Among the documents that survive from Steve Schoner’s Life After Potter’s House archive is a short and unsettling confession. A former Christian Fellowship Ministries pastor and his wife, writing anonymously and with evident shame, describe a practice they took part in and later repented of: returning curses. In plain terms it is the practice of praying curses back onto former members and critics, on the theory that those people are aiming curses at the church in the first place. The couple’s testimony is not an outsider’s accusation. It is an insider’s account of standing in a basement and calling out, by name, the people who had left, in order to turn imagined curses back on them. This is what returning curses is, and why a repentant pastor came to call it witchcraft.
What returning curses looked like
By their account the couple were on staff at an East Coast conference church in the early 1990s when they were invited, along with the church treasurer and his wife, to a private prayer meeting in the pastor’s home. The pastor warned them that most of the congregation would not understand what they were about to do. Then, in the basement, they were instructed to pray against people he called enemies of the cross, to name them one by one, and to turn back onto them any prayers those people were supposedly sending at the church. The targets were not occultists or strangers. They were people who had left the church, some of whom had spoken to the media about it. The couple say they took part fully believing they were defending the faith.
What changed their minds was the machinery of suspicion behind it. There was never any evidence that the people being cursed had cursed anyone. In the couple’s own phrase, “suspicion was the scapegoat,” a blanket justification for praying against whomever the leadership disliked. If the pastor got a headache, they write, he blamed it on enemies of the cross praying against him and felt entitled to send it back. After they left CFM the couple sought out some of the people they had prayed against and found them to be ordinary Christians who had never practiced any such thing. Their only offense had been to question the pastor and then to say so out loud.
From the basement to the platform
The part of the testimony that reaches past one church is the couple’s claim about scale. What they had done in secret, sure the congregation would be scandalized by it, they say has since become a mainstream practice in CFM, moving from a private basement prayer to a closing rally cry at public Bible conferences. They attribute the shift to an endorsement from Wayman Mitchell himself, and they name the practice for what they now believe it to be, a form of charismatic witchcraft dressed as spiritual warfare. That is their characterization, offered as confession rather than proof, and it should be read as one couple’s account. It is also a specific and checkable claim about a specific practice, made by people testifying against their own past conduct, which is not the profile of an invented story.
The people being cursed
Notice who ends up on the receiving end. Not enemies of the gospel in any ordinary sense, but former members whose sin, by the couple’s own description, was to grow disgruntled, question the pastor, and speak against The Fellowship. The label pinned on them, enemies of the cross, is the same one that recurs across this record. It is the phrase thrown at the departing pastor Lee Stubbs, and it is the vocabulary running through Thomas Cunningham’s 2023 letter, where a critic is reclassified as a rebel to be shunned. Returning curses is that same instinct in its most spiritual costume. The church that answers criticism by attacking the critic here answers it by praying against him by name.
What the Bible actually says
Here the practice collapses on contact with the text it claims to serve. The New Testament is not ambiguous about how a Christian treats those who oppose him. Paul writes, “Bless them which persecute you: bless, and curse not” (Romans 12:14). Jesus is more pointed still: “Bless them that curse you, and pray for them which despitefully use you” (Luke 6:28), and in the Sermon on the Mount, “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you… and pray for them which despitefully use you” (Matthew 5:44). The command is not to neutralize a curse but to answer it with a blessing. A believer who returns a curse has not won a spiritual battle. He has disobeyed the plainest instruction Christ ever gave about enemies.
The two verses the couple say were used to license the practice do not survive their own context either. “No weapon that is formed against thee shall prosper” (Isaiah 54:17) is a promise of God’s protection over his people, not a permission to forge a weapon of one’s own and aim it back. To turn a defensive assurance into an offensive mandate is the exact move this site keeps naming: text pressed into service against its own meaning, because text without context is pretext. The couple themselves reached, far more soundly, for the test Jesus gave, that a tree is known by its own fruit, and that what the mouth speaks overflows from the heart (Luke 6:43-45). A ministry whose closing prayer names its critics and calls down harm on them has announced, in that very prayer, what is stored in its heart.
Why the confession matters
Concede the limits of the document honestly. It is one anonymous testimony, its authors unnamed, its widest claim about CFM-wide practice unverifiable from a single source. Grant all of that, and it still does something no outside critic can. It is a confession by people testifying against themselves, describing a practice from the inside and repenting of it, which is a costly kind of evidence. It corroborates, in the register of prayer, what the lawsuits and the withdrawal letters show in the registers of law and relationship: a system that treats the people who question it as enemies to be defeated rather than believers to be reconciled. The document sits in Steve Schoner’s archive beside the court transcripts, and it belongs there. Set it next to Romans 12, and the couple’s verdict on their old practice needs no improving. They condemned it as foul, unholy, and unbiblical, and then they stopped.
Sources and further reading
- “Returning Curses: Former CFM Pastor and Wife Repent,” an edited testimony hosted in Steve Schoner’s Life After Potter’s House archive
- On the archive and the litigation around it, see the Steve Schoner case
- On the same “enemy of the cross” language, see Thomas Cunningham’s 2023 letter and the reporting that featured Lee Stubbs
