Steve Cooper was the newspaper reporter who became The Fellowship’s first book-length chronicler. A reporter for the San Bernardino Sun-Telegram in California, he converted in 1974 after a visit to The Fellowship’s early tent works in Arizona, moved his family to Flagstaff in 1978, and wrote Go Ye: The Arizona Story, published by Potters Press, the church’s own imprint, in 1982, three years before Ron Simpkins’ better-known An Open Door. His own conversion story appears inside the book, which is how most of what follows is known. And on page 2, before defending The Fellowship’s discipleship model, Steve Cooper stated the objection to it more plainly than most critics have: “The idea smacks of cultism.”
A reporter at the tent in Cottonwood
Cooper tells his own story late in Go Ye. He grew up in the 1960s alongside Ron Simpkins, the future author of An Open Door; the two attended junior college together before Simpkins left for university in Flagstaff and Cooper went into newspapers. Simpkins came home for Christmas 1973 a convert, returned at Easter more zealous still, and brought along Joe Weidinger, a mutual friend from Arizona who told Cooper the two of them were praying God would pull the rug out from under him. By spring 1974, by his own account, the bottom had dropped out, and Cooper drove to Arizona, where he met Simpkins, Weidinger, and their Flagstaff pastor, Ron Jones. On his second day the group drove 40 miles south to Cottonwood, where a young pastor named Peter Edwards was opening a new work under a borrowed tent. Cooper describes the crew failing to raise the tent against the wind until Jones stopped the work to pray, and the wind shifting to lift the canvas into place — the kind of providence story The Fellowship’s histories run on, told here by a man who at that moment was crossing the street to buy a Coke rather than pray. Under that tent, listening to Edwards preach, Cooper was converted. He returned to San Bernardino, spent about two and a half years at Immanuel Baptist Church, and married; he and his wife, Elaine, had a son.
From assignment to allegiance
The book began as a journalist’s project and ended as a member’s. Feeling called to write about where God was moving, Cooper wrote to Simpkins; the reply carried an invitation from Wayman Mitchell to the Prescott conference of July 1977. In October and November of that year Cooper took a leave of absence and toured The Fellowship’s churches as a reporter, and found, he writes, that the outside observer’s position would not hold. Mitchell told him more than once that a man cannot understand above the level of his experience. On a trip Mitchell arranged, Cooper watched Jack Harris preach a three-day crusade in Obregon, Mexico, including a healing account Cooper records in detail, and put his dilemma to Harris on a hotel balcony afterward: he wanted to be part of what he was seeing and also wanted the job and home he had in California. Harris declined to decide for him. In March 1978 Cooper and his family moved to Flagstaff — the same week, he notes, that Jack Harris arrived to take over the Flagstaff church.
What Go Ye is, and is not
The title comes from the Great Commission: “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost” (Matthew 28:19, KJV), which the book quotes on its opening pages. The work circulates under two names — the cover title Go Ye: The Arizona Story, and the running title Go Ye: A Study in Discipleship — and both describe it accurately: a history of the Arizona Fellowship built as an argument for its discipleship method. It is a primary source of the first rank for this site’s purposes, and an authorized one, which are two different things. Cooper was a trained reporter, and the book preserves names, dates, and places that The Fellowship’s contested history can be checked against. He was also, by publication, a member of six years writing under the church’s own imprint about the men who had converted him. The book is the church’s account of itself, written by a professional — which is exactly why its concessions carry weight.
The sentence on page 2
The concession that matters most comes before the story starts. Introducing the question of whether a pastor should raise disciples to his own level of ministry, Cooper writes that many are immediately turned off by what looks to them like cultism, and that people will protest that pastors will become spiritual dictators. He poses the objection in order to answer it; the book that follows is his answer. Four decades later, the objection has a documented record instead of a hypothetical one. What pastors with unaccountable authority over disciples produced is traced on this site through The Fellowship’s pastoral authority doctrine and its novice-pastor pipeline — the same system Go Ye was written to commend. The record since 1982 answers the question he raised better than the book did.
What became of Steve Cooper?
The available record ends where the book does. Go Ye leaves Cooper in Flagstaff, a member of Jack Harris’s congregation, a former reporter turned Fellowship chronicler; whether he remained in The Fellowship, and what he made of the decades that followed, is not documented in the sources this site holds. If you knew Steve Cooper in the Arizona churches, or know his later story, the contact page is open — his account of The Fellowship’s early years is one of the few written from inside with a reporter’s habits, and completing his story would complete a source.
