The Christian Research Institute’s page carrying this report lists its publication date as June 2009, but the report’s own internal references, to a preliminary report from March 3, 1988, and to a Geraldo Rivera television segment that aired that September, make clear the underlying research is more than two decades older than that date suggests. It comes from the same year as the earliest television scrutiny of Wayman Mitchell’s network. CRI is a mainstream evangelical apologetics organization, not a secular anti-cult group, and its verdict is worth reading precisely because it comes from inside the world Christian Fellowship Ministries claims to belong to.
History: Wayman Mitchell’s break from Foursquare
CRI traces the network, known variously as The Potter’s House, The Door, Victory Chapel, Christian Center, Crossroads Chapel, and De Puerta, to Prescott, Arizona, in the early 1970s, with more than 250 affiliated congregations established worldwide by 1985. Wayman Mitchell, a graduate of the Foursquare-affiliated L.I.F.E. Bible College, broke with that denomination over a dispute concerning ordination procedure and became licensed instead through the church he had founded. CRI frames Mitchell’s project sympathetically at first: many early converts came out of the 1960s and 70s counterculture and the Jesus Movement, and Mitchell offered them direction, a personal experience of Christ, and a concrete place to commit themselves.
Beliefs: orthodox doctrine, and a debt to Branham
On core theology, CRI’s assessment is largely favorable. The network holds no published statement of faith, but follows the teaching in Duffield and Van Cleave’s Foundations of Pentecostal Theology, and affirms essential orthodox positions, the Trinity, the deity of Christ, salvation by grace alone, alongside a pretribulational, premillennial view of secondary matters. Where CRI’s report adds something not fully documented elsewhere in this archive is its account of Mitchell’s own early influences: he was shaped, CRI states, by William Branham, who denied the Trinity and helped drive the early Latter Rain movement, and by A. A. Allen, another Latter Rain preacher who emphasized a five-fold ministry. CRI credits Mitchell with rejecting the excesses of both men while still retaining some of the concepts behind their gift ministries, a lineage examined at greater length in Wayman Mitchell’s Branham inheritance.
Organization: young councils, and a hyperactive schedule
CRI describes a governance structure of a pastor alongside a church council, with the pastor of each newly planted congregation responsible for its financial, doctrinal, and moral accountability, all operating under bylaws Mitchell and others established at incorporation. The specific weakness CRI flags is age and inexperience: council members are typically young men with little or no biblical training, which CRI contrasts directly with the qualifications for eldership Scripture actually lays out in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1 and 2. The report also describes an intensely active weekly schedule, men’s leadership classes, street evangelism, Spanish-language outreach, and music ministry, framed internally as a deterrent keeping new converts from old habits, which CRI notes carries a real risk of burnout for members unable to keep pace.
Tongues, healing, and the biblical pattern
CRI’s sharpest doctrinal critique concerns practice rather than belief. Tongues, it reports, are exercised by the whole congregation in unison with no interpretation offered, which CRI contrasts with 1 Corinthians 14:22-33’s requirement that congregational tongues be followed by interpretation for the church’s edification. On healing, CRI describes a come-get-your-miracle mentality that raises expectations Scripture never promises will be met, since, in CRI’s own stated position, God may heal in answer to prayer but gives no guarantee that He will (James 5:14-15).
The Geraldo segment, and the allegations it surfaced
CRI’s report is explicit that its concerns sharpened after a Geraldo Rivera television segment aired in September 1988, in which exit counselor Rick Ross called the network cultic and dangerous. CRI lists the specific allegations reaching it from ex-members in Prescott and elsewhere: a shepherding-style doctrine of strong leadership control, a teaching that leaving invites God’s own judgment, family ostracism, tithing enforced as a condition of right standing with God, subjugation of women, and shunning of ex-members as lost until they return. CRI notes that similar allegations arriving independently from outside Prescott suggested the pattern was not confined to a single congregation.
A careful, hedged verdict
Having spoken with Rick Ross, ex-members, and multiple Potter’s House pastors and received conflicting accounts from all of them, CRI declined to adjudicate the specific allegations publicly, while still concluding that the severity of the reports made it unable to recommend the network as a place of Christian fellowship. Its exact verdict deserves to stand in its own words: the group could not rightly be called a non-Christian cult, but if the allegations proved true, one could properly say it was “at best aberrant, and at worst a church containing cultic elements or practices.”
Why this early evaluation still matters
Composed the same year as the Geraldo broadcast and close to the earliest Arizona television reporting examined elsewhere in this archive, this is among the oldest outside evaluations gathered on this site, and its caution has aged well. CRI reached no verdict it could not support, named its own uncertainty plainly, and still landed on language, aberrant, cultic elements, that nearly every testimony collected here in the decades since would go on to confirm in its own way.
Sources and further reading
- Christian Research Institute, “The Potter’s House,” originally researched 1988; article ID DP080
- On Mitchell’s Branham lineage, see Wayman Mitchell’s Branham inheritance
- The report recommends Ron Simpkins, An Open Door (Potter’s Press, 1985), the network’s own official history
