Wayman Mitchell built a fellowship that teaches its members to treat anyone who leaves as dead to them. Then, when his own daughter died outside it, he applied the rule to her. Sharon Mastin was buried in Western Australia in 2012, years after she and her husband walked away from Christian Fellowship Ministries, the network known as The Potter’s House and The Fellowship. In fact, former pastor Clement Okusi, writing under his own name, states that Wayman Mitchell did not attend her funeral. The account fits everything the network teaches, and that is the part worth examining.
Who Sharon Mastin was
Sharon was Nelda Mitchell’s daughter, whom Wayman Mitchell raised in his household and counted among his children. The Fellowship’s own memorial for him, published by the Prescott Potter’s House, lists Sharon among the three children who died before him, alongside Terry and Karen. Later, she married Mike Mastin, who came up through the Prescott congregation and rose to lead the Australian churches. He took the Perth work over from Mitchell himself, the same work that Wayman and Nelda had pastored three separate times. So for a period the Mastins sat near the center of The Fellowship in Western Australia. Then they left.
The funeral Wayman Mitchell did not attend
Sharon Mastin died in Osborne Park, a Perth suburb. The West Australian carried her death notice on February 20, 2012. By then she and Mike had been out of The Fellowship for years. Okusi recorded in 2015 that Wayman Mitchell refused to attend the funeral of his daughter Sharon Mastin. He puts Wayman roughly a fifteen-minute drive away when he stayed home. Former members in the network’s own discussion spaces describe the same scene, placing Wayman in Perth and absent from the service. Still, the accounts converge on one fact. Wayman Mitchell did not come.
The verdict the network’s own book hands down
The Fellowship likes to quote one verse about provision and family. Paul writes in 1 Timothy 5:8, “But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.” The Greek is specific. “His own” renders ton idion, one’s own people, and “of his own house” renders oikeion, the members of one’s household. Still, the sentence weighs the duty a man owes his own family before any wider claim on him. Even so, this system trained its founder to withhold his presence from his daughter’s grave, and it had named her among those to renounce. By the measure of its own scripture, that system has denied the faith it claims to guard. Yet Wayman Mitchell did not invent the logic for Sharon alone. He built it, taught it, and shipped it abroad, and the families still inside The Fellowship live under it now.
Sources
Clement Okusi, Surviving Separation from a Church Network (2015). Prescott Potter’s House, memorial page for Wayman Mitchell. Sharon Mastin obituary, The West Australian, February 20, 2012, archived at Legacy.com. Cult Education Institute, Christian Fellowship Churches visitor comments.
