Almost everything gathered in this archive is written looking backward, by someone who has already left. This October 1999 testimony is different. Its author was still attending the Potter’s House when she wrote it, three years saved, still weighing whether to stay, and she had gone looking for other people’s stories online only because something in her own spirit had already started to give out. What she found, in her words, opened her eyes. What she wrote afterward is a rare document, built around the question that finally moved her, why wasn’t God moving there: a snapshot of the decision to leave while it is still being made, not remembered.
A defeated spirit
She is careful, almost to a fault, not to overstate her case. She admits her own imperfections and unresolved issues up front, and she explicitly declines to call the Potter’s House a cult even while agreeing with much of what former members had already written on the subject. What she describes instead is more specific and, in some ways, harder to argue with: a full year of feeling defeated after nearly every service, preaching that used Scripture as something to be struck with rather than a tool she was being taught to wield in her own life, and a persistently negative tone from the pulpit. She came to feel her pastor carried a grievance of his own, one that left her with the impression that God was perpetually angry rather than good.
Quiet withdrawal
Her response was not dramatic. As a new convert she had attended three services a week; by the time she wrote this, she had quietly scaled back to Sunday mornings only, and noticed real peace of mind as a direct result of stepping back. Underneath that small adjustment sat a much larger fear she names plainly: a sense that her salvation itself might not survive her leaving, that staying saved required staying in that particular building. That is not a minor detail. It is the same fear-based mechanism documented in a separate 1999 testimony from someone who had already gotten out, here caught in the act of still operating on someone who had not yet left.
Why wasn’t God moving there?
The most striking part of her account is the plain empirical question she started asking herself. She had originally come to the church seeking physical healing, and years of prayer and fasting had produced nothing. Looking around, she noticed something else: members who had been in the church far longer than her, and by her own estimate more spiritually dedicated, were still visibly struggling in their finances, health, and emotional lives. She asked herself directly whether there was some hindrance in the church itself, and put the question in words any reader of Matthew 7:16-20 will recognize, wondering plainly why God did not seem to be moving there at all. That is the test Jesus himself gave for a tree, known by its fruit, and she was applying it to her own congregation with an honesty that took her somewhere she had not expected to go.
Refusing blind obedience
She is equally direct about what she will not do going forward. She does not want a faith that simply absorbs whatever is preached from the pulpit without question, and she says so with some dry humor, adding that she would be in real trouble if she had to depend on her pastor for basic direction in life. What she wants instead is straightforward: a church that preaches with love and from the heart, rather than one that preaches from a chip on someone’s shoulder.
The truth that set her free
She closes by naming exactly what changed her mind, and it deserves to be read in her own words: “I guess the truth in this case has set me free.” It is a direct echo of John 8:32, and an apt one, since what she describes is not a doctrinal argument winning her over but information itself doing the work. Other people’s testimonies dismantled a fear that she might be hunted down, spiritually speaking, for leaving. She ends knowing she can transfer to another full-gospel church, that the blessings she associated with obedience will continue, and that God still loves her regardless of which building she attends on Sunday.
Why this testimony still matters
What makes this document different from nearly everything else in this archive is timing. It was not written by someone safely on the other side of an exit, free to reflect without consequence. It was written by someone still inside, still uncertain, using the testimonies of people who had already left as the specific tool that let her imagine leaving herself. That is the quiet, practical purpose an archive like this one serves. It is not only a record for historians. For at least one reader in 1999, it was the reason she felt able to walk out the door.
Sources and further reading
- “I now know I can walk away from the Potter’s House…” testimony by a Potter’s House member, October 1999; archived in the Cult Education Institute reference files
- On the same fear-based theology from someone who had already left, see “God Is Always There”
