My father, Dennis Crosby, spent 37 years inside The Fellowship before he got out. In his chapter of a published anthology of former-member memoirs, he tells a short story about a friend named Mike, a man he served with in the Gulf. Mike eventually had to choose between the Potter’s House and his security clearance. Mike chose the clearance.
A friend named Mike
My father met Mike in the military and brought him around The Fellowship. Both were stationed in Germany in the early 1990s. Mike had questions early. He once asked Dennis Crosby how he could be sure Wayman Mitchell was trustworthy. So Crosby pointed to the big-name preachers who followed Mitchell. He said the founder had to be on the level. When Mike returned to the States, he landed at a Potter’s House near Fort Bragg. Still, he summed the place up in five words: “My pastor is an idiot.” He also described prayer meetings where the congregation “prayed judgment on people who opposed the church.” My father had never heard of such a thing. It sounded, he wrote, satanic.
The FBI, El Paso, and a security clearance
Later, Mike moved on to a Texas church led by a pastor named Paul Stephens, the Potter’s House in El Paso. After 9/11, by Dennis Crosby’s account, someone warned Mike that the FBI was looking into that church. So he would have to stop attending or lose his security clearance. His job required it. So he left, moved to Oklahoma, and took a civilian government job. My father took it hard at the time. He was still a believer. Even so, he could not understand why Mike would leave The Fellowship, not until Mike explained the part about the FBI.
