary Christian who owned one dismissed as a Lukie, a rule he calls flagrantly hypocritical since he watched leaders themselves watch television in motel rooms whenever they traveled. Women were barred from any public expression except in front of other women, and even that drew frowns. None of it could be questioned without risking one’s position, public ridicule, and the label of rebel.
An American church wearing an Australian address
He is specific about the network’s cultural character, and the title he gave his own testimony captures it exactly. Despite twenty years in Australia and more than a hundred congregations, the senior leadership remained American, and members were fed a constant stream of praise for the United States over their own country. One Australian pastor was publicly castigated at a conference simply for preaching a message of national pride, invoking the spirit of the Australian diggers at Gallipoli and in Vietnam. Wayman Mitchell himself, by this account, taught that Australians were naturally shy and withheld, in need of American can-do spirit to be properly fired up, a teaching this author, in his own words, calls something red-blooded Australians endured for far too long.
Elitism and isolation inside Potter’s House church Australia
He recalls a senior pastor telling an Australian conference that the fellowship had never claimed to be the only true church, only that it possessed an understanding of the Church no one else had, a distinction without much practical difference. It produced exactly the sense that they alone were the real thing, a mentality he describes as typical throughout the network. Friendships outside the fellowship were treated with open suspicion, and outside criticism was met with public ridicule from the pulpit, which he says cultivated a martyr complex among members he now regards as genuinely dangerous, the same self-image, he notes, that has preceded self-destructive behavior in other closed religious groups.
A sermon, a resignation, and being erased
The breaking point arrived while he was away on a two-week family holiday. He returned to Perth to learn that a pastor friend in Sydney had left the fellowship and taken his entire congregation with him, unheard of in Australia at that point; within three months of his writing this testimony, three more churches had followed. The senior pastor, named in his account as Mike Mastin, preached a sermon declaring that the departing man had effectively lost his mind, a message the author felt was aimed partly at himself, since he had missed a few meetings during the holiday. He walked out at the sermon’s end and told his wife he was never coming back, and he never did.
Too wary of Mastin’s temper to confront him face to face in his own office, he instead mailed a letter of resignation without explanation, hoping to meet somewhere neutral like a coffee shop instead. The letter never received any response at all, not after twelve years of ministry and two churches added to the network, which he describes starkly: it was as though he had ceased to exist. Only one pastor friend risked contacting him afterward; that friend and his wife have since left the fellowship as well. These specific claims about Mastin’s temper and silence are this author’s own account, offered from one side of a professional relationship that ended abruptly, and no response from Mastin appears in the record reviewed here.
“The sound of cracking whips”
What stayed with him longest was a single word. Still inside the fellowship, he once prayed asking God directly what was troubling him, and the only answer he says he heard in his spirit was control. A friend who left around the same time gave the network its own private name afterward, calling it the Regime, or simply the Firm, and describing the whole experience as “the sound of cracking whips.”
Why this testimony still matters
He closes without personal grudge against the sincere people still inside, describing them as the genuine fruit of a movement bound by legalism, elitism, authoritarian leadership, and isolation rather than by any deliberate individual cruelty. His invitation to anyone still reading from inside Potter’s House church Australia is plain and unadorned: look closely at what surrounds you, talk to people outside the network, and know that a genuinely loving Christian church exists beyond its walls, one he says he would recommend without reservation.
Sources and further reading
- “No Longer a Redneck,” testimony by a former Australian Potter’s House pastor, November 2002; archived at the Cult Education Institute reference files
