Most of what can be documented about the first legal war between The Fellowship and its critics survives because one man kept the paperwork. Steve Schoner spent ten years inside the Potter’s House in Flagstaff, Arizona, left, picketed it, was sued for the picketing, and then published the court transcripts, the deposition, and a federal tax lien on a website he called Life After Potter’s House. The site is gone. The records are not, because copies were saved before it went offline, and together they lay out a chronology that The Fellowship’s own history tends to leave out. The Steve Schoner case is reconstructed here from the press of the day, public court and county records, and Schoner’s own archive.
Steve Schoner’s decade inside The Potter’s House
Schoner was a committed member for about a decade, most of it in the discipleship track that prepares men for the ministry. He held a degree in religion and philosophy from Northern Arizona University and looked, by his own account, like a man on his way to a pulpit. What turned him was a sentence. A pastor described the kingdom of God as “a spiritual dictatorship,” and the phrase named the thing Schoner had been living without a word for: a system in which a member did not cross the pastor, and in which devotion was measured in exhaustion. He began to step back. He later compared joining the Potter’s House to a noose that is not cinched all at once but tightened by degrees, an image the Prescott College paper The Word carried in December 1998.
The money question: Dave Diver, the records, and an IRS lien
The break widened over money. Dave Diver, a member of some twenty years who by the paper’s account had given the church around sixty thousand dollars, was expelled after he asked where his donations were going. When he questioned a final check of two thousand dollars, he was told he would be treated as a trespasser if he returned. In June 1990, Diver, Schoner, and Steve Twitchell went to the Flagstaff church council and asked to see the financial records for 1986 through 1990, the years the congregation was fully inside Wayman Mitchell’s organization. The council refused. The men warned that they would take what they knew to the Internal Revenue Service, and they did, meeting with criminal investigators and giving statements over many hours.
At the end of 1991 the Flagstaff congregation split from Mitchell’s organization and continued as Grace Fellowship Full Gospel Church. It had been one of the larger works in the network, and its pastor, Conrad Orosco, had served as treasurer for the whole Potter’s House organization. In August 1992 the IRS filed a Notice of Federal Tax Lien in Coconino County against Grace Fellowship Full Gospel Church for unpaid employment taxes, Form 941, for the period ending December 31, 1991, in the amount of $10,568.42. The sum is small. Its interest lies in the timing and the office it names: the lien covers the church’s last year under the Potter’s House banner, and its former treasurer had kept the books for the entire network. Whether comparable liens were filed against other congregations, and whether the organization’s tax-exempt standing was ever examined, the record assembled here does not settle, and The Fellowship has not said.
The pickets
Schoner’s answer to what he had seen was a picket line. He and others, including Diver, Lou Muccitelli, Dave Otteman, Mark Workman, and Mark Freeman, carried signs outside Fellowship churches in Flagstaff and outside the international Bible conferences in Prescott. Some of the signs were blunt, including one that read “THIS CULT $UCK$” with the S rendered as dollar signs, a jab at the tithing structure. Concede that a picket line outside a church is a confrontation, and that the crudest signs were crude. Crude speech aimed at an institution is still protected speech, and Schoner framed his own reason plainly as a moral obligation to say something. The response from the pulpit, by several accounts, was to name and dismiss the critics; Mitchell reportedly called the exit counselor Rick Ross a highly paid religious mercenary in 1988, and, asked why Schoner kept at it, suggested he was unbalanced and needed to get a life.
Haywood v. Schoner, 1994
On August 27, 1994, a new Door church opened in Flagstaff, staffed on its opening night by an “impact team” sent from Mitchell’s Prescott congregation. Its pastor was Kenneth Haywood. Within months Haywood, his wife Anne Marie, and the Flagstaff Door Christian Fellowship Church sued Schoner and five other picketers in Coconino County Superior Court, case CV-95-118, for harassment and for what the complaint called emotional damages, including a heart attack Haywood attributed to the stress of the picketing. According to Schoner, the medical records the defense subpoenaed showed that Haywood, then thirty, had not had a heart attack. The plaintiffs’ attorney was David Palmer, who also represented Christian Fellowship Ministries in Prescott, a detail that would matter as the case went on.
The affiliation Haywood denied under oath
The heart of the case, and the reason Schoner preserved the transcripts, is what Haywood said about his connection to Mitchell. Under direct examination by his own attorney on June 6, 1995, Haywood testified that his church was “solely independent” and had “no affiliation” with the Potter’s House in Prescott. Under cross-examination the same day, the picture changed. Haywood acknowledged that he had pastored Potter’s House churches in California and Arizona, and that Wayman Mitchell had asked him to come to Flagstaff and start the church. He also confirmed that Mitchell had ordained him, that his congregation sent a share of its income up to the parent church in Prescott, and that his building carried the same flaming-earth logo as the Prescott church. Pressed on whether many Potter’s House churches now operate under the name “The Door,” he conceded the point. Steve Schoner characterized the shifting testimony as perjury. A reader with the transcript can see, at a minimum, a witness who called himself unaffiliated and then described ordination, assignment, and tithing that run straight back to Prescott.
At the deposition on June 28, 1995, Palmer objected to nearly every question that touched doctrine, practice, or structure, invoking the First Amendment by Schoner’s count some thirty-five times and instructing his client not to answer. The defense argued that affiliation was the whole issue, because the picketers were being sued for protesting a church they were told they had no quarrel with. Judge J. Michael Flournoy, called into the deposition to rule, told Palmer that filing the suit had opened the door, and that in a deposition the defense could ask almost anything relevant to the case, religious practice aside. The questions Palmer had tried to block, about who ordained Haywood and whether Mitchell had a say in how the Flagstaff church was run, went to the affiliation Haywood had denied.
Judge Flournoy, the settlement, and the fees
The case never reached a jury. After further hearings the parties settled in 1996 on terms that admitted no guilt on either side; the defendants accepted the distance limits of Flournoy’s picketing injunction, and Haywood withdrew his charges. Flournoy then ordered the defendants to pay Haywood’s attorney fees, reported at roughly twenty-seven thousand dollars, as though they had lost a case that was never tried. Schoner’s blunt lesson, set down on his site, was that anyone sued by the Potter’s House over speech should refuse to settle and insist on a trial.
The judge who entered that order has a documented record of his own. The Arizona Supreme Court suspended J. Michael Flournoy in 1999 after the Commission on Judicial Conduct brought five counts of misconduct, including repeated courtroom outbursts of temper and an incident involving an omitted trial transcript, and after six earlier reprimands and admonishments between 1993 and 1998. His suspension ran about eighteen months; he returned to the bench at the end of 2000 and resigned in 2002 rather than face election opponents. None of that discipline arose from the Schoner case, and it came years afterward. It does describe the courtroom in which the picketers were ordered to pay.
Life After Potter’s House and Second Chance
Schoner turned his experience into a resource for others. He helped start a support group he called Life After Potter’s House, and his archive fed a wider network of former members. The Phoenix Gazette, in a report later circulated by CultEducation, profiled a Valley support group called Second Chance, formed for former members of cults and high-control religious groups, and several ex-members whose accounts rhyme with Schoner’s. Debbie Christensen said a La Puerta congregation recruited her as a teenager, love-bombed her, then taught that leaving meant hell; she said that after a church member raped her at sixteen, her pastor told her to keep quiet. Mary Katz, who had joined Mitchell’s church when it still used the Foursquare name, described spending nearly every night there, cutting off her Christian parents, and buying a television as her first act of independence. She vowed that “No one dictates my walk with God.” Schoner, one of the group’s former Potter’s House voices, told the paper it took him about three years to feel normal again, and that depression is common among people leaving such groups.
A strange coda: Kenneth Haywood and the 2008 India bombings
The man who sued Schoner surfaced again thirteen years later, on the other side of the world. In July 2008 a string of bombings in Ahmedabad, India, killed more than forty people, and an email claiming responsibility in the name of a group calling itself the Indian Mujahideen was traced to a wireless network in Navi Mumbai. The laptop belonged to an American expatriate named Kenneth Haywood. Indian police questioned him, said he was “on the radar of suspicion” but never charged him, and accepted at least provisionally his account that his connection had been hijacked. The Guardian reported that when officers raided the flat they found not militants but “a group of puzzled American expats.” Haywood later left India, by some reports with help from the US consulate.
What ties this back to Flagstaff is Haywood’s employer. He worked for a Bangalore firm called Campbell White. An investigator writing for the news site GNN, along with later Indian press reports, connected Campbell White to Door and Christian Fellowship Ministries churches: the company shared a building with a Door Christian Center, its managing director pastored a Door church, and its staff turned up hosting services at Potter’s House and Door congregations back in the United States. The Indian Express reported that the firm’s Mumbai rooms doubled as prayer rooms for a Potter’s House tied to Christian Fellowship Ministries. The GNN writer found the thread by way of Schoner’s archived “Life After the Potter’s House” site, the same records that documented the 1994 lawsuit. A separate strand of commentary spun the episode into a claim that the church was a front for the CIA; that claim rests on conspiracy blogs rather than evidence, and nothing here supports it. The documented facts are narrower, and strange enough on their own. The pastor who had once sued a critic for calling his church a cult was, years later, the American whose laptop sat at the center of an Indian terrorism inquiry. The paper trail that established his affiliation was the one Steve Schoner had preserved.
Why the Steve Schoner archive still matters
Strip away the coda and the case still does something The Fellowship’s literature will not. Under oath, in a suit The Fellowship’s own side had filed, a Door pastor described ordination by Mitchell, assignment by Mitchell, a logo shared with Prescott, and income flowing up to the parent church, the same central structure the organization prefers to describe as a loose fellowship of autonomous congregations. The suit also fits a pattern this site has documented elsewhere, in which The Fellowship answers criticism by attacking the critic rather than the criticism. An inside source quoted by Schoner had Mitchell framing the aim of the litigation as destroying the Flagstaff picketers with legal fees, win or lose, and the fee award made that outcome real even after a settlement that admitted no wrong.
There is an irony the New Testament would recognize. A church that presents itself as the guardian of biblical Christianity took its critics to a secular court, the move Paul rebukes in 1 Corinthians 6, where he writes that “there is utterly a fault among you, because ye go to law one with another” (1 Corinthians 6:7). Steve Schoner lost the fee fight and eventually let the website lapse. The site is down, but the transcripts, the lien, and the depositions were saved, and they still say what the pulpit did not.
Sources and further reading
- Ryan Crehan, “A Cult in Prescott?”, The Word (Prescott College), December 8, 1998
- Michelle Bearden, “Support group helps those hurt by bouts with fringe churches,” The Phoenix Gazette
- Rick Ross reference archive on the Door and Potter’s House
- Notice of Federal Tax Lien, Grace Fellowship Full Gospel Church, Coconino County Recorder, August 24, 1992 (Form 668(Y), public record)
- Superior Court of Arizona, Coconino County, Haywood et al v. Schoner et al, No. CV-95-118 (status hearing June 6, 1995; deposition and protective-order hearing June 28, 1995), archived on Steve Schoner’s Life After Potter’s House site
- In re J. Michael Flournoy, Supreme Court of Arizona judicial-conduct opinion (1999), and the recall-Flournoy record
- “Pastor questioned in India bombing,” Kingman Daily Miner, August 17, 2008
- “American expats caught up in Indian bomb blast inquiry,” The Guardian, July 29, 2008
- Court and picketing images: Kenneth Haywood category, Wikimedia Commons
