On a May night in 1987, a gunman fired a high-powered rifle into The Door Christian Fellowship in Tucson. It is the flagship Arizona congregation of the network now called Christian Fellowship Ministries, The Door, or The Potter’s House. The gunfire seriously wounded one churchgoer. The next morning, by the account of the Tucson Citizen, about five hundred people came back, and the five-day Bible conference carried on. The crime is not the revealing part. The response is.
What the Tucson Citizen reported
The reporting is straightforward. The full piece sits in Rick Ross’s Cult Education Institute archive. An unknown gunman shot through an orange metal door on the north side of the building at 2950 East Irvington Road during conference services. Members tended to the wounded, and the congregation went back to prayer. Pastor Harold Warner had started The Door Christian Fellowship about fourteen years earlier. He told the paper the leadership did not want to dwell on it. “We don’t want to focus on this thing,” he said. The conference, the second of two held that year, ran its full five days.
Warner also gave the paper the movement’s measure of itself. The church had grown from an old hall into a new building of twenty-four thousand square feet. Its evangelism reached ex-addicts, recovering alcoholics, the young, and people in genuinely desperate straits. From Tucson, Warner said, The Door Christian Fellowship had planted churches across the United States and in sixteen other countries.
How The Door Christian Fellowship read the attack
The members quoted in the story did not treat the shooting as a crime to report and process. They read it as a trial, and as evidence of spiritual warfare. One long-time member described the gunfire almost calmly and folded it into a familiar category: believers face trials, and this was one more. The reasoning is worth stating plainly, because it does real work. They took an attack from outside as confirmation that the group stood on God’s side. The world opposes what God is building, so opposition proves God is building it.
What Scripture actually says about being attacked
Concede the strong form of the argument first, because it is partly right. Scripture does promise trials. James tells believers to “count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations” (James 1:2). Peter tells them to “think it not strange concerning the fiery trial” (1 Peter 4:12). Paul writes that “all that will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution” (2 Timothy 3:12). A church that keeps meeting after violence is not, by that fact alone, doing anything sinister. The gunman deserves every word of condemnation.
The move that does not follow is the next one. An attack does not prove that its targets are right. Jesus said the opposite about how violence and conviction travel together: “whosoever killeth you will think that he doeth God service” (John 16:2). Persecutor and persecuted both invoke God. If opposition certified a group as true, it would certify every embattled sect on earth at once. That is incoherent. Scripture treats trials as something believers endure, never as a scoreboard that vindicates whichever group is taking fire today.
Why the frame is load-bearing
This is why the persecution frame at The Door Christian Fellowship matters more than the bullet. In a high-control setting it converts every hardship into proof, and it quietly reclassifies doubt as disloyalty. If the world’s hostility confirms the church, then questioning the church starts to feel like joining the world. Pair that with a congregation that, by its own description, draws people in desperate straits, and the grip tightens. The people most drawn in often have the least to fall back on if they leave. The same logic later turns outward, which is why the church treats criticism as an attack rather than a question. A frame that reads opposition as endorsement cannot, by design, hear correction.
Why Rick Ross preserved the record
This article survives because Rick Ross kept it. His Cult Education Institute, once hosted at rickross.com, gathered contemporary coverage of Christian Fellowship Ministries for decades. The article is still readable in the Internet Archive. Members then had few channels of their own, and little reason to expect belief. Ross has been careful with his terms. He describes the network as a destructive group that he places close to the line of a cult rather than flatly across it. That restraint is part of why the archive holds up. What survives there is not an ex-member’s later reconstruction. It is the movement describing itself, on the record, to a daily newspaper. In its own words, in 1987, The Door Christian Fellowship told a reporter how it reads a bullet. The frame was never hidden. They preached it.
