Eight years before Charisma reported that 160 churches had walked away from Christian Fellowship Ministries, the same magazine ran the article that established nearly every fact and every defense that later reporting would recycle. J. Lee Grady’s December 1993 profile, “Potter’s House Leader Defends Group,” is the primary document behind material this site has already drawn on secondhand in the account of the 2001 Potter’s House exodus. Having the original in full changes little about what was reported there, which holds up accurately, but it adds real texture: Wayman Mitchell’s own words explaining himself, a third senior pastor’s departure not covered elsewhere on this site, and the earliest public airing of a defense pattern that would still be running when Thomas Cunningham wrote his withdrawal letter three decades later.
An empire that called itself asleep
Grady’s numbers, current as of 1993, put the network at roughly 800 churches in 51 countries, run from Prescott under the names Christian Fellowship Ministries, the Door, Victory Chapel, and Potter’s House. Mitchell, 63 at the time, described his own creation as a loose fellowship rather than a denomination, and characterized its low public profile as a virtue rather than an accident: the group had simply never sought attention. One detail here is worth flagging rather than quietly repeating. Grady’s article dates Mitchell’s break from the Foursquare denomination to 1985, bringing roughly 150 congregations with him. Other sources gathered on this site, including denominational history and family testimony, consistently place that split in 1983. This article does not resolve the discrepancy; it simply notes that Grady’s 1993 reporting used a different year and a smaller starting count than the figure generally accepted elsewhere in this record.
How the Potter’s House leader defends the group in his own words
Asked directly about the authoritarianism charge that had already dogged the group for years, Mitchell did not engage the substance. He turned the word back on the questioner, asking rhetorically what authoritarianism was even supposed to mean, since, in his framing, “the family is authoritarian.” It is a short answer and a revealing one, treating an accusation about institutional power as though it were an accusation about ordinary domestic structure. It let him skip past the actual complaint, that pastors and members inside his churches described something considerably more totalizing than a strict household. He was more forthcoming about intent than substance elsewhere, describing the church’s preaching style as old-fashioned Pentecostalism paired with strict moral standards, which was true as far as it went and answered a question nobody watching the exodus of his own senior pastors had actually asked.
Three pastors, three departures
By 1993 the pattern Mitchell was being asked to explain already had a track record. Colorado pastor Ron Jones, who had worked alongside Mitchell since the early 1970s, severed his ties in 1990, and at least a hundred pastors followed him out. Larry Neville, the Asia missionary whose own 1990 resignation letter is documented elsewhere on this site, told Grady that after his 1991 break he received roughly forty letters from former colleagues demanding he repent. A second missionary, John McGovern, then serving in Hong Kong, gave Grady the detail that sharpens the story considerably: Filipino church leaders were instructed to publicly declare that they renounced Larry Neville, with his departure framed to them as being on the order of Lucifer’s rebellion against God. Neville’s own summary of the cost was plain, that friends stopped speaking to him, and he attributed the whole pattern to what he called the group’s overemphasis on spiritual authority, all while continuing, at the time of the interview, to oversee dozens of churches he had planted across the Philippines, Taiwan, Singapore, and Malaysia.
A third pastor’s exit adds a data point not documented elsewhere on this site. Howard Pennington had pulled his own congregation in Kingman, Arizona, out of the network that year, and he was careful in how he framed the break, allowing that the group did not fit the textbook profile of a cult while still describing an atmosphere in which Mitchell’s word functioned, in practice, as something close to command. Leaving, he said, was what finally let him see how much larger the body of Christ was than The Fellowship he had spent years inside. Mitchell, for his part, told Grady he felt betrayed by his colleagues’ departures and described the wave of exits as an assault on the structure he had built.
Harold Warner’s defense, and its own concession
The most substantial defense in the piece came from Harold Warner, then 43 and pastoring a well-regarded, eight-hundred-member Tucson congregation built on concerts, block parties, films, and gang-outreach events rather than street confrontation. Warner asked readers to see the network’s excesses as the product of enthusiasm rather than design, the overreach of young former hippies zealous to win converts rather than a deliberate strategy of control. He pushed back hard on the word cult itself as a label thrown around far too loosely to mean anything precise, insisting that what critics called excessive control was simply a church holding its members accountable. What makes Warner’s defense worth reading closely, rather than dismissing as simple loyalty, is the admission folded inside it: he conceded outright that the network had been guilty of elitism, attributing it to ignorance and zeal rather than malice, which is a considerably more candid answer than his own leader offered in the same article.
Why this 1993 profile still matters
Read as the source behind later reporting rather than as an isolated clipping, this article shows how early the defense script was written and how little it changed. Deny the label, minimize the departures as personal loyalty rather than principled objection, let a more sympathetic pastor concede a soft fault while the founder concedes nothing at all, and treat continued growth as its own rebuttal. That is the same sequence Charisma would report again in 2001, and it is recognizably the same sequence running through Greg Mitchell’s response to Thomas Cunningham more than two decades after that. The specific charges changed. The reflex to answer them did not.
Sources and further reading
- J. Lee Grady, “Potter’s House Leader Defends Group,” Charisma, December 1993; archived in the Cult Education Institute reference files
- On the 2001 follow-up reporting this article underlies, see the Potter’s House exodus
- On Larry Neville’s own account, see his 1990 letter; on the founding date discrepancy, see the founding of Christian Fellowship Ministries
