The Potter’s House taught parents to whoop their children as an act of obedience to God, using the proverb that a father who spares the rod hates his son, and drawing on the child-rearing manuals of the American psychologist James Dobson. Corporal punishment was not a private family choice made against the church’s advice; it was taught from the platform. In documented cases the practice crossed from spanking into injury: a ruler broken on a child, a bruise shaped like a hand, a visit from social services. This is what the record shows, and where the teaching came from.
The evidence sits in four places: a book of insider humor written and published by the church’s own second generation, a Dutch television documentary that filmed former members describing it, the published anthology of former-member memoirs, and the convergent testimony of people who grew up in these churches. Former members describe being physically disciplined as children, some of them beaten with sticks, and some accounts are far harsher than others.
What Did Potter’s House Spanking Look Like?
The teaching came down from the pulpit as a chain of authority. In the 2025 documentary by the Dutch investigative program Pointer, produced by KRO-NCRV, former members of De Deur — the Dutch name for The Door, one of the church names used by The Potter’s House — described the sermon logic plainly. Parents may discipline their children, husbands may discipline their wives, and children and wives must always obey. One former member explained that his parents heard that teaching as permission to use whatever means it took to make a child obey. Another described being taught, in effect, to hit children when they would not listen.
That is the structure worth noticing. The instruction to strike children was not left to each family’s conscience. It was preached, tied to a verse, and folded into the same hierarchy of submission that governed wives and members. A parent who hit a disobedient child was following the church.
The church’s own children wrote a book about the paddle
The strongest evidence that this was a shared practice, and not a handful of families going too far, comes from The Fellowship itself. The second generation, who call themselves Potter’s House Kids, produced a self-published book of insider humor titled You Know You’re a Potter’s House Kid When…, dedicated to Wayman Mitchell. One of its sections is given over to discipline, and it opens by affirming, in the writers’ own words, a belief in “spanking to be a beneficial, not harmful, method of discipline.” The generation raised under the practice set it down as a fond and defining feature of who they are, invoking the mottoes train up a child and spare the rod as they did.
The entries are jokes, and that is what makes them evidence. The book memorializes children who cried at the sight of a wooden spoon or a drumstick in a parent’s hand, a solid oak paddle decorated with smiley faces and Scripture verses, a wooden spoon carried in the diaper bag and nicknamed the child’s hearing aid, and the boy taken out the back by his father. It records that the striking reached past the home: one entry recalls the founder’s wife and another leader’s wife spanking not only their own children but their friends, and their friends’ children too. When a group’s own children publish the paddle as a badge of belonging, the practice was neither rare nor hidden.
Where the teaching came from: James Dobson and one proverb
Two sources fed Potter’s House spanking. The first was Scripture, reduced to a single line. Proverbs 13:24 in the King James reads, “He that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes.” Former members recall that verse quoted as the whole case, the proof that a loving parent is a parent who strikes.
The second was James Dobson. Dobson, an American evangelical psychologist, published Dare to Discipline in 1970, and his manuals circulated widely among conservative churches, The Potter’s House among them. Dobson advocated spanking children from as young as 15 months to about age eight, using a switch or paddle on the buttocks, and he wrote that “pain is a marvelous purifier.” His method supplied the technique the proverb was taken to authorize: strike early, strike with an object, strike until the child yields.
Dobson’s own writing carried a limit that the documented cases ignored. He warned against harsh spanking and said it was never necessary to beat a child into submission. When former members describe rulers breaking and hand-shaped bruises, they are describing conduct past the boundary even Dobson set. The teaching kept the method and dropped the restraint.
How severe did it get?
Potter’s House spanking got severe enough to leave marks, break objects, and draw the attention of the state. The severity of Potter’s House spanking is documented in convergent testimony, meaning separate witnesses who did not coordinate report the same kind of thing.
The Pointer documentary examined physical violence directly. Across 19 interviews, its makers found that within De Deur, at least in earlier years, using violence in the strict raising of children had been normalized. One father interviewed on camera recalled working at the church’s print shop and finding, after a Sunday service, a ruler that had broken because it had been used to give his child a beating. He said he regrets how he raised his children and would have wanted to give them a gentler childhood.
A collection of former-member memoirs published in 2024 records the same pattern from inside a family. One contributor writes that in her home “the verse about not sparing the rod was taken literally,” that she was hit with objects, and that she came to fear her own parents. The same memoir describes a Sunday when a congregant asked the women to pray after a teacher noticed a bruise shaped like a hand on her daughter’s arm and called social services, and it states plainly that the writer knew of multiple Potter’s House children who were mistreated at home.
The wider body of former-member testimony matches. Members describe conference sermons that sent fathers home charged up to enforce obedience on wives and children, and recall discipline administered with belts, spoons, and switches rather than an open hand. The convergence across a documentary, a published anthology, and independent personal accounts is the finding: the harm was not the exception a single bad parent made, but a pattern the teaching produced.
“He that spareth his rod”: does the Bible command this?
A Christian reader will press the obvious point: Proverbs 13:24 is in the Bible, and it does speak of the rod. That is true, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a dodge. The book of Proverbs is wisdom literature, proverbial sayings about how life generally goes, not a code of statutes with penalties attached. The “rod” of Proverbs, the Hebrew shebet, is the shepherd’s implement of guidance and correction, and the same book uses it as a figure for discipline broadly, not a mandate to strike a toddler with a paddle until an object breaks. A rod was used to steer sheep in the right direction, not to beat them with it.
The decisive problem is that the New Testament speaks directly to Christian parents and sets the opposite emphasis. Ephesians 6:4 tells fathers to “provoke not your children to wrath,” and Colossians 3:21 warns, “Fathers, provoke not your children to anger, lest they be discouraged.” A childhood of fear, marks, and beatings administered in the name of God is the exact provocation those verses forbid. Building an entire regime of corporal punishment on one proverb, while stepping past the New Testament’s instruction to parents, is the private, selective handling of Scripture this site has documented across The Fellowship’s teaching, and the use of verses out of their context to license a practice the whole counsel of Scripture does not support.
Why it matters
A defender of The Fellowship will say that spanking was normal in the era, that the Bible mentions the rod, and that not every parent went too far. Each point holds something true. Corporal punishment was culturally common, the rod appears in Proverbs (although it means something different than what is implied by many Christians today), and some parents kept it within ordinary bounds. But the church’s own second generation published the paddle as an emblem of a Potter’s House childhood, which is not how an isolated excess is remembered, and those concessions do not reach the finding. The church taught the practice from the pulpit rather than leaving it to conscience, tied it to a chain of submission, supplied the method through Dobson, and produced documented outcomes that ordinary discipline does not: a broken ruler, a hand-shaped bruise, social services at the door.
Potter’s House spanking was taught from the platform, and some of the parents who administered it now say they would do it differently, and this article does not exist to condemn them; many were following what they were taught to believe was obedience to God. The teaching is the subject. A church that instructs parents to beat their children, hands them a technique, and normalizes it to the point that the harm goes unaddressed owns the result. The paddle has already led to at least one assault charge connected to The Fellowship. The question the reader arrived with has a plain answer: yes, The Potter’s House taught parents to beat their children, and in more cases than the church has ever accounted for, the beating left a mark.
