What does The Potter’s House believe? The question has two answers, and the difference between them is the subject of this article. On paper, the church holds a 12-point statement of faith that most Pentecostal congregations could sign: one God in three Persons, an infallible Bible, baptism in the Holy Spirit with tongues, healing provided in the atonement, the second coming. In practice, the beliefs that govern a member’s week appear nowhere in that statement: the pastor as God’s delegated authority, God’s personal placement of every member in one congregation, holiness standards that reach into the living room, and giving far beyond the tithe. Both answers below come from the church’s own materials. This concerns the network Wayman Mitchell led from Prescott, Arizona — The Potter’s House, The Door, and Victory Chapel, together Christian Fellowship Ministries (CFM), also called The Fellowship — not the Dallas megachurch that shares the name.
What The Potter’s House believes on paper
The Prescott mother church publishes its Statement of Faith. Its 12 points cover the Trinity, the incarnation, the Holy Spirit, Spirit baptism evidenced by speaking in tongues, salvation by faith, consecrated Christian living, the Church as the Body of Christ, baptism and the Lord’s Supper, and the bodily return of Christ with a millennium and final judgment. Nothing in it is unusual for a Pentecostal church, and a fair reading should say so.
Three details in the document matter for what follows. First, the only authority the statement names is the Bible’s, described as ultimate, final, eternal, and impossible to supersede. The words pastor, tithe, and obedience do not appear. Second, the statement locates healing of body, soul, and spirit in the atonement, which makes healing a settled purchase rather than an open question. Third, it teaches that every believer has “a place in the church designated by God.” Those two doctrinal seeds, healing and placement, grow into the operative system described next.
What does The Potter’s House believe in practice?
The working doctrines are unwritten. A longtime insider describes them as the Fellowship principles, a code that governs members more than the statement of faith does. My own 25 years inside The Door match that description: no one hands a new convert these rules, and he learns them by being corrected. In practice the church teaches:
- The pastor holds delegated divine authority. The headship doctrine treats the pastor’s counsel as carrying God’s weight, and disagreement as rebellion. Jobs, moves, courtships, and marriages pass through his approval.
- God placed you in this congregation. The placement doctrine expands the statement’s designated-by-God clause until leaving the congregation means leaving God’s will.
- Sickness signals a spiritual problem. The healing doctrine builds on the atonement clause: Wayman Mitchell’s book on healing presents disease as the devil’s work, and John Gooding’s ministerial syllabus traces sickness to sin. Members learn to treat doctors, and above all psychologists, as a failure of faith.
- Revival comes through rapid discipleship. Converts are groomed toward the pulpit and pioneered out as pastors within a year or two, and the congregation’s calendar exists to feed evangelism.
- Holiness is enforced in specifics. The unwritten standards have included a ban on television for anyone in ministry and detailed rules for women covering dress, dating, and silence; the network has never had a female pastor.
- Giving proves faith. Tithes plus recurring offerings are taught as obligation, while the congregation receives no accounting of where the money goes.
A former member quoted on this site put the resulting ratio at “90% Potter’s House, 10% Bible.” That is a member’s arithmetic, and it describes the gap between the two answers above.
“Ye shall know them by their fruits”
The church preaches the test itself; Jesus applies it to religious leaders: “Ye shall know them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:16, KJV). Applied to the doctrines above, the record reads as follows.
The healing doctrine has a body count in the documentation. This site’s account of suicides in The Fellowship records members whose mental illness was read as demonic and went untreated; a 2025 Dutch investigation by the program Pointer reported that The Door discourages psychological care, including a pastor telling a member to stop antidepressants. The same teaching produced the documented, fatal failure of judgment in the Eastern Freeway tragedy.
The headship and placement doctrines produce the family damage former members report convergently: courtships steered, marriages surveilled and undone, relatives outside the church treated as threats. And the structure produced a verdict from inside: in 1990, about 160 churches left The Fellowship in a single exodus, led by men who had preached in it for years.
“Every Pentecostal church believes these things”
The defense deserves its strongest form, and half of it is correct. The written statement is orthodox evangelicalism, and belief in divine healing, tongues, and holiness is mainstream Pentecostalism, held peacefully by millions. If the written statement were the whole answer, this article would have no subject.
The distinctives are the unwritten half and its enforcement. A belief becomes a rule when a sanction follows it, and the sanctions are what former members document: discipline for a television, months of standing meetings for questioning counsel, exclusion for leaving. Where that line between conviction and control sits is treated separately in high-control group versus cult. Nor does the criticism rest on hostile summaries of the doctrine: the church’s teaching is documented from its own printed and preached words, and the practice from four decades of named testimony, court records, and contemporaneous press. A reader who suspects this page of unfairness can read the church’s statement first and the documentation second, in either order.
Where this article fits
This page states the beliefs and their fruits; two companion pieces do the testing. For the doctrines measured against Scripture, point by point, read the biblical case. For the control structure analyzed on Steven Hassan’s model, read the BITE analysis. What the beliefs cost the people who held them is recorded in the testimonies across this site, in their own words.
