By 2004 the Potter’s House had been investigated by television newsrooms in Tucson, Indianapolis, and Boston, and its home state finally took a turn. That February and March, KPHO, the CBS affiliate in Phoenix, ran a two-part investigation by its 5i-Team, reported by Chris Hayes, into The Door, the Arizona-born network also known as the Potter’s House and Christian Fellowship Ministries. The headline on the second installment gathered the standing charges into a single line: mind control, fear, families torn apart. What made the piece memorable was its setting. The reporter went to a springtime family event, the Chandler Ostrich Festival Parade, and watched The Door work the crowd with images of the burning twin towers.
9/11 at the Ostrich Festival Parade
Hundreds of members of the Door Christian Center marched in the parade, and their pitch was the end of the world. They used imagery of the September 11 attacks, then two and a half years past, to press bystanders toward being born again, while a loudspeaker carried the message down the route: ask Jesus into your heart tonight, and no matter which church you attend, you must be born again to enter heaven. One member announced over the speaker that he had once been an angel in church and a devil at school. A minister named James Martinez explained the urgency in plainly apocalyptic terms, saying the church had brought a confrontational message because time was short, these were the last days, and the Anti-Christ was “setting his stage up right at this moment.” Many in the crowd granted the church its right to march while recoiling from the tone. One parade-goer, Patty McCrary, told the station the delivery struck her as angry rather than peaceful.
The 5i-Team’s charges
KPHO’s first installment, in February, had laid out the accusations that follow this church wherever it plants: that it is a brainwashing cult, that it controls members through fear, and that it divides families. The Door, the report reminded viewers, began in Prescott, Arizona, in the network Wayman Mitchell founded, and had since spread under several names across the state and the world. None of the charges were new to anyone who had followed the group. But hearing them from a CBS affiliate in the church’s own backyard gave them a weight a critic’s pamphlet never could.
The Indiana girl, resolved
The most consequential thing the 2004 report did was close a story the cameras had left open eight years earlier. It returned to the case of the five-year-old Indiana girl whose ordeal at a Potter’s House service had become a 1996 news series, and it supplied the ending. The child, the report said, still feared going back, telling the station she thought they would do it to her again if she returned. And a family court judge, back in 1996, had ruled that she could never be taken to the church again. The report restated what had frightened her, that a Prescott pastor had dressed as the devil and made her put her hands into a bucket of blood, and it noted that the pastor, named here as Dan Mazon, had not softened, repeating his line that the real fault lies with a generation that fails to understand fear. That earlier case is told in full in The Struggle for Courtney’s Soul; the 2004 broadcast is where its verdict finally reaches the air.
The persecution defense
Give the members the last word they gave themselves, because it is revealing. Some at the parade told the reporter, credibly, that this church had pulled them out of drugs and crime, the genuine good that keeps such groups supplied with defenders. And when confronted with the brainwashing accusation, several did what The Fellowship has always done with criticism: they reached for the early church, comparing the attacks on them to the attacks on the first Christians. It is among the oldest deflections in the group’s repertoire, and it does not survive contact with the record, as the piece on the early church being called a sect in Acts 24 lays out. Persecution is being harmed for righteousness. Being asked where the money goes, or why a four-year-old came home terrified, is not persecution. It is a question.
Why the report matters
Read across the newsroom investigations gathered on this site, the 2004 KPHO report is the one filmed closest to home and latest in the sequence, and it finds exactly what the earlier ones found. The method had not changed; it had only turned outward. What frightened a small child in a darkened church in 1996 was, at the Ostrich Festival Parade in 2004, being aimed at a whole crowd of strangers with a picture of the twin towers. The same fear the pastor defended as good medicine for a soft generation had become the church’s public face at a family fair. A CBS affiliate noticed, a parade-goer named the tone for what it was, and a judge’s eight-year-old ruling finally reached the broadcast. The record just keeps accumulating.
Sources and further reading
- Chris Hayes, “Mind control, fear, families torn apart: allegations against a church founded in Arizona,” 5i-Team, KPHO CBS 5, Phoenix, February and March 2004; archived in the Cult Education Institute reference files (part one and part two)
- The 1996 case it resolves: The Struggle for Courtney’s Soul
- On the persecution deflection and the origin, see Acts 24 and the sect label and the founding of Christian Fellowship Ministries
