Ron Simpkins was one of the earliest and most influential figures in Christian Fellowship Ministries (CFM), the organization behind The Potter’s House. He wrote two of its foundational books, discipled one of the men who chronicled its history, and helped shape the church-planting method that carries Wayman Mitchell’s name. He also left. Years later he joined Praise Chapel, a fellowship that The Potter’s House publicly branded “the enemy.” His books are still quoted inside the churches he departed.
Where did Ron Simpkins come from?
The fullest account of Simpkins comes from a source The Potter’s House published itself: Go Ye: The Arizona Story, the 1982 history written by Steve Cooper. Cooper and Simpkins grew up together in the 1960s and attended junior college together before Simpkins left for university in Flagstaff. By 1973 Simpkins had finished school, earned a master’s degree in history, and taken a job as a junior high school history teacher.
Simpkins was converted in Flagstaff around 1973 under Pastor Ron Jones, whose own line of discipleship ran back through Glen Cluck to Wayman Mitchell in Prescott. He brought a friend named Joe Weidinger with him, and the two young converts ran their first outreach in Winslow, where Simpkins gave his first altar call. For roughly four years he was discipled inside the Flagstaff church, learning, as Cooper’s book puts it, by watching, by listening, and by instruction.
His education is worth noting, because The Fellowship has long discouraged formal theological training. The Foursquare denomination’s own history records that Mitchell permitted only what it called primitive and militant evangelism and steered his men away from Bible college. Simpkins, a man with a graduate degree in history, became one of the writers who put that anti-intellectual instinct into print.
The churches Ron Simpkins planted
In 1977 Simpkins left the Flagstaff church to plant his own work in Payson, Arizona. According to Go Ye, he later opened a church in Tucson, pastored in Flagstaff, spent six months overseas on a mission that reached toward Manila, and eventually moved north to plant a church in Denver, Colorado. Across those years he became one of the early pastors whose fruit the young Fellowship pointed to as proof its method worked.
He also left a mark on how The Fellowship organized its members. Go Ye credits Simpkins in Flagstaff with restructuring the scattered home-meeting groups, variously called the underground church or the church in the home, into the standing small-group system the book calls the Fellowships. That system of home groups feeding the main congregation remains a feature of Potter’s House churches today.
Simpkins was also the man who brought Steve Cooper to faith. Cooper, then a newspaper reporter, was his childhood friend, and it was Simpkins who handed him a copy of Josh McDowell’s Evidence That Demands a Verdict and argued him toward conversion. Cooper went on to write Go Ye, the first authorized history of The Fellowship, and thanked Simpkins in its acknowledgments as “my friend, whose vision and advice were invaluable.”
The two books that shaped The Potter’s House
Simpkins is remembered less for any single church than for what he wrote. He authored two of the earliest books The Fellowship produced.
We Can Take the Land: A Study in Church Planting appeared in 1984 with a foreword by Wayman Mitchell. It is a training manual for planting churches on Mitchell’s model, built around an interview with Mitchell and a chapter of interviews with early pastors Jack Harris, Harold Warner, and Ron Jones. It codified the discipleship-and-multiplication pattern that sent workers out to open churches city by city, and former members still cite it as a primary text for understanding how the machine was designed to run.
An Open Door: A Story of the Restoration of the Local Church followed in 1985, published by the church’s own imprint, Potters Press in Prescott. It is an authorized account of Mitchell’s ministry and the congregation he built, and it is candid about the sources Mitchell drew from. The book names the healing-revival preachers of the 1950s, including William Branham and A. A. Allen, as part of the lineage behind The Potter’s House. That admission, printed by the church itself under Simpkins’s name, is one of the strongest pieces of evidence for The Fellowship’s roots in the post-war faith-healing circuit.
Both books did what The Fellowship’s later leaders kept doing: they were written for internal training and discipleship, and they were superseded over time by newer titles from Mitchell and his son Greg. But the early manuals carry Simpkins’s name, and the militant church-planting language they helped fix in place outlasted his membership.
Why did Ron Simpkins leave?
Simpkins left Christian Fellowship Ministries (CFM). The public record of what he did next is his own later authorship. In 1993 he published Handbook for Small Churches, and in 1994 he wrote The Harvest Generation: The Story of Praise Chapel — a history of a different fellowship, written by the man who had once written the history and the manuals of The Potter’s House.
Praise Chapel was not a neutral destination. In December 1998 the wife of a Praise Chapel pastor wrote that The Potter’s House had proclaimed Praise Chapel “the enemy” and wanted her fellowship’s name removed from any list tying it to the group. Simpkins is reported to preach alongside other former Fellowship figures, including Mike Neville, within the Praise Chapel orbit. His involvement with Praise Chapel is established by his authorship of its story; the present-tense detail of where and with whom he preaches rests on secondary report and is the one claim here that would benefit from a firmer source.
What Ron Simpkins’s story shows
A Fellowship defender will answer that Simpkins left, that a man who joined “the enemy” cannot speak for The Potter’s House, and that his departure says nothing about the church he abandoned. The first two points are true. He did leave, and he did align with a fellowship The Fellowship condemned. But the conclusion does not follow. The Potter’s House still prints and quotes his material, still teaches the church-planting pattern his manual codified, and still rests part of its own origin story on the book he wrote. An organization does not get to keep an author’s work as scripture while discarding the fact that the author walked out.
Simpkins belongs to a pattern this site has documented elsewhere. Steve Cooper, who wrote The Fellowship’s first history, left. Larry Neville, whose 1990 letter warned that structure is not divine, left. Ron Simpkins, who wrote the manual and the authorized story, left. The men closest to the founding, the ones who understood the method well enough to put it in writing, are among those who walked away from what Wayman Mitchell built. That is not the record of disgruntled outsiders. It is the record of the builders.
