A year or so after Boston’s News 7 traced Cape Cod tithes to Prescott in the investigation examined in Blind Faith, the Cape Cod Times sent reporter Sean Poley back to the same well. His four-part series on Victory Chapel Cape Cod, published December 10 through 13, 1995, did not rely on outsiders or ex-members with secondhand knowledge. It was built around former pastors themselves, men and women who had spent years, in some cases decades, inside Victory Chapel of South Dennis and its sister Cape congregation, describing the machinery from the inside. Two independent Massachusetts newsrooms, working a year apart, reached the same conclusions about the same pastor. That is not a coincidence worth glossing over.
Part I: a fellowship of fear at Victory Chapel Cape Cod
The series centers on four named voices: Richard Montes, once an associate pastor in South Dennis; Lee Stubbs, a pastor for fourteen years across New Mexico, Maryland, and Georgia; Ken and Sandi Haining, a husband and wife who together gave the church fifteen years; and Ross and Trina Ragan, who spent seven years in the South Dennis congregation before leaving in 1991. All had built their adult lives around the organization. All described a system that, in their retelling, replaced self-worth with dependence and mistook doubt for demonic attack. Montes summarized the toll bluntly: the church had cost people their marriages and their families, in his account, and he said he would never have set foot inside it knowing what he knew by the time he left.
Wayman Mitchell, Paul Campo, and Harold Warner, the leaders named throughout the series, declined to be interviewed. What the series includes is their own words from earlier, voluntary appearances: a 1988 Campo interview, and sermon audio the paper had separately obtained. In one of those recordings, Wayman Mitchell described the office of preacher in terms that leave little room for the two-way conversation his critics were asking for: “Preachers don’t dialogue. Teachers dialogue. Preachers proclaim.” It is a short line, and it is his own, and it says plainly what four former pastors spent four newspaper installments trying to describe from the outside.
Former associate pastor Ross Ragan reached for a familiar image to explain how the change crept up on him, a pot of water on a slow boil that never gives its occupant a moment sharp enough to notice the danger before it is too late. Montes made a related point about scale rather than mechanism: the departures were no longer a handful of disgruntled outliers but numbers in the hundreds, a pattern too large, in his view, to explain away as the usual churn every congregation sees.
Part II: a subtle form of conditioning
The second installment traces how the hook is set. For a teenage Montes in El Paso, the draw was music, a church band playing songs he already knew with lyrics quietly rewritten toward salvation, and a congregation heavy with girls his age. He was not looking for God; by his own account he was looking for a guitar and a social life. Pastor Paul Campo, young and personable, drew him in with attention and flattery over his playing, and the church’s own members supplied the rest, a deliberate campaign of daily contact the group itself called fellowship, and which Montes recalled its members describing, without apparent irony, as an effort to lock a new convert into the kingdom.
Ken Haining, who left The Fellowship after fifteen years, described an organization that took pride in skipping the ordinary safeguards other churches use to screen who gets sent into ministry, no seminary, no structured discipleship program, just zeal treated as sufficient credential. New converts eager to serve were routed quickly toward leadership, and the man who trained them became, in practice, the template they were expected to reproduce. When young Montes wanted to pursue a music education, Campo warned him that college would carry him away from Christ altogether. Montes stayed. That single redirected ambition, a young convert’s dream deferred on a pastor’s say-so, is the same dynamic Larry Neville’s 1990 letter already put in writing at the level of an entire missionary career: the structure absorbing a man’s future in the name of protecting it.
Part III: intimidation keeps members in the flock
Mitchell and Campo have both said publicly that no one is compelled to stay. Campo told the Times in 1988 that the door was open to anyone unhappy with his preaching. The four ex-pastors interviewed for this series did not dispute the door’s existence; they disputed how survivable walking through it actually was. Ken and Sandi Haining described the disorientation of finally thinking independently, after years inside a system that had trained them to treat outside scrutiny as an attack to repel rather than a question to answer. Richard Montes put it in terms of authority rather than psychology. A pastor’s line delivered as a word straight from God was not, in his account, open to negotiation, and Campo was remembered as telling his own congregation that hearing him preach was indistinguishable from hearing Christ himself.
The clearest and most damaging corroboration in the whole series concerns a practice this site has already documented from an anonymous confession. Ken Haining, a fifteen-year pastor with a background in psychology, told the Times that the fellowship practiced what he called Christian voodoo, teaching members to curse the finances and endeavors of people the church considered its enemies. He set that practice directly against the text it claimed to serve, noting that Jesus said to bless those who persecute you, while the church he had served taught the opposite. That is, point for point, the same practice and the same scriptural contradiction described by the repentant couple in the returning curses testimony drawn from Steve Schoner’s archive. One account is anonymous; here is a named, on-record pastor of fifteen years describing the identical practice under a different Christian Fellowship pastor, on the opposite coast, independently of the other. A practice reported once might be a grievance. Reported twice, by strangers to each other, under different pastors, it is policy.
J. Lee Grady, editor of Charisma magazine, reached a similar verdict from a more distant vantage in his book What Happened to the Fire?, writing that the organization had developed its own strain of sectarianism “infected with the poison of elitism.” Grady’s point, as the Times summarized it, was that unquestioning trust in leadership leaves ordinary believers exposed to exploitation they have no framework to recognize. Ross Ragan, who worked alongside Campo for years before leaving, offered his own diagnosis of the man rather than the system, describing him as sincere but badly deceived, someone Ragan believed once glimpsed the problem clearly and backed away from correcting it out of fear. That is Ragan’s assessment of a man who is, as of this writing, still an active pastor; it is presented here as his opinion, not as an established fact about Campo’s state of mind.
The starkest single scene in the series belongs to Ross and Trina Ragan. After leaving in 1991, they wrote to the congregation explaining their reasons, citing financial irregularities Trina, who had served as a church bookkeeper, said she had observed firsthand. Members mailed the letter back. One copy came back burned, its ashes enclosed. Others arrived torn to pieces, some with notes calling the Ragans’ explanation too foul to keep, professing pity for how far they had fallen, or declaring that the sender was renouncing the letter itself in the name of Jesus against a list of named spirits. It is shunning performed as liturgy, and it sits naturally beside the burned relationships already documented in Thomas Cunningham’s letter and Clement Okusi’s survival guide, both written years later, on different continents, describing the identical instinct.
Part IV: the cost of leaving
The final installment turns to what recovery actually looked like. Lee Stubbs and his wife Connie, who had left earlier that year and moved back to Tucson, sought counseling from a marriage and family therapist, John Cepin. Cepin described their symptoms, sleep disturbance, difficulty concentrating, flashbacks, and hypervigilance, as consistent with the effects of prolonged post-traumatic stress even without a single identifiable traumatic event, attributing the pattern instead to a sustained withdrawal of relationships over time. That clinical language echoes, from a different decade and a different continent, the childhood diagnosis at the center of The Struggle for Courtney’s Soul. Stubbs himself is very likely the same Lee Stubbs who appeared in that 1996 broadcast as a twenty-year Potter’s House pastor freshly departed with his wife. The two accounts describe his tenure slightly differently, fourteen years in this series against twenty in the broadcast, a discrepancy this article does not attempt to resolve, but the University of Arizona connection and the timing line up closely enough that they plainly describe the same man and the same exit.
Sandi Haining spoke about the isolation that followed leaving with unusual candor, describing years of grief over what she called wasted time and the discomfort of admitting she had once been as certain, and by her own account as domineering, as anyone still inside. She described the silence from people who had once called themselves her closest friends as the hardest part of the whole ordeal, at its lowest point leaving her uncertain she wanted to go on; this is offered here as a factual account of a difficult period she has since moved past, not as a current concern. Both the Hainings and the Ragans told the paper they had rebuilt their lives, returned to church elsewhere, and did not regret leaving, whatever it had cost them. Montes, back in Texas running his father’s business, said he still could not sit through a televised sermon without his old defenses rising.
Why this series still matters
Set beside Blind Faith, this series is not a second opinion so much as a second exposure of the same negative. Different reporters, a different newsroom, and this time the primary sources were not disillusioned members watching from outside but pastors who had stood at the pulpit themselves, describing the same congregation, the same pastor, and, in the cursing testimony, the exact same practice already confessed independently by an anonymous couple elsewhere in this archive. None of the four men and women interviewed claimed the church was without any genuine faith or that every person inside it was miserable. What they described, consistently and from four separate vantage points, was a structure that made ordinary spiritual doubt feel like betrayal, and made walking away feel like the only available proof that they had not, after all, lost their minds.
Sources and further reading
- Sean Poley, “Former pastors provide an insider’s view of the Christian Fellowship,” a four-part series, Cape Cod Times, December 10-13, 1995; archived at the Cult Education Institute
- J. Lee Grady, What Happened to the Fire? (Chosen Books), as quoted in the series
- On the same congregation and pastor a year earlier, see Blind Faith
- On the same cursing practice confessed independently, see returning curses
- On Lee Stubbs’s earlier television appearance, see The Struggle for Courtney’s Soul
- On the same shunning-by-letter pattern elsewhere, see Thomas Cunningham’s letter and Clement Okusi’s guide
