Potter’s House pastors, and anyone who held a leadership position under them — associate pastors, directors, board members, conference speakers — bear a responsibility that a rank-and-file member does not: to acknowledge and repent of the harm they caused, and not only to recount the harm they suffered. The two are not in tension. A person can be wronged by the system and have wronged others inside it, and honest testimony names both. This article makes the case that leaving The Potter’s House does not discharge a former leader’s account; it opens it. The Potter’s House is the flagship name of the churches under Christian Fellowship Ministries (CFM), which also operate as The Door, Victory Chapel, and Lighthouse.
The subject was raised by a former pastor who wrote at length about his years in a Fellowship church, where he had served as an associate pastor and board member before he and his wife were pushed out. He made a sound point, and framed it around some claims that do not hold, so they need separating cleanly before building on the part that does.
What Potter’s House pastors owe that members do not
His argument was this: the men who now describe the abuse they endured were, many of them, leaders with ambition, and some of them dealt out the same treatment they now denounce, without ever saying so. He did not exempt himself. “I live every day with the names and faces of people that I hurt,” he wrote, believing at the time it was godly ministry. That posture, a former leader holding himself to account rather than filing only a grievance, is the right one, and Scripture requires it of leaders specifically.
James states the standard plainly: “My brethren, be not many masters, knowing that we shall receive the greater condemnation” (James 3:1, KJV). The word rendered “masters” is teachers — those who take up spiritual authority over others answer for it more strictly, not less. A man who stood in a Fellowship pulpit, disciplined members, approved or denied marriages, and enforced the giving standards does not get to set that ledger down the day he leaves. He carries a heavier one than the member who only obeyed.
Why repentance is the point, not condemnation
A Christian reader may hear a call for former leaders to confess as a call to pile shame on people who have already lost their church, their friends, and often their families. It is the opposite. “He that covereth his sins shall not prosper: but whoso confesseth and forsaketh them shall have mercy” (Proverbs 28:13, KJV). The proverb frames confession as the door to mercy, not the entrance to punishment. Covering the harm is what fails; naming and forsaking it is what heals, both for the one who caused it and for the ones who still carry it. Healing that skips the confession is the same evasion the system trained, moved outside the walls.
The standard applies to former members too. Many who were born into The Door sang in the choir, acted on the drama team, or played in a band. They did not pastor, but they propagated the culture — repeating its lines, keeping its standards, and treating people who questioned it the way they had been taught to. Naming what a member received at the church’s hands is only half of an honest account. The other half is naming what that member handed on before knowing better.
Where the argument is misused
The same true point can be turned into a weapon, and this is where the argument parts ways with that former pastor. He used it to suggest that the former members who spoke to the press wore their halos falsely, that reporters were chiefly out to attack Christianity, and that the “cult” label does not fit. Each of those is a separate claim, and the call for leaders to repent does not carry any of them.
It does not follow that because some who testify were also perpetrators, the testimony is discredited — the abuse a person names is not made false by the abuse that person committed. Nor does it follow that pressing former leaders to own their part relieves the institution of its own account; the pattern by which churches avoid confronting abuse is not answered by redistributing blame onto the people who left. And it does not follow that the label question is settled by calling the group merely “cultish”; where The Potter’s House sits on the high-control-group-to-cult spectrum is a separate inquiry with its own evidence.
One more distinction matters, and it is the reason not to adopt that former pastor’s harder edge. Responsibility scales with authority. A high-control church diminishes the culpability of those it forms — that is what the control is for — so the call to repent falls heaviest on the men who held the most power and lightest on the members who were shaped by them, and it never lands on the victim. Used to flatten those degrees, “everyone was guilty too” becomes one more way to protect the top of the structure. Used with care, it asks the most of those who were given the most, which is the biblical order.
What honest leadership testimony looks like
The New Testament does not treat naming wrongdoing as unloving. Paul named Hymenaeus, Philetus, Alexander, and Demas, and John named Diotrephes; the biblical pattern for naming those who harm the flock is well established. But Paul turned the same candor on himself, calling himself the chief of sinners, and that self-application is the piece former Fellowship leaders most often drop. The standard is not “expose others.” It is “cover nothing, beginning with your own hands.”
A former leader who wants to help the people still inside can do one thing no victim’s account can do: testify against the doctrine and the culture from the position of the man who once preached it, and say plainly where he was wrong to. That testimony is worth more than any outsider’s, and it costs more, which is why so little of it exists. The invitation is open. Accounts from former members who took exactly this step have already been published. Leaving The Potter’s House ends a man’s membership. It does not end his responsibility for what he did with it.
