In 1988, the Arizona Daily Sun asked a blunt question behind the Potter’s House cult allegations gathering around its Flagstaff congregation. Was this church a cult or not? It belonged to the network Wayman Mitchell founded in Prescott in 1970, known by names from The Door to Victory Chapel. The assistant pastor said no, firmly and more than once. The trouble for that denial was not only what former members alleged. It was what the church’s own recorded sermons said.
The church’s answer to the Potter’s House cult charge
Give the church its strongest defense first, because the assistant pastor, Tom Eickmeyer, made a coherent one. He rejected the Potter’s House cult label outright. People could come and go as they pleased, he said, and the church kept no membership rolls. Tithing was scriptural but voluntary, expected only of those who could afford it. The church was pro-family, and many members visited non-Christian relatives freely. The former members attacking it, in his account, were nursing personal grievances. They had made something, he suggested, out of essentially nothing. A congregation that keeps meeting is not, by itself, proof of anything. If the case rested on ex-members’ word against the pastor’s, it would be a stalemate.
The church’s own tapes
It did not rest there. The Sun obtained recordings of The Fellowship’s sermons, and a church’s own voice is harder to wave away than any former member’s. In a 1979 sermon at Victory Chapel, a pastor told new converts to ignore the urge to leave town for work. They should stay put and “starve to death serving God,” he said, since anyone who died of hunger would at least reach heaven. In a 1987 sermon, the local pastor, Conrad Orosco, addressed marriage. When members asked his permission to wed and he said no, he told them, the refusal was God the Father speaking. Set those beside Eickmeyer’s picture of a low-pressure, leave-whenever-you-like fellowship. On the tapes, the Potter’s House cult debate stops being one ex-member’s word against a pastor’s. The freedom Eickmeyer described and the control the tapes preached do not belong to the same church.
Why strangers told the same story
The second problem for the personal-grievance theory is convergence. The people the Sun interviewed had not coordinated, and several did not know one another. Yet they described the same machinery. Lou Muccitelli was expelled after he asked to see the financial records. He said he had divorced his wife and left four children on pastoral advice. Over a decade he had given the church more than twenty thousand dollars, and had fallen behind on child support to keep his tithes current. Doris Workman watched her son withdraw from the family. He visited his cancer-stricken father only twice rather than miss services, and married a woman the church selected. Doris Toomey said the demand to attend everything ended her marriage. The sharpest detail came from Steve Schoner, a former Bible-study leader. He admitted that he had once warned a wavering woman that wolves would take her if she left the flock. Then he watched for her to fall, so he could say he had told her so. That is not an embittered outsider inventing a pattern. That is an insider describing the mechanism he used to run.
What leaving did to people
The former members also described damage that outlasted their departure. Schoner woke between three and four most mornings from a recurring dream of standing in church naked. He went through stretches of depression and anger he compared to what combat veterans carry. Muccitelli described cold dread and a sense that evil had followed him home. Mark Workman called it withdrawal, the church’s world still lodged in his mind long after he had physically left it. Whatever one concludes about the doctrine, the human cost in the record is consistent, specific, and hard to write off as coincidence.
Why Rick Ross was already there
By 1988 one name kept surfacing on the other side of these accounts: Rick Ross. He worked then as a deprogrammer and exit counselor, and had helped Potter’s House members for years. He had also appeared on a Geraldo broadcast about the church and cults, which drove still more calls his way. Ross was documenting the Potter’s House cult long before its former members had any platform of their own, when they had little reason to expect belief. His work is the reason the 1988 reporting survives, alongside decades of contemporary coverage of Christian Fellowship Ministries. Eickmeyer dismissed him as a non-Christian whose methods he distrusted. That is one way to answer a man holding your members’ tape recordings. It is not a rebuttal.
The test the church chose
Leaders in The Fellowship liked to challenge critics with a line from the Sermon on the Mount: where was the fruit? It is a fair test, and a scriptural one, since Jesus said “by their fruits ye shall know them” (Matthew 7:16). On those terms, the Potter’s House cult question answers itself. The fruit on record is a man who lost his wife, his four children, and his savings and called it faithfulness. It is a mother who now sees her son twice a year. It is a former leader who taught people to dread the door he had already walked through. And it is a church whose own tapes told the hungry to stay and starve. By the standard the church itself proposed, the verdict is not difficult to read.
