In November 2022 Joel E. Crosby began the biggest project he had taken on, an anthology of memoirs by people who were once members of the same cult he grew up in. There was almost nothing online about it, a few documentaries from the 1980s and the occasional newspaper article, and he wanted that to change. The result is Escaping the Potter’s House, ten accounts from former members of Christian Fellowship Ministries, the network also called The Fellowship, The Door, and The Potter’s House. This is the story of how the book got made, and why it took the shape it did.
Why he started
When Crosby left The Door, the internet held almost nothing for someone in his position. There were two Facebook groups, so he joined both and posted among former members scattered across the world. He became an admin, partly because he had run a group of more than two hundred thousand people before, and partly because organic social media is his trade. One line ran through nearly every post. Someone has to do something. He was still working through his own trauma, but he kept turning that sentence over. He is not good on camera, so a documentary was off the table. Writing, though, he can do. So the thing he could do was write a book.
What Escaping the Potter’s House had to prove
He did not want a memoir anyone could wave away. By then he had met plenty of the current members who defied their own pastors to make anonymous profiles and typed at former members from the safety of their homes. The message was always a version of the same line. It is not true. The Potter’s House is not a cult. You are the only one who thinks so. And the next one was easy to predict, that it is just him, just his church, just his country, never the whole of The Fellowship. So he built Escaping the Potter’s House to close every one of those exits, with ten former members from four countries and three continents who describe the same things. This is not one voice. It is ten, and most of them have never met.
One story on time
He set a deadline of January 31, 2023, which gave people three months to send in their stories. Over thirty signed up. By the deadline, exactly one story had arrived. It was Helen’s, titled “The Miracle Baby.” So he decided he owed it to her to keep pressing. More submissions came in as the months went on, but many were too short or too loose to carry a chapter, which is understandable, since most contributors are not writers. Still, he kept asking, and he kept the standard where it needed to be.
Refusing to stack the deck
He made one rule early and held to it. He would not nitpick whose story made the book and whose did not, and he would not build a false picture by gathering only the most extreme experiences. It would have been easy to paint the Potter’s House at its worst that way. But he wanted God in the process, not his own thumb on the scale. So he let anyone who wanted to speak, whether or not they were still a Christian. The final ten came out at eight written by Christians and two by people who had left the faith. He has been criticized from both sides for that. Even so, an honest cross-section is what a final argument needs, since a curated hit piece is the easy thing to wave away, and this is not one.
The two he owes the most
Here is the part the critics never expect. The two contributors who are no longer Christians are the two he is most grateful to. Helen, the one who sent her story on time, is one of them, and he pressed on with the whole book because she had done what he asked when almost no one else had. The other is Nathan, whose chapter is titled “The Golden Boy.” Nathan was the first to ask for a ghostwriter, which sent Crosby looking for one. Crosby could have written that chapter himself, but he was still processing his own trauma, and getting his own story onto the page was already hard. Sinking into someone else’s and feeling the full weight of it was more than he could manage then. The ghostwriter he found worked so well that he brought her back for several more chapters. So two people who walked away from the faith are a large part of why this book exists.
What it cost, and what it did not
He told people from the start that he would make sure a book got made, and that he would pay for it. That meant the editor and the formatter, and later the audiobook, the Dutch translation, and the Spanish translation. That is his own money, and he has not earned it back. Since publishing he has been told he is chasing a career, and that his marketing background proves it. If profit were the point, he would have bought crypto and stocks, not written about abuse and put his own story in front of the world. He is a private and introverted person. He did this because it matters, and because someone had to.
What he says to his critics
Current members assume they already know him. They decide he is full of hate, that he cannot forgive the people who wronged him, that he is a rebel guilty of witchcraft, and that God will judge him for it. He is still a Christian. He wrote this book out of love for the people still trapped inside that cult. And he has one question for the people cursing it online, which is why they are so angry about a book they have never read.
Why there is no sequel
Some readers have asked for a sequel, because they would like to share their own story in one. The impulse is understandable, but the book does not need it. The point of Escaping the Potter’s House was to be a final argument. It was meant to end the yes-no game between current and former members. One side says it happened, the other says it did not. Ten accounts from four countries settle that game. The argument stands. Anyone who reads the book without a verdict already in mind will have to meet those experiences head on.
Would he do it again?
He does not know, and that is the honest answer. The book has given him a great deal, and it has cost him at least as much. He is, by now, the biggest rebel that church has ever produced, and that has made him the center of its gossip, its intimidation, and its threats. He would rather not be this public. So he cannot promise he would do it again. He can only say that when it needed doing, he did what he could.
