WaymanMitchell.com is run by a former member. It carries a page titled “Critics of the Potter’s House.” Buried there is an essay laying out the Potter’s House headship doctrine in the words of the man who left over it. He ran a pro-CFM apologetics site for years before he wrote it. He states plainly that Christian Fellowship Ministries demands “100% submission to headship, or you are a rebel.” He traces the teaching to the same “honor” doctrine practiced at Bethel Church in Redding, California. That claim deserves the scrutiny CFM applies to Benny Hinn. So does the Scripture used to defend it.
Credit Given Where Credit Is Due
The essay concedes something true before it turns to criticism, and the concession is worth taking seriously. CFM rejected the Toronto Blessing, the Pensacola outpouring, and the Promise Keepers movement while most of Pentecostal Australia embraced them. It calls Benny Hinn and Joel Osteen false teachers, correctly. Wayman Mitchell built a network that, by the author’s own account, kept its converts away from the prosperity gospel’s worst excesses. That is a real achievement, and pretending otherwise would not be honest.
But rejecting one error does not inoculate an organization against a different one. A church can correctly diagnose Benny Hinn’s showmanship and still build its own machine for controlling people, just with a Pentecostal vocabulary instead of a prosperity one. The essay argues CFM did exactly that with headship. CFM’s own published materials support him.
A Defender Who Changed His Mind
The essay carries more weight than a typical complaint because of who wrote it. Its author ran pottersclub.com for years, defending CFM’s doctrine in public. He describes a supernatural conversion experience and a specific conviction that God directed him to Lismore, New South Wales, shortly before he joined CFM. That conviction is why he did not walk away casually once his pastor started lying to him, the way he says others around him did. He stayed because leaving felt like defying God. Only after years of documented dishonesty from that pastor did he conclude that the doctrine holding him in place, not God, was the actual problem.
Former members of The Door in Zwolle, the Netherlands, describe the same thing under a different pastor, in a different language, across a different ocean. The mechanism this Australian author describes is the same one. Placement doctrine and headship doctrine are not two separate teachings in CFM. They are the same claim applied twice: God put you in this specific church, and God’s chosen man now holds that same portion of divine authority over the rest of your decisions.
What the Potter’s House Headship Doctrine Actually Requires
The essay lays out headship’s operating rules without softening them. Pastors in CFM, he writes, carry near-royal deference whether they have earned it or not. Questioning a pastor’s decision gets treated as rebellion against God Himself, especially when that pastor is out of line or in sin. The catchphrase touch God’s anointed fell out of use inside CFM even as the practice it described stayed fully intact. CFM runs on a tiered chain of command. Wayman Mitchell sits at the top, above a board he appointed and claims accountability to. Below that come national, state, territory, and area leaders, then local pastors, then the members underneath them.
That structure is not unique to one Australian congregation. A former CFM pastor’s 2003 letter to Wayman Mitchell describes a written contract requiring pastors to submit their ministry to Mitchell or his successors and surrender church assets on demand. That letter is reproduced in our coverage of his correspondence with Fellowship leadership. Testimony collected in our reporting on Mitchell’s leadership style describes him as a man who expected absolute obedience from everyone inside the CFM structure, pastors included. A third account, documented in our coverage of the placement doctrine’s role in the Evert Valk case, traces headship back to the placement teaching underneath it. Three independent accounts, spanning three continents and five decades of CFM history, describe the identical mechanism. That convergence is itself evidence.
Their Own Manual Disagrees
CFM’s internal training manual makes the strongest case against headship doctrine, and CFM wrote it. John Gooding’s Helps and Guidelines, distributed to CFM pastors, condemns the so-called shepherding movement for requiring ministers to submit to a board of elders under the banner of covering or headship. Gooding calls that practice, in his own words, “dangerous, deceptive and unscriptural.” He goes further still. Biblical revelation, he writes, prohibits domination and the lording of authority over individual lives. A pastor governs the church, not the house of the individual members within it.
Gooding aimed that warning upward, at movements asking pastors to submit to boards above them. He did not apply it downward, to what CFM asks of the members sitting under their own pastor. But the mechanism he condemned, a leader claiming spiritual authority over decisions that belong to the individual, is the same mechanism the Australian critic describes CFM enforcing in its own congregations. CFM’s manual calls headship dangerous when practiced against pastors. It offers no comparable warning for what happens when the same doctrine gets practiced against everyone else.
What the Text Actually Says
Jesus addressed this exact dynamic directly, and He did not split the difference. When His disciples argued over rank, He named the pattern and forbade His followers to imitate it.
But Jesus called them unto him, and said, Ye know that the princes of the Gentiles exercise dominion over them, and they that are great exercise authority upon them. But it shall not be so among you: but whosoever will be great among you, let him be your minister; and whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant. (Matthew 20:25-27, KJV)
The Greek verb behind “exercise dominion,” katakyrieuo, means to bring someone under one’s power, to subjugate. Jesus used it to describe how Gentile rulers treat their subjects, then forbade it among His disciples in the same breath. The word He chose for what should replace it, diakonos, means a table-waiter, a servant. That is a wide gap between a king demanding obedience and a servant clearing plates, and Jesus placed church leadership on the servant’s side of it.
Peter, writing to pastors directly, used that same Greek verb, and forbade it a second time.
Neither as being lords over God’s heritage, but being ensamples to the flock. (1 Peter 5:3, KJV)
Katakyrieuo, again. Two apostolic sources, decades apart, condemn the identical behavior with the identical word. Peter’s alternative is not obedience but example, typos in the Greek, a pattern a congregation is free to imitate, not a rank it must submit to.
Jesus made a second point that CFM’s tiered chain of command runs directly against.
But be not ye called Rabbi: for one is your Master, even Christ; and all ye are brethren. (Matthew 23:8, KJV)
Brethren is a flat word. It admits no levels. Wayman Mitchell, a national leader, an area leader, and the newest convert in the pew are all, in Christ’s own description, brethren. The seven-tier structure the critic describes, board, national, state, territory, area, local pastor, member, is therefore an organizational chart. It is not a biblical mandate. CFM is free to run itself that way. It is not free to claim Scripture requires it.
The Verse Retooled to Silence a Question
Headship doctrine leans hardest on one Old Testament verse, and the essay names it directly.
For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry. (1 Samuel 15:23, KJV)
Samuel spoke that line to King Saul after Saul disobeyed an explicit command that God delivered through a prophet: destroy Amalek completely, keep nothing. Saul kept the best of the plunder and the king alive, then lied about it to Samuel’s face. The Hebrew word translated “witchcraft” is qesem, divination, the practice of seeking hidden knowledge outside God’s revealed word. Saul’s sin was substituting his own judgment for a command God had already made explicit through a named prophet.
That is not what happens when a church member in Lismore or Zwolle disagrees with a pastor’s decision about a sermon series, a marriage, or a career. No prophet has delivered an unambiguous command from God naming who should marry whom or which city a family should live in. When a pastor’s personal preference gets dressed in Samuel’s words to Saul, the doctrine borrows the weight of a specific, one-time divine command and applies it to an ordinary disagreement between two Christians. CFM’s own critic makes the same point: the verse gets deployed constantly against people who leave, stripped of the context that would tell anyone why Samuel actually said it. He is right, and the context is not hard to check.
The Doctrine Answers Its Own Question
Go back to the foundation the Potter’s House headship doctrine stands on. God places each member in a specific CFM congregation, and the pastor holds delegated authority over that placement. If that claim is true, the doctrine cannot explain its own escape hatch. Pastors in CFM regularly remove members they judge to be rebellious, unrepentant, or simply inconvenient. If God alone assigns a member’s place, no pastor has standing to reassign it. Every expulsion CFM leadership has carried out concedes the point this article makes. Authority over a believer’s church membership does not belong to a man, headship doctrine notwithstanding, or the men enforcing that doctrine could not overturn it the moment it suited them.
The Australian essay ends without a tidy resolution, and that is honest. Its author still believes God spoke to him and sent him toward CFM. He does not regret that part. He regrets what men built on top of it, out of a handful of verses about kings, prophets, and a rebellion that had nothing to do with disagreeing with a pastor. Brethren does not mean rebel. A servant who washes feet is not a king who demands them washed.
