Praise Chapel is a church-planting fellowship founded in California in 1976, and it is not part of The Potter’s House or Christian Fellowship Ministries (CFM). The two are separate organizations, and Praise Chapel has insisted on the distinction in writing. What makes the question worth asking is that the two look remarkably alike, were bridged by two brothers, and ended in open enmity: in 1998 The Potter’s House declared Praise Chapel “the enemy.” Today Praise Chapel operates worldwide under the banner PC Global, led by a man who once sat on the board of The Potter’s House.
Is Praise Chapel part of The Potter’s House?
No. Praise Chapel is a distinct fellowship with its own founder, its own headquarters, and its own name, and it does not belong to Christian Fellowship Ministries (CFM). This matters because the two are often confused, and the confusion is not accidental: they share a nearly identical church-planting method and a period of historical overlap. When a website once listed Praise Chapel as affiliated with the Christian Fellowship churches, a Praise Chapel pastor’s wife wrote in 1998 to ask that the record be corrected, stating that her fellowship was not The Potter’s House and wanted nothing to do with it.
Where did Praise Chapel come from?
By Praise Chapel’s own published history, the fellowship began in 1976, when Mike and Donna Neville moved from Tulsa, Oklahoma, to Maywood, California, to pastor a struggling Pentecostal congregation. From that one church they built a church-planting operation on a simple structure: one church discipling couples and sending them out to plant new churches, supported by basic ministry funding, Bible conferences, and a family-style fellowship. They summarized the vision in three words still used across the group today: Win, Build, Send.
That founding sits alongside, not inside, the story of The Potter’s House. Wayman Mitchell took over a Prescott, Arizona, congregation in 1970 and broke his churches away from the Foursquare denomination in 1983 to run them as Christian Fellowship Ministries (CFM). Praise Chapel and The Potter’s House grew up in the same era, in the same Pentecostal soil, on the same church-planting logic, as parallel operations rather than one inside the other.
Why Praise Chapel looks so much like The Potter’s House
The resemblance is not a coincidence, and it runs through the Neville family. Larry Neville worked with Wayman Mitchell for roughly 13 years, sat on the original Board of Elders of Christian Fellowship Ministries (CFM), and planted churches across Asia before he broke with Mitchell in 1990 and left the following year. Mike Neville, the founder of Praise Chapel, was Larry’s brother. When Larry Neville left The Potter’s House, he joined the fellowship his brother had built, and he leads it still.
Personnel flowed the same direction. A former member, writing in 2002 about his years in The Door — one of the church names used by The Potter’s House — described Praise Chapel as a sister fellowship made up largely of former Door pastors. The 1990 split that sent roughly a hundred pastors out of The Potter’s House gave Praise Chapel a supply of experienced, like-minded church-planters who already knew the method by heart, because they had run it for years under Mitchell.
What the shared model does not settle is whether Praise Chapel reproduces the control patterns documented on this site inside The Potter’s House. That is a separate question, and the evidence base for it is thinner. The same church-planting machinery can be run with or without the shunning, the reputational discipline, and the pastoral domination that former members describe in The Fellowship. The honest statement is narrow: the structure is the same, the personnel overlapped, and at least one former member reports the same no-compassion dynamics carrying over. A blanket verdict on Praise Chapel would go past what the record supports.
Why The Potter’s House called Praise Chapel “the enemy”
The break was not amicable. In December 1998, the Praise Chapel pastor’s wife who wrote to correct the affiliation label explained that she and her husband had left The Potter’s House in 1989, officially over a financial disagreement, and had been branded “out of the will of God” ever since. The financial dispute she described was concrete: Mitchell wanted each congregation to send 5 percent of its income to the church that had sent its pastor out, and another 5 percent to his own church in Prescott, an arithmetic that fell hardest on new churches still dependent on support.
By her account, The Potter’s House had gone beyond disagreement and proclaimed Praise Chapel “the enemy.” The label belongs to the same period as the exodus in which about 160 churches left Christian Fellowship Ministries (CFM), and it fits a pattern The Fellowship has applied to departing leaders repeatedly: those who leave are not merely gone, they are recast as rebels and enemies. Praise Chapel, growing and absorbing former Door pastors, was a natural target for that language.
What Praise Chapel is today
Praise Chapel now presents itself as a global family of fellowships. Its churches are organized under PC Global, headquartered in Rancho Cucamonga, California, which by its own count spans more than 4,300 churches in 30 nations. Larry Neville, the former Potter’s House board-elder, heads it, and has written a shelf of books on church planting, discipleship, and multiplication, the same subjects Mitchell’s church trained him in.
For a reader trying to sort out the two names, the summary is straightforward. Praise Chapel is not The Potter’s House, and its leaders reject the equation. But the two were born in the same movement of church-planting Pentecostalism, were joined by the Neville brothers, exchanged pastors after The Potter’s House split, and parted in open hostility. They are separate houses built from the same blueprint, and the family that drew the blueprint sat on both sides of the wall.
