A Fellowship Built on One Man’s Word
Wayman Mitchell died on September 21, 2020, in Prescott, Arizona, at age 90. By then Christian Fellowship Ministries, the network built around him and known to outsiders as Potter’s House, counted more than 2,600 congregations worldwide. Every one of them traced its authority back to a single man’s vision and his personal ordinances, not to any shared governing body. Mitchell did not build a denomination. He built a hierarchy that ran through him, and pastors who wanted a place in it had to pledge personal allegiance before he would let them plant a church.
His son, Greg Mitchell, announced the diagnosis to the Prescott congregation that June. Wayman Mitchell had been fighting Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s for six months, and recent operations had not helped. Greg told the church only that “his preaching days are finished.” Six months later his father was gone. What remained, according to former members and legal documents connected to Mitchell’s own lawsuits, was an organization built less on shared faith than on personal submission to one man.
The Vision That Became a Cage
Mitchell called his discipleship model “the Vision,” and inside CFM the term still carries weight. Members receive training in a local congregation, get sent out to plant a new church, then train and send out their own converts so the network multiplies. It worked. Mitchell reached mostly young people and hippies on the street in the early 1970s, and the congregations he planted multiplied fast across the United States and then overseas.
Eddie van Diermen, who co-founded The Door in Zwolle with his brother Rudy, met Mitchell in the late 1970s. He credits the early growth honestly. So does Dennis Crosby, a longtime member of the Zwolle congregation, though Crosby is blunter about what loyalty to Mitchell actually required. “You become an ineffective Christian, because you do not follow Jesus, but Mitchell,” he says of the culture Mitchell built around himself.
Van Diermen doesn’t exempt himself from the pattern either. He led The Door’s Amsterdam congregation for a time and admits he followed Mitchell’s example there. The authoritarian traits, he says, were present from the beginning. They just weren’t obvious yet, because obedience was still producing visible fruit.
The Vision itself wasn’t the problem. Training believers and sending them out to plant churches is a biblical pattern, not a red flag on its own. What CFM added to it was the requirement that every church planted through the Vision stay permanently tethered to Prescott, and that every pastor sent out stay personally loyal to the man who sent him. Discipleship became the delivery mechanism for control rather than a check against it, because the people best positioned to raise concerns were the same people most financially and relationally dependent on Mitchell approving of them.
When Questions Became Dangerous
The fruit stopped covering for the structure in the early 1990s. A pastor Mitchell had financially supported chose to leave The Fellowship, taking his congregation with him. Mitchell could not accept it. According to Van Diermen, that single departure changed everything. The loose fellowship of church planters became an organization with one man at the top, and disagreement stopped being tolerated. Anyone who questioned Mitchell’s decisions was treated as a rebel standing against God himself.
Contracts began circulating that bound any newly planted church to CFM permanently, so a pastor could no longer walk away with the congregation he had built. The same freedom Mitchell once gave his church planters, he now worked to take back. A first wave of American pastors left in the early 1990s regardless, and Van Diermen says Mitchell lost nearly everyone who had been with him from the start. Proximity to leadership brought its own risk. “The closer you got to leadership, the more dangerous he got,” Van Diermen recalls. Obedience kept you safe. Questions did not.
Purges in Perth and Zwolle
Mitchell removed pastors who displeased him without explanation when he judged it necessary. In late 2008 he stripped Australian pastor David Vicary of his position as senior pastor of the CFM’s Perth mother church and took the pulpit himself. The congregation split in half.
Van Diermen describes a recurring pattern behind these removals. Mitchell would isolate a strong leader with a thriving congregation, relocate him to an insignificant post overseas, then install a replacement so grateful for the promotion that he became extra dependent on Prescott. Recounting Mitchell’s own words about one such removal, Van Diermen says Mitchell put it plainly: “I want that little weasel out of there.”
Van Diermen’s own family paid the price for asking questions. At a conference he once challenged Mitchell directly, asking whether the council of elders Mitchell had personally appointed could actually contradict him. Mitchell said yes. Van Diermen said he doubted it. That evening Mitchell warned him that continuing down that road would endanger his family, his children, his grandchildren, and his own standing in the church. Van Diermen calls it exactly what it was: intimidation. At the end of 2019, after forty-two years of involvement, the Zwolle pastor expelled him from the church at Mitchell’s instigation. By then the congregation had added a new ritual to its prayer meetings, holding up Mitchell’s photograph while asking members to pray for “our leader and his son Greg in Prescott.”
A Lawsuit That Bled a Young Church Dry
CFM’s financial structure sends 10 percent of every planted church’s income up to the mother church, which in turn tithes to Mitchell’s own church in Prescott. Ex-members’ biggest complaint isn’t the percentage. It’s where a large share of that money actually went: not to world evangelism, but to lawsuits Mitchell filed against his own pastors.
The case against pastor Larry Gregory is the clearest example. Gregory and his wife were sent from the CFM church in Guam to plant a congregation in Fiji in 1996. Prescott sent no financial support, and Gregory suspected the sending pastor in Guam of fraud. The young Fijian congregation had to cover the costs of a church building, a church vehicle, and an expensive healing campaign Mitchell himself led there, much of it out of the Gregorys’ own pocket. “Prescott did not give a single dollar,” Gregory later wrote in a 2018 email exchange.
Raising that problem cost him. Mitchell demanded the Gregorys return to the United States in 2001. When Gregory refused, insisting he had done nothing wrong, Mitchell filed suit to seize the church building outright. Gregory says the goal was personal. “His main goal was to hurt me personally,” he wrote, describing an effort to destroy the Fiji congregation because he had refused to back down. Legal documents put Mitchell’s spending on the case at roughly $442,000, and possibly more. He hired a top Australian attorney at $310 an hour, flew him to Fiji, and booked him into first-class hotels. At one point he bribed a court clerk to help produce a false arrest warrant meant to have Gregory jailed. That part of the scheme came to light before it succeeded.
What the Departures Reveal
No single account proves a pattern. Enough independent ones, told by people with no reason to coordinate a story, do. In 2002, roughly 160 congregations left CFM at once, in a fellowship already known by that point for controlling and intimidating pastors. New Zealand’s churches left the network entirely rather than stay affiliated. In 2015, nearly half of the CFM’s leaders in Britain, 52 pastors, walked away in a single wave. None of these were isolated disputes between one pastor and one congregation. Each was a bloc of leaders, in a different country, reaching the same conclusion independently: the cost of staying under Mitchell’s authority had outgrown whatever benefit came from the network’s name and resources.
These departures happened years and continents apart, driven by pastors who had no obvious way to compare notes. What they describe converges on the same complaint: a single man who would not tolerate correction, and a structure built to make sure he never had to accept any. Reformatorisch Dagblad asked Greg Mitchell to respond to the criticism on his father’s behalf. He declined. Van Diermen’s own nineteen-page letter to Wayman Mitchell, sent after his expulsion, never received a reply either. Coercive leaders rarely leave a paper trail defending their own conduct. The silence itself is part of the record.
Testing the Fruit
Scripture doesn’t ask believers to submit blindly to a man’s ordinances. In Acts 17:11, the Bereans are commended precisely because they refused to take even Paul’s word at face value. They “searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so” (KJV). That is the standard CFM’s structure was built to prevent. A pastor who threatens your family for asking a question has already told you what kind of leader he is. Mitchell built a fellowship that multiplied fast, then spent the next three decades punishing anyone who noticed the cost. The men and women who eventually walked away did what the Bereans did. They tested the fruit against the standard, and they left when it did not hold up.
