Of all the material gathered on this site, one of the hardest to watch is a three-part news series that a mainstream Indianapolis station broadcast in 1996, built around a four-year-old girl. The Struggle for Courtney’s Soul aired on Call 6, the WRTV news team, reported by Jim Parsons, and it followed a custody fight that began after a child came home frightened from a Potter’s House service. What gives it weight is the source. This was not an ex-member with a grievance. It was a local television newsroom that investigated for months, agreed to protect the child’s identity, and then traced a neighborhood church all the way back to Prescott, Arizona, and to the same former members the Potter’s House was in the middle of suing. The parts have been compiled into a single documentary, embedded above.
What happened to Courtney
Courtney’s parents were no longer together; her mother held legal custody, and her father had weekend visitation, which he used to take her to the Potter’s House in the Irvington section of Indianapolis. On a Friday-night service around the girl’s fourth birthday, according to the family and the reporting, the pastor staged a skit in which he appeared as the devil with a pitchfork and a bucket said to hold blood and a heart, and had children put their fingers into it. Courtney told the reporter he had yelled at her, “You will never get your hand out again.” She came home terrified.
The aftermath is what turned a frightening night into a legal case. Her mother described a child who became clingy and afraid of men, who had nightmares, and who began talking about death and saying she was ready to die. A counselor who evaluated her, named in the broadcast as Tom Bontrager, diagnosed post-traumatic stress and told the reporter he could distinguish a genuinely traumatized child from a coached one, and that this child had suffered. Courtney’s grandmother put it plainly, that a four-year-old should not feel she is in danger walking into a church, and that to her, that is a crime. On the strength of the diagnosis, the mother and grandparents refused to allow further unsupervised visits. Out of care for the child, WRTV withheld her last name and any identifying images, and this account keeps to that.
The pastor’s defense, and the father’s
What lifts the story above a single bad night is that no one on the church’s side denied the skit. The Indianapolis pastor, identified in the broadcast as Dan Mazan, defended it, arguing that the trouble with this generation is that people no longer understand fear, and that a certain amount of fear is a good thing. The girl’s father, Shane Hyde, went to Marion County Juvenile Court to restore unsupervised visitation. He said God had changed his life for the better and that he was trying to instill righteousness in his daughter, and he accused his former partner and her parents of acting out of contempt of court and personal disapproval of him rather than genuine concern about the church. The series gave both those positions their airtime. The pastor’s line about the value of fear, though, sits awkwardly next to Paul’s word to Timothy that “God hath not given us the spirit of fear” (2 Timothy 1:7).
The trail back to Prescott
In its second night, the series did what The Fellowship’s critics always end up doing: it followed the church home. The reporter went to Prescott, Arizona, where Wayman Mitchell had built his network beginning in 1970, and aired a clip of a member describing himself as no longer really human but a disciple who is part of God. The Indianapolis pastor acknowledged on camera that his church sends tithes back to the mother church and to Prescott. The report stated that all of the roughly eight hundred Potter’s House congregations send money up to Prescott and to Mitchell, a structure a former member on screen called a pyramid with Mitchell at the top and accountable to no one. Exit counselor Rick Ross, who said he had deprogrammed more than a dozen members, appeared, as did a line of former members picketing outside the Prescott church, describing a church that forbade television and movies, dictated whom members could see, and pushed families toward division and divorce. The church declined to comment, apart from one member of twenty years who said he had never once found it cultish, and Mitchell, who avoided the reporter’s questions, was shown in an old interview insisting that members were free and that the claim of control was a lie.
The people on the picket line
The third night put a face on the exits. Lee Stubbs, a Potter’s House pastor of twenty years who had left the year before with his wife and enrolled at the University of Arizona, described being treated as an apostate once he walked away, his tires slashed and windows broken, and himself recast from lifelong friend to, in the church’s vocabulary, a slime bucket and an enemy of the cross. He said that inside the system, leaving the Fellowship is treated as leaving the kingdom of God itself, and he had kept a written list of the names he was called. The Cult Awareness Network, the report noted, held a thick file on the Potter’s House and described it as authoritarian and doctrinally thin. The detail that matters most for this site is procedural. The former members were picketing, had been placed under an injunction, had formed a defense fund, and were being sued by the Potter’s House, which is the same Flagstaff picketing and litigation examined in the Steve Schoner case. Courtney’s story in Indiana and the lawsuit in Arizona are two ends of one rope.
Why The Struggle for Courtney’s Soul still matters
The broadcast did not report how the judge finally ruled; the decision was pending when the last part aired, and the tape does not contain the outcome. What it does contain is harder to wave away than any single ruling. An outside newsroom, with no stake in the fight, found a four-year-old carrying a clinical trauma diagnosis after a church skit, met a pastor who defended frightening children as spiritual instruction, and followed the money and the authority straight back to Prescott, to Wayman Mitchell, and to the very critics the organization was dragging through court. This is the same picture the ex-members had been drawing, arriving this time on the evening news and centered, for once, on a child too young to have chosen any of it. Read alongside the 1980s Tucson series, Behind the Door, it shows the pattern crossing a decade and half a continent without changing shape.
Sources and further reading
- The Struggle for Courtney’s Soul, a three-part investigation by Jim Parsons, Call 6 / WRTV, Indianapolis, 1996; the parts were posted to YouTube by Rhie Hari
- On the Arizona picketing, injunction, and lawsuit the series touches, see the Steve Schoner case
- On the same charges a decade earlier, see the Tucson series Behind the Door
