The Potter’s House Prescott, at 5195 N. Highway 89 in Prescott, Arizona, is the mother church of Christian Fellowship Ministries (CFM), the network Wayman Mitchell built from that congregation starting in the early 1970s and led until his death there on September 21, 2020, at age 90. Its congregations operate worldwide under names including The Potter’s House, The Door, Victory Chapel, and Lighthouse, and every one of them traces its authority back to Prescott. Mitchell’s son Greg Mitchell leads the church today. This article collects the history and the record of that one location: how it began, what it controls, and what its own town has documented about it.
Why is it called The Potter’s House?
The name comes from Jeremiah: “Arise, and go down to the potter’s house, and there I will cause thee to hear my words” (Jeremiah 18:2, KJV). In the passage, God remakes a marred vessel as a picture of His dealings with the house of Israel, a nation. A local Prescott Baptist pastor who examined the church traced the borrowed name to the same text and noted that the passage concerns corporate judgment and mercy, not a model for one man’s authority over a congregation.
How the Prescott church began
Wayman Mitchell’s organization published its own account of his start. In An Open Door, the church’s official 1985 history by Ron Simpkins, the pre-conversion Mitchell is a “two-bit hoodlum,” a thief willing to rob a drunk for cash. By his own account he was converted in 1955, at 25, at a Pentecostal altar call in California, and he trained at L.I.F.E. Bible College, the school of the Foursquare denomination. He pastored the Prescott congregation under Foursquare’s covering, and in the early 1970s it began converting young people out of the counterculture and the Jesus Movement, then sending them out to plant churches of their own. The Christian Research Institute’s 1988 report counted more than 250 affiliated congregations worldwide by 1985, and traced Mitchell’s formation to healing revivalists William Branham and A. A. Allen, a lineage the church’s own biography of Mitchell confirms. His documented family history, including the Mormon records question, is examined separately.
The Foursquare break and the contested founding
Mitchell broke his churches away from Foursquare over its requirement that pastors complete Bible college training, a requirement he had fulfilled himself but stopped enforcing for the men he sent out. The sources on this site give three dates for the split — 1982 in a 1995 Cape Cod Times report, 1983 in denominational history, 1985 in a 1993 Charisma profile — and that discrepancy is documented rather than smoothed over.
The name Christian Fellowship also had an earlier owner. A church called Christian Fellowship existed in the Phoenix area under Pastor John Metzler, who died with four of his members on December 18, 1978, when flooding collapsed an Interstate 17 bridge at Black Canyon City. Bill Tubbs, who sat on that church’s original board, wrote that Mitchell did not start it. The three surviving sources — Tubbs’s letter, Foursquare’s published history, and the contemporaneous Associated Press report — are read against The Fellowship’s authorized version in the contested founding of Christian Fellowship Ministries.
What The Potter’s House Prescott headquarters controls
Prescott is The Fellowship’s center of gravity, and the arrangement is personal rather than institutional. Christian Fellowship Ministries (CFM) has no governing body over its pastors; men who wanted to plant churches pledged allegiance to Mitchell personally, and every congregation planted through his discipleship model — “the Vision,” in the church’s own vocabulary — stays tethered to Prescott. Pastors gather there for The Fellowship’s Bible conferences, which the church still holds twice a year. By Mitchell’s death The Fellowship counted more than 2,600 congregations worldwide.
Money moves in the same direction. A mid-1990s two-night investigation by Boston’s WHDH, reported by Hank Phillippi Ryan, followed the tithe chain from Cape Cod congregations up to Prescott and to Mitchell, drawing on Dave Diver and Chris Turner, the Flagstaff men who took the church’s finances to the IRS.
Succession stayed in the family. Greg Mitchell announced his father’s Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s to the Prescott congregation in June 2020, telling the church “his preaching days are finished,” and took over leadership of The Fellowship on Wayman’s death that September.
What Prescott itself has documented
The church’s own town supplies an unusual share of the record. In March 1992 the Prescott congregation, through attorney David Palmer Jr., filed a federal lawsuit against the local school district after its board voted on February 10 to bar students from distributing literature on campus, a policy adopted in response to complaints about Potter’s House tracts; church spokesman William Bronson put the congregation at 500 members and cast the dispute as persecution. The lawsuit’s full context is documented here. The pastor of Word of Truth Baptist Church, an independent congregation in the same town with no survivor’s stake in the question, preached two sermons on CFM and stopped short of the cult label, settling on “very cultish.”
The wider Arizona record began earlier. In 1988 the Arizona Daily Sun examined The Fellowship’s Flagstaff congregation and obtained the church’s own sermon tapes: a 1979 Victory Chapel sermon told converts to stay put and “starve to death serving God” rather than leave town for work, and in a 1987 tape the local pastor taught that his refusal of a marriage request was God the Father speaking. The 1988 reporting is examined here. That same year Geraldo Rivera’s program carried the first national television scrutiny of The Fellowship. And the structure Prescott anchors has shed churches twice, in 1990 and again around 2001, when Charisma reported as many as 160 of roughly 800 congregations pulling out over complaints of control.
“Isn’t it an ordinary Pentecostal church?”
On paper, largely yes, and the concession should be made in full. The Prescott church publishes an orthodox statement of faith; CRI, a mainstream evangelical apologetics ministry, judged The Fellowship’s core doctrine orthodox in 1988; and in the schools lawsuit the church had a serious First Amendment argument, grounded in settled Supreme Court precedent. A reader should also discount for geography: any headquarters town sees more of its resident institution, friction included.
What remains after those concessions is the distinctive record. The control documented above comes from the church’s own sermon tapes, its own official history, and its own publications, before any former member is consulted. The network Prescott anchors answers to no board, seats its authority in one family, and collects from congregations that render no accounting back. Even Wayman Mitchell’s own household supplies a data point: when his daughter Sharon Mastin, who had left The Fellowship, was buried in Perth in 2012, former pastor Clement Okusi records that Mitchell stayed home, minutes away.
Whether that record makes the word cult fair is a separate question, answered on this site from the Bible the church itself claims as final authority. For The Potter’s House Prescott, the local facts above are the starting point, and every one of them carries a source a reader can check.
