Not every document in this archive is a complaint against the Potter’s House. Some are corrections filed against people documenting it. In December 1998, the wife of a Praise Chapel pastor wrote to a website that had listed her fellowship as affiliated with Christian Fellowship Churches, and asked, firmly but without hostility, that the record be fixed. Praise Chapel, she wrote, was not the Potter’s House and wanted nothing to do with it. The letter that followed to explain why is worth reading for its own sake, because clearing up one mislabeling required her to describe a financial dispute, a declared enmity, and a family-splitting fallout that belongs in this record regardless of which fellowship it happened to.
Not the same organization
The author was direct about her own history. She and her husband had once been part of the Potter’s House and left in 1989, officially over financial disagreement but, by her account, really over refusing to submit to a newly assigned pastor. The label that followed was immediate and durable: out of the will of God, in rebellion, a verdict she says the network has never revised even a decade later. She was careful to be fair rather than simply bitter, conceding that the Potter’s House had genuinely helped many people even as it had wounded others, herself included, and noting that no church is perfect while adding, pointedly, that imperfection is not an excuse for wrongdoing. Her fellowship, she stressed, had once had some historical overlap with Christian Fellowship Churches, but the two organizations were not now, and should not be described as, the same thing.
The five-percent-and-five-percent dispute
The financial mechanism she described adds real texture to the tithing structure documented elsewhere on this site. Wayman Mitchell, she wrote, wanted every congregation to send five percent of its income to the church that had originally sent its pastor out, and a separate five percent to his own church in Prescott. The arithmetic turned punishing fast for new congregations still dependent on support from their planting church: a church receiving five hundred dollars toward its rent from its mother congregation would, under the policy, owe twenty-five dollars of that same money back to the mother church and another twenty-five to Prescott, a demand with no real income behind it for churches still finding their feet. Pastors who objected were not, in her telling, being disloyal so much as doing arithmetic, and Mitchell’s reaction to the pushback was severe enough that it cost the network a wave of departing churches.
Praise Chapel declared “the enemy”
What happened next is the letter’s real center of gravity. Mitchell telephoned the founder of her fellowship directly and instructed him to sever all contact with any pastor the network considered to be in rebellion. The founder refused, telling Mitchell that only God, not Mitchell, decided whom he fellowshipped with. Mitchell’s response was to declare the entire fellowship the enemy, a verdict the author calls simply silly but which nonetheless produced real and lasting damage, separating families who had once worshipped side by side. This letter does not name its fellowship’s founder, and while Praise Chapel is connected elsewhere on this site to Larry Neville’s late brother Michael, this account alone cannot confirm whether it describes the same network. What it does confirm is that the pattern used against Larry Neville personally, an order to renounce contact enforced by proclaiming the departed an enemy, was turned here against an entire sister fellowship rather than a single man.
Incuriosity as obedience
A small, almost incidental anecdote in the letter says as much about life inside the network as the larger dispute does. The author’s sister, still a member, mentioned that a couple who had been in their congregation for thirteen years had suddenly left, and when asked why, she said she did not know and considered it none of her business unless her pastor chose to volunteer the reason. The author’s own reaction, indignant that a relationship of over a decade could end without anyone feeling entitled to an explanation, captures the exact discipline this site has documented from the inside elsewhere: a congregation trained not to ask, contrasted here with an outsider’s plain astonishment that not asking had come to feel like virtue.
A qualified verdict, and a strange closing note
The letter ends without bitterness, which is part of what makes it worth including. Its author’s diagnosis was that the Potter’s House had real potential and had done real good, but needed someone willing to humble it, trading what she called a legalistic, controlling spirit for more grace before pride finished the job pride had started. Then, in a postscript that has nothing to do with any of it, she added that her own Idaho congregation loved Santa Claus and kept him in the house at Christmas, a small, almost funny detail that nonetheless makes a point: whatever her own fellowship’s history and flaws, it was not simply the Potter’s House with the names changed.
Sources and further reading
- “Potter’s House has proclaimed that Praise Chapel is ‘the enemy,'” letter from a Praise Chapel pastor’s wife, December 1998; archived in the Cult Education Institute reference files
- On the same renounce-the-rebel pattern used against an individual, see Larry Neville’s 1990 letter and the Potter’s House exodus
