Larry Neville was one of the early insiders of Christian Fellowship Ministries (CFM), the organization behind The Potter’s House. He served as a pastor, a board-elder, and a missionary for roughly 13 years, planting churches across Asia and writing a book the church published itself. In October 1990 he wrote to Wayman Mitchell to object to the way the church was cutting off its own leaders, and within a year he was gone. Today Larry Neville leads Praise Chapel’s global network, PC Global, a separate church-planting fellowship that runs on almost exactly the model he once served under Mitchell, and one The Potter’s House would later brand “the enemy.”
Who was Larry Neville inside The Fellowship?
By the account of Charisma magazine, Larry Neville worked with Wayman Mitchell for 13 years, from the late 1970s until 1991. He was not a peripheral figure. He sat on the original Board of Elders of Christian Fellowship Ministries (CFM), pastored, and served as one of the church’s missionaries, pioneering congregations in Arizona, Pennsylvania, the Philippines, and Singapore. He planted extensively across Asia, and by 1990 he was writing from a Potter’s House work in Singapore.
He also wrote. While still inside The Fellowship, Neville authored The National Church in a Nationalistic Age, published in 1989 by the church’s own imprint, Potters Press in Prescott. He was, in other words, exactly the kind of trusted, productive leader the church held up as proof its method worked: an elder, a church-planter on three continents, and a published author under the church’s own label.
The 1990 letter that broke with Wayman Mitchell
In October 1990, Neville wrote a letter from Singapore to Wayman Mitchell and the elders of Christian Fellowship Ministries (CFM). He wrote it in the middle of the first large split in the church’s history, the exodus in which Colorado pastor Ron Jones severed his ties and, by the reporting of the time, roughly 100 pastors left with him.
Neville’s letter objected to how the church was treating the men who left. Mitchell’s structure had moved to cut off four named leaders — Jack Harris, Ron Jones, Peter Edwards, and Ron Simpkins — and anyone who associated with them, disassociating them from every relationship with fellowship ministers and attacking their character. Neville told Mitchell plainly, in his own words, “I have not found sufficient Biblical backing” for those actions. He argued that the church’s structure was not itself divine and that no organizational chart justified the shunning he was watching from the mission field.
This was not the complaint of a bitter outsider. Neville wrote while still inside, still on the field, still submitted, and he said so: he had agonized for almost a year and tried to stay out of it before he spoke. He left in 1991. The concerns he set down that October, enforced separation, reputational discipline, pressure on relationships, and structural rigidity, are the same concerns that surfaced in reporting about The Fellowship decades later. A man who helped build the church, and sat on its board, reached them first and from the inside.
Where did Larry Neville go?
Neville joined Praise Chapel, and Praise Chapel was a family affair. According to 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. Mike Neville was Larry’s brother. The church he started grew, by its own count, into more than 4,300 churches in 30 nations.
The model reads like a photocopy of the one Larry Neville left. Praise Chapel describes itself as one church sending out couples who were discipled in the local church to plant new churches, supported by Bible conferences and a family-style fellowship, under a vision it calls Win, Build, Send. That is the Potter’s House church-planting pattern in different words, run by the brother of a Potter’s House board-elder. The two organizations are not the same, and Praise Chapel has insisted on the distinction. A Praise Chapel pastor’s wife wrote in 1998 that The Potter’s House had proclaimed Praise Chapel “the enemy” and wanted her fellowship’s name kept off any list tying the two together.
Larry Neville now leads what Praise Chapel has become. Its churches are organized under PC Global, which he heads from Rancho Cucamonga, California, and which describes itself as a family of fellowships spanning more than 30 countries. He has written a shelf of books on the same subject Mitchell’s church trained him in: church planting, discipleship, and multiplication, with titles including Disciple Makers, The Globality Revolution, and Connectivity. The board-elder who questioned the structure in 1990 spent the decades after building a comparable structure of his own.
Why Larry Neville matters
A defender of The Fellowship has a ready answer: Neville left, he now runs a rival, and a man who leads the competition cannot be trusted about the church he walked out of. Two parts of that are true. He did leave, and he does lead a fellowship The Potter’s House called the enemy. But the timing undoes the charge. Neville’s objection was written in 1990, from inside, while he was still a submitted missionary and elder, before he had any rival to run. He was not attacking a competitor; he was pleading with his own leadership to stop shunning men over an organizational dispute, and he grounded the plea in Scripture he could not find on the other side.
His story also belongs to a pattern this site has traced through the men closest to the founding. Steve Cooper wrote the church’s first history and left. Ron Simpkins wrote its church-planting manual and left. Ron Jones, one of Mitchell’s earliest disciples, left and took roughly 100 pastors with him. Larry Neville, who sat on the board and carried the work to Asia, wrote his objection and left. These are not the complaints of people who never understood what Wayman Mitchell built. They are the verdicts of the people who built it, and who then spent the rest of their ministries elsewhere.
