In May 1989, Northern Arizona University’s student paper, the Lumberjack, covered an event that had drawn pickets to the campus gym. The flyers promoted a ringside evening with former heavyweight contender Earnie Shavers, an inside look at boxing with video footage. They left something out. The sponsor was the Potter’s House Pathfinders chapter, the student arm of the Flagstaff Potter’s House. That church is part of The Fellowship that Wayman Mitchell founded in Prescott. About two hundred people came for boxing. What they got was an altar call.
What Potter’s House Pathfinders left off the flyers
Take the legitimate version first. Christians evangelize, and that is no scandal. Inviting a famous convert to tell his story is a normal way to do it, and Earnie Shavers’ testimony may have been entirely sincere. None of that is the problem. The problem is the omission. The Potter’s House Pathfinders name, and the church behind it, appeared nowhere in the advertising. The flyers sold the night as a secular look at boxing. People who would never have walked into a Potter’s House service walked into the gym instead. Partway through the boxing talk, the evening turned into a sermon and an appeal to come forward and be saved.
The reasoning behind the disguise
Why hide the sponsor? A former member, Dave Diver, supplied the answer the church gave itself. Fewer people would have come, he said, if the event had been billed as religious. He recounted the logic he had heard inside the church: “Would you tell a fish what you’re baiting the hook with?” The justification borrowed a scriptural tone. Believers are to be fishers of men, the saying went, citing Jesus’ call in Matthew 4:19. Concede the verse. It is real, and evangelism is a command. What the verse does not contain is the hook, the bait, or the concealment. Jesus called men openly and told them plainly what he asked of them.
What Paul said about hidden methods
The New Testament treats this question directly, and not in the church’s favor. Paul described his own preaching as the opposite of concealment. He had “renounced the hidden things of dishonesty, not walking in craftiness, nor handling the word of God deceitfully” (2 Corinthians 4:2). His method, he said, was “by manifestation of the truth.” Set that beside an event engineered to hide its preacher. The audience would not know who was speaking until they had taken their seats. The Potter’s House Pathfinders approach is not a bolder kind of evangelism. It is the exact practice Paul said he had renounced. A gospel that needs a disguise to get a hearing is advertising its own weakness.
The pressure once the doors closed
The format inside matched the bait. Shavers moved from boxing to a warning: get right with God before you die, and do not leave tonight unsaved, because it could be too late. Then he asked people to come forward. When few did, he asked again, and again. By the paper’s count, he made the appeal five times before two people rose. He repeated it eleven more times to draw four others. The Holy Spirit, he told the crowd, had shown him that more lives were out of order. Repeating an altar call sixteen times until the room yields is not persuasion by truth. It is persuasion by pressure, worked on people who had come to watch boxing.
The same opacity around the money
The concealment did not stop at the door. Diver was an NAU graduate who had once preached for the church. He said he gave it between fifty and sixty thousand dollars. Then he grew suspicious and asked where the money was going. For asking, he said, the church forced him out, and he wanted it to open its books. A current member offered the familiar line that tithing was encouraged but not required. The pattern is consistent. Do not tell the fish about the hook, and do not tell the donor about the ledger. An organization confident in what it is doing does not work this hard to manage what people are allowed to know.
Why the record survived
This account can be read today because Rick Ross kept it. By 1989, his files already held years of coverage of the Potter’s House Pathfinders kind of operation. They documented the churches behind it too. His archive preserves the 1989 reporting alongside decades of documentation on Christian Fellowship Ministries. The university’s own dean of students told the paper he suspected the Potter’s House was using Pathfinders as a campus foothold. He said the office of student life would look into it. The students who organized the pickets called themselves Life After Potter’s House. They had already learned what the flyers hid.
An evening sold as boxing. A sponsor kept off the page. An altar call dropped on a captive room, and a ledger no one could see. That is the shape of the Potter’s House Pathfinders night. Call it fishing if you like. Only notice that the fish were never told.
