In the spring of 1989, the CBS news program 48 Hours, then anchored by Dan Rather, sent a crew to an apartment in Anchorage and was given cameras-rolling access to a forced intervention. The subject was the Potter’s House deprogramming of a fourteen-year-old boy named Aaron. His mother, Marna Perrin, believed she had lost him to a Christian Fellowship Ministries (CFM) congregation that called itself The Potter’s House. The intervention ran across several days and roughly forty-four hours of argument. The New York Times reviewed the broadcast the morning after it aired, and an Anchorage newspaper had reported the same custody fight weeks before it reached a national audience. The film is a primary source, which is why the case still matters: it caught The Fellowship, and the man who founded it, on a record neither could edit afterward.
Concede the method was fraught
Start with the part that should trouble anyone. Coercive deprogramming was a real and contested practice, and this Potter’s House deprogramming showed why. A former member named Mark Workman, a two-hundred-twenty-pound weightlifter, traveled with the deprogrammer Rick Ross. By the film’s own account, he was there to keep the boy from walking out of the apartment while the argument ran for two days. Holding a fourteen-year-old in a room until he abandons his beliefs raises ethical and legal questions that the critics of deprogramming did not invent, and the program paused to air a brief case for and against the method. The courts spent the following decade narrowing what interventionists could lawfully do, and Ross himself later abandoned forced intervention with adults. None of that should be waved away to score a point against the church.
What the Potter’s House deprogramming was responding to
The method is not the origin of the problem. Strip the deprogramming away and ask what had put a mother in the position of hiring one. By the time the cameras arrived, Aaron had run from home, had hidden in a baptismal tank behind the church altar, and had come to believe that Satan possessed his own mother. Police confirmed Marna Perrin’s legal right to hold her son, a minor. He had reached the church from a troubled history: a seventh-grade drug arrest, a forty-five-day stay in rehabilitation, and an expulsion from school. A teacher in the film described the trade plainly, saying the boy had gone “from the high of drugs to the high of God.” A former member, Beverly Carlson, said the church was grooming him to preach and had made him its number-one boy among the teenagers he was sent to recruit. This is the appeal the network captured without quite explaining it. The church took a vulnerable adolescent, offered him certainty and a new family, and taught him that the woman who raised him now belonged to the devil.
What the Anchorage paper had already established
Months before CBS arrived, the local press had laid out the same case in plainer terms. In March 1989 the Anchorage Daily News reported that Marna had joined the Potter’s House after a hard divorce, hoping for a spiritual home. She had left within the year, once the sermons turned relentless about the devil and her eight-year-old began having nightmares. She told the paper that when she stopped attending, the boy’s distress turned acute and he spoke of not wanting to go on living at home. Her leaving made her a “backslider.” A former member, Beverly Carlson, said rumors then followed that Marna had abused her children, and the pastor warned members to avoid her. Carlson also said she had overheard a church member, Henry Bates, discussing taking custody of Aaron and mapping out a life for him. When the boy ran from home in late January, it was to Bates’s house that he went.
The dispute reached a courtroom. The district attorney declined to prosecute the pastor, Bob Overson, and Bates for harboring a runaway. The two then signed a legal stipulation that they would not harbor Aaron, entice him away from his mother, or interfere with her parental rights. Rick Ross, who told the paper he had studied this network since 1983, called it a “destructive Bible group” that breaks up families, and he named the tactic directly. Because the churches know they cannot win custody of a minor, he said, they work to make the home untenable until a parent burns out. That is the same legal reality that, the same year in Orange County, California, ran the other way once a court rather than a parent held custody. Overson denied all of it, telling the paper there was “no ball and chain around people’s legs” at his church.
A church that would not be seen
One detail deserves its own line. The church’s officials, including the Anchorage pastor Bob Overson, refused interviews and refused to let the crew film a service. The only footage from inside came from sermons someone had recorded in secret, heavy with talk of the devil and of enemies. The refusal was a matter of principle for the founder. In his authorized biography, In Pursuit of Destiny (Ian Wilson, 1996), Mitchell calls reporters “pea-brained, illiterate and lazy” and accuses them of carrying hidden cameras into churches to manufacture a damning sound bite. Set the secrecy beside the rest of The Fellowship’s record: a campus event that hides its sponsor, a ledger kept from the membership, and now a church that would not open its doors to a camera. The instinct is consistent. Control what outsiders are permitted to know.
The test the boy was never taught
Scripture asks for the one thing the church had trained out of him. John writes, “Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world” (1 John 4:1). The Greek verb behind try, dokimazo, is the word for assaying metal, testing a coin to see whether it is genuine. The church had taught Aaron to run that test on his mother and to find a demon in her. It had never taught him to run it on the church that told him to look. That asymmetry is the entire mechanism: discernment is aimed outward, at family, at the world, at anyone who raises a doubt, and never inward, at the leadership doing the aiming. A group that can locate Satan in a grieving mother but never in its own conduct has not sharpened anyone’s discernment. It has commandeered it.
Who Rick Ross is, then and now
An honest account of the Potter’s House deprogramming has to be honest about the man running it. Rick Alan Ross, born in 1952 and paid three hundred and fifty dollars a day plus expenses, was by 1989 a full-time deprogrammer working alongside the Cult Awareness Network, and his method then was confrontational and, with adults, sometimes coercive. That approach later cost him. In 1991 he took part in the forced deprogramming of an adult Pentecostal believer, Jason Scott. A jury acquitted him of unlawful imprisonment, but a 1995 civil suit produced a heavy judgment against him, after which he stopped doing involuntary interventions with adults. None of it is hidden, and his own Wikipedia entry records it. What he built next is the part that reaches the present: in 1996 he founded the archive now known as the Cult Education Institute, which reporters and courts treat as a serious reference and which still lists this network by name. One profile called him the country’s preeminent deprogrammer. The man who walked into that Anchorage apartment was documenting The Fellowship when almost no one else would.
How Wayman Mitchell answered the cameras
The most revealing footage around the case is not of the boy but of the founder. When local cameras covered a protest outside a Potter’s House revival in Phoenix, where former members carried signs calling the group a cult, Wayman Mitchell answered on the record, and he answered by attacking the messenger. He cast the protest as a conspiracy run by Ross, then reached for the one fact about Ross he thought would land: that Ross is Jewish. On camera he said that “every Jew is an antichrist,” and dismissed him as a paid mercenary and a Jewish crusader against Christianity. Weigh what that response concedes. Ross had entered cult work in the first place after a group tried to recruit residents of a Jewish nursing home where his grandmother lived, and Mitchell met a documented criticism of his church not with an answer but with the critic’s ethnicity. Former members say he went further from the pulpit, attaching a homophobic slur to the same man. The on-camera material needs no embellishment: a leader secure in his teaching does not respond to scrutiny by impugning a critic’s race.
What the protest footage documented about the group
The same coverage preserved the complaints the protesters were actually making, and they were specific rather than atmospheric. Former members described a system they called headship, under which a member surrenders ordinary decisions to the leadership set over him. One said he had given the group more than sixty thousand dollars and could get no accounting of where it went. A former member, Debbie Christensen, alleged that she was raped by a man in the church and that her pastor helped conceal it. That allegation is hers, decades old and unproven, and it is reported here as what she stated on camera rather than as a finding. Others described the constant meetings, the pressure to evangelize, and a posture in which a parent outside the church becomes a threat. The Christian Research Institute, which monitors Christian groups, declined to recommend The Potter’s House and described it as, at best, aberrant and, at worst, a church with cultic practices. By the group’s own count at the time, it ran more than five hundred branches worldwide.
What the record shows now
The reviewer who watched in 1989 was not sentimental about the result. The New York Times judged that the program had settled for a dramatic episode lifted out of a complicated life, and that it was hard to believe the boy’s troubles were behind him. That skepticism is fair, because a two-day intervention does not undo what a church spends years building, and the film closes on a story with no tidy ending. What endures is not the method but the measure of the thing: a deprogrammer had to argue a fourteen-year-old, for two days, back into recognizing his own mother as his mother. The Cult Education Institute still lists the group, former members still publish their accounts under their own names, and in 2024 Ross noted the arrival of a new book on the Potter’s House and its founder.
New book is out about the “Potter’s House” aka “Christian Fellowship Churches” founded by a former Foursquare Pentecosta preacher named Wayman Mitchell. https://t.co/6U95cu24Vp
— Rick Alan Ross (@RickAlanRoss) June 9, 2024
This archive works in that same documentary tradition, drawing on The Fellowship’s own published materials. The Potter’s House deprogramming of Aaron is one entry in a long file, and what sets it apart is that you can watch it for yourself. Hold the footage against the group’s own books and the documented cases that follow, then decide whether anything in it has been described unfairly.
This article describes the manipulation of a minor and a history of substance use. If you or a young person you know is being drawn into a high-control group, a licensed counselor with no stake in the church is the place to start. Former members of The Door and The Potter’s House can reach Stichting De Deur Uit for peer support. In the Netherlands, 113 Zelfmoordpreventie is reachable at 0800-0113 and Slachtofferhulp Nederland at 0900-0101. Readers who need help are best served by qualified professionals; this archive does not stand in for one.
