The Door presents itself as a missions movement with thousands of churches worldwide. In the Netherlands it operates as Evangeliegemeente De Deur. Elsewhere the same organization trades as The Potter’s House, Victory Chapel, The Door, and La Puerta, all under Christian Fellowship Ministries, also called The Fellowship. Far less visible is what happens to the money inside The Door, and what that does to ordinary members and pastors alike.
This article follows the money in three stages. First, why members give. Second, what the local church does with it. Third, what reaches the top of the pyramid in Prescott, Arizona. It draws on official documents, including contracts and court filings, and on interviews with former pastors and members. What follows is a reading of that material. Check it against the sources and decide for yourself.
Why members give
Every member is expected to give ten percent of gross income as a tithe. The tithe is treated as a test of obedience to God and to leadership. On top of it, members are pressed for “love offerings” toward conferences and world evangelism.
The pressure peaks at the biannual international conferences. There a dedicated offering sermon, sometimes half an hour long, is built entirely around persuading the audience to give large sums. Often it invokes the emergency money a household keeps aside, the cash set by for a broken washing machine, and urges that it be given to the church instead.
In the Netherlands, Kenneth van Vliet, pastor of The Door in The Hague, is known for offering sermons of this kind. In them, it is said that the pastor “has heard from God” that someone present must give ten or even a hundred thousand euros. Spiritual returns are then tied to financial ones, such as the claim that a childless couple will receive a miracle baby if they give a particular amount.
The Door positions itself publicly against prosperity theology, the belief that financial blessing follows directly from faith and giving. It names figures such as Kenneth Copeland, Benny Hinn, and Joel Osteen as deceivers. In practice, however, its conference appeals run on the same engine: give, and God will give back, sometimes a job, a miracle, or a child. Strip away the disavowal, and the message at the offering is the one it claims to oppose. As a result, many members hand over well beyond ten percent under moral pressure, against a promised supernatural return that is not guaranteed, toward a final destination for the money that is rarely explained.
Sometimes a special collection is taken for a stated purpose, a new building. The funds are then carried to Prescott and handed to the headquarters church. Afterward the local congregation is expected to give again for the building it was already promised. A former member’s published memoir records a donor who gave eighty thousand dollars toward a church a pastor announced he would plant in Papua New Guinea. When the plan was dropped, the money was gone, and the donor, a successful businessman, was given no account of where it went. Other cases follow the pattern. A large sum is raised in a single evening to send a missionary couple who then never leave, with no clear explanation and the money unaccounted for. In one case, a missionary couple in Virginia were told at the last moment that the promised funds were “no longer available,” after thousands had been raised for them.
What the local church does with the money
One example of how the organization uses gathered money played out in the United States. Sophie Libemday filed for divorce from John Foley, son of the prominent pastor Kevin Foley, and The Potter’s House worked to keep custody with John.
According to Sophie’s account, no lawyer was officially provided by the church. Yet John was represented by a legal team the Fellowship’s churches use repeatedly, known for defending men in custody disputes. He was also supported with church money through an arrangement in which he was paid off the books for nominal church work, keeping his declared income low and his child-support obligations down. The support was arranged through the church in McMinnville under Kevin Foley. Sophie states that John received up to twenty thousand dollars described as “family support” for her and the children, which in reality funded his legal fight. On her account, the income of the Fellowship was used not for the work of God but to protect men inside the structure, with no transparency and the true destination concealed through informal payments.
Churches and foundations are required to spend money as communicated to donors. Funds raised for a stated purpose, a carpet, mission work, a building, must lawfully be spent on it. An organization that does otherwise edges toward misrepresentation or fraud. In the Netherlands, foundations with ANBI charitable status must publish an annual public report of income and expenditure. Yet these reports tend to reveal little. De Deur Zwolle, for instance, reports large sums spent on “world evangelism” and “conference costs” with no specification of what those line items contain. In the United States, where The Potter’s House is registered as a nonprofit, religious bodies are generally expected to file an annual Form 990 accounting for income, expenses, and compensation. According to the article’s sourcing, The Potter’s House has not done so. That removes any external view of its finances for an organization receiving millions worldwide through tithes and collections.
The churches also run on a mother-and-daughter structure. Each daughter church tithes its congregational income upward to its mother church, which tithes upward in turn, all the way to Prescott. The shape mirrors what the commercial world calls a pyramid or multi-level structure. Each layer pays the one above. The obligations are effectively binding and framed as obedience. And the top receives from thousands of congregations without paying upward itself. Members are asked to trust that Prescott handles these flows carefully and uses them to support new churches. In practice, pastors of those new churches report covering costs from their own savings with little structural help from Prescott, which raises the obvious question of what the tithes are actually used for.
Where the money inside The Door ends up in Prescott
A significant share of the money ends at the headquarters church in Prescott; the top of the pyramid. Two episodes raise serious questions about how carefully it is handled.
In 2000, Wayman Mitchell began litigation against a local pastor in Fiji, Lawrence Gregory, over a church building Gregory had bought himself. Mitchell demanded it be put in the name of Christian Fellowship Ministries. The case ran until 2021, when Fiji’s High Court rejected the claim and confirmed Gregory as rightful owner, declining the principal requests with the single word “I decline.” According to a witness, the organization spent on the order of half a million dollars in legal fees to claim a building worth a small fraction of that. The point, as it was put, was not the value of the property but to make a point. So member contributions raised under religious motives were spent on prolonged litigation and institutional control, rather than on aid or community support.
The second episode concerns an alleged real-estate investment of five million dollars made by Mitchell. He made it reportedly while in the early stages of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, when he was approached with a proposal that turned out to be a fraud. It remains unclear whether the money was Mitchell’s own or the church’s. If personal, it asks how a pastor on a reportedly modest income accumulated five million dollars to invest. If the church’s, it asks why, after the case was won under his son Greg Mitchell, the recovered sum was not returned to the church but divided among Greg and his sisters. Either way, the absence of accounting at that level is a warning sign for leaders and members.
What if your offering sustains the abuse
Members are urged to give generously, and giving is presented as stewardship, the careful handling of what God has entrusted to you. The material here shows something else. Proceeds were redirected without explanation. Tithes were carried to an international top without transparency. Substantial sums were spent on legal power plays, personal interests, and the manipulation of a custody case, while members were regularly drained and the organization offered no openness.
That raises a pointed question. What if your gift, however well meant, sustains a system that enables harm rather than reaching people or carrying the gospel? Transparency about money is a baseline requirement for any body that depends on donations and trust. Whoever gives may expect the gift to reach where it is needed, not to vanish into a fog of unaccountable transfers and institutional self-interest.
