This is the second episode in Letters to the Church, the series that starts with an actual document and then works out what it says. The document this time is a letter dated 5 March 2003, sent from Pretoria by Pastor Rudy van Diermen to the pastors of The Fellowship, with the text of a pastor’s contract attached. Rudy van Diermen says Wayman Mitchell wanted him to sign that contract, have it notarized, and understand that a refusal would end the financial support of his church. The letter raises one narrow, concrete question, and it is the question this article follows: why should a pastor have to sign a notarized contract that places his ministry, his conduct, and his church’s assets under central authority?
Rudy van Diermen built the Dutch side of The Fellowship. The first congregation began in 1978 as a small Bible study in Steenwijk, moved to Zwolle, and grew under him into dozens of churches after an American evangelist connected him with Wayman Mitchell. He led the Dutch work until the late 1990s, moved to South Africa in 1997 to plant a church there, and around 2002 was relieved of his Dutch responsibilities by the leadership. The 2003 letter is what he sent to the fellowship’s pastors once he had seen where the structure was going. In keeping with this series, the letter and the contract are reproduced in full below, followed by the analysis. Document first, analysis second.
The letter of 5 March 2003
Pretoria, 5 March 2003
To all the Pastors in the fellowship.
Hereby I am sending you a copy of the Pastor’s contract that Pastor Mitchell wanted me to sign, and if I would have refused to sign it, he would have stopped the support of our church. I not only had to sign it, but also I had to go to the notary public and let them sign it too. So the world’s court system and money domination is being used as a threat to keep Pastors in line. This form sooner or later every Pastor will have to sign. This is the direction Pastor Mitchell is taking the fellowship. It is not a fellowship anymore, it is an organisation. Something we never wanted to become. A business organisation.
It is very very crucial for all of you to remember how we started. We started as a fellowship of friends. Support was a gift of love. The vision of our fellowship is that all over the world indigenous autonomous and self-supporting fellowships would arise with their own conference. Anyone that would plant 25 churches could start their own conference agreed upon in the Phoenix leadership. Some conferences started out of need of location. The vision of multiplication is that all over the world men were going to function as a powerful copy of Pastor Mitchell’s leadership. The vision is to train men and to train them so well that they fully can and will function totally separate from you, and a new fellowship is formed. And over that new fellowship the first Pastor has totally NO AUTHORITY, otherwise multiplication is impossible.
Through that multiplication of disciples and churches and leaders totally released in the world, the world is going to be reached with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. That is the risk Jesus Christ took, that is the risk we will have to take. If we do not want to take that risk, then we need to start looking for another job. 2 Tim. 2:2// on this text our fellowship is based.
Pastor Mitchell appointed an eldership over the entire fellowship, which is a violation of our vision. Elders are Pastors. So to appoint 7 Pastors over our whole fellowship creates a headquarters in Prescott, something we all, including Pastor Mitchell, never wanted. If you want to appoint an eldership (actually not necessary), you will have to use your own men as leaders over your own fellowship. That’s why the new eldership appointment of the 7 according to our vision should have been Pastor Mitchell’s own disciples over his own fellowship. And in Harold’s fellowship Harold’s men. And in Joe Campbell’s fellowship Joe Campbell’s men. And in Mike Mastins, Hank Houghtons, Bill Coolidge, Tommy Alvarez, Dale Reece, Greg Johnson’s fellowships, their own men. And in Rudy van Diermen’s fellowship Rudy van Diermen’s men etc. etc.
Pastor Mitchell is violating our vision of discipleship and multiplication. In an old sermon of Pastor Mitchell I found the following quote: “A movement will start with a man, that man is given a message, that movement starts developing methods, then that movement starts to develop into an organisation. Then unavoidably it degenerates into a grave tomb or mausoleum or museum. This is the course of history in which it always goes…”
Read the contract for yourself.
Pastor Rudy van Diermen, Pretoria.
The pastor’s contract
Pastor Contract
Dated this ______ day of _______, 200_
I __________________ hereby subscribe to the by-laws of the Christian Fellowship Church Inc., an Arizona Corporation; DBA The Potter’s House Christian Fellowship. I submit myself to the Leadership and Board of Elders put in place to minister order and discipline in oversight of this Fellowship. I submit my ministry to Pastor Wayman Mitchell or his successors. I make a solemn commitment before God and this church in _______________ State of ______________
I will abide by the standards, doctrines and vision to make disciples, plant churches and work in unity with the Fellowship as a pastor and steward of this church. If at any time in the future I decide I can no longer work in good faith with this church or Leadership, I will resign from my position, leave the church in good order and not cause any further disruption in that church or any other Fellowship church.
I further state; I am in subjection to Pastor Mitchell and the Board of Elders of the Christian Fellowship Ministries. Should they see fit to remove me for moral indiscretion, financial insolvency, doctrinal error, or a disruptive spirit causing harm to the church or Fellowship; I will submit to their direction and surrender all church bank accounts, buildings, equipment and assets and go quietly on to redirection, discipline and relocation.
Signed ________________________________________ Dated ______
Notary public ________________________________ Dated ________
What Rudy van Diermen was arguing
The letter makes four moves, and none of them is a complaint about doctrine. First, it says the issue is written obligation backed by money. Mitchell wanted the contract signed and notarized, and refusal meant support would stop, which is why Rudy van Diermen calls it the use of “the world’s court system and money domination” to keep pastors in line. That is the line that moves the dispute out of church culture and into enforceable structure.
Second, the letter says this is a change of kind, not degree. The Fellowship began, in Rudy’s telling, as a fellowship of friends where support was a gift of love, and it was becoming a business organisation. Third, he sets that against the founding vision, which he grounds in 2 Timothy 2:2 and describes as multiplication and release: train men so well that they function completely apart from you, and over the new fellowship the sending pastor has, in his capitals, “totally NO AUTHORITY, otherwise multiplication is impossible.” The contract does the opposite. It keeps the pastor permanently subject and keeps the assets permanently claimable. Fourth, he objects to the appointment of an eldership of seven pastors over the whole network, which he says manufactures the one thing the group always said it would never build, a headquarters in Prescott.
The sharpest stroke is that Rudy van Diermen closes with Mitchell’s own words. He quotes an old Mitchell sermon in which a movement starts with a man and a message, develops methods, hardens into an organisation, and then “degenerates into a grave tomb or mausoleum or museum.” Rudy’s point is plain. By 2003, the founder was doing to the fellowship exactly what the founder had once preached would kill it.
The contract’s clauses
Read on its own, the contract earns Rudy’s alarm. The signer submits his ministry “to Pastor Wayman Mitchell or his successors” and to the Board of Elders. He pre-commits, if he ever decides he cannot work with the leadership, to resign, leave in good order, and “not cause any further disruption in that church or any other Fellowship church.” Then the operative clause: if the leadership removes him for “moral indiscretion, financial insolvency, doctrinal error, or a disruptive spirit,” he agrees to “surrender all church bank accounts, buildings, equipment and assets and go quietly on to redirection, discipline and relocation.” Three of the four removal grounds are specific. The fourth, a disruptive spirit, is whatever the leadership says it is, which is the clause a man like Rudy van Diermen would trip the moment he wrote a letter like this one.
What later reporting confirmed
Rudy’s 2003 warning did not stay an isolated allegation. In 2020 the Dutch daily Reformatorisch Dagblad ran a seven-part series on De Deur in Zwolle, drawing on interviews and on letters and legal documents, and stated that it had itself seen examples of the contracts circulating in Christian Fellowship Ministries. In that reporting, Rudy’s brother Eddie van Diermen dated the shift to the early 1990s, when the fellowship turned into an organization and the contracts began making it very hard for pastors to leave with the churches they had built. The paper also described the money structure that gives the surrender clause its bite. Planted churches send ten percent to the mother church, which sends tithes on to Mitchell’s church in Prescott, and much of that flow, the paper reported, went not to world evangelism but to the lawsuits Mitchell filed, such as his 2001 suit against pastor Larry Gregory. In 2002, by these accounts, around 160 congregations left the network.
The same reporting connects the letter to Zwolle’s later history, and here I keep to what the paper documented. It reported that Evert Valk succeeded Rudy van Diermen in Zwolle in 2002, that Rudy had warned Mitchell against appointing Valk because of serious problems in his life, and that Mitchell proceeded anyway. Valk lost that position in 2018 over what the church called moral failure. The paper also reported Eddie van Diermen’s account that when he pressed Mitchell on whether the elders could actually overrule him, Mitchell warned that continuing would endanger his family and his place in the church, which Eddie experienced as intimidation, and that Eddie was expelled from the Zwolle congregation in late 2019 after forty-two years. Greg Mitchell, who now leads the network in his father’s place, declined the paper’s request to respond. These are the paper’s findings, not a court’s, and they are reported here as corroboration of the structural claim, not as proof of every detail.
Why the Rudy van Diermen letter matters
Discussions about whether a group is a high-control system often run on culture, memory, and testimony gathered after the fact. This document is different, because it was written inside the system, in real time, with the instrument attached. On its face the contract formalizes vertical authority, restricts exit, and places local church property under conditions set by central leadership, and the covering letter names the mechanism as financial dependence turned into leverage. Concede the strongest reply: adults signed willingly, none of this is illegal, and a church may set terms for its ministers. The problem is not legality. It is that the arrangement is the reverse of the vision the letter cites, where 2 Timothy 2:2 sends trained men out to be released, not retained. Rudy van Diermen ended with Wayman Mitchell’s own prophecy about movements calcifying into a mausoleum. Read next to the notarized contract, the prophecy looks less like a warning the founder gave and more like an outcome the founder built.
The series
This is episode 4.2 of Letters to the Church. It follows episode 4.1 on Pastor Larry Neville’s 1990 letter, which pulled an entire church out of The Fellowship, and it leads into episode 4.3 on Thomas Cunningham’s 2023 withdrawal letter. If you hold other letters, contracts, statements, or internal documents connected to The Potter’s House, The Door, Victory Chapel, or Christian Fellowship Ministries, send them my way. The purpose of the series is simple: document first, analysis second.
Sources and further reading
- Pastor Rudy van Diermen, letter to the pastors of the fellowship, Pretoria, 5 March 2003, with the attached pastor’s contract (reproduced in full above)
- Pastor contract, Christian Fellowship Church Inc. doing business as The Potter’s House Christian Fellowship (notarized template)
- Eunice Hoekman-van Stuijvenberg, “Behind closed doors” series, Reformatorisch Dagblad, September and October 2020; English translations at Pastor Wayman Mitchell Was in Charge and Comeback of a Failing Pastor
- Earlier analysis of this letter: Letter from Rudy van Diermen (ex-pastor) to Fellowship pastors
- On the same contract as an international instrument, see the sworn testimony about Prescott ties in the Steve Schoner case and the founding history of Christian Fellowship Ministries
