The Door

 

This group of churches goes by several names, including "Christian Fellowship Ministries", "The Potter's House" (not T.D. Jakes affliliated), and "Victory Chapel".  However, it is most commonly referred to as "The Door", a small Charismatic denomination begun by Wayman Mitchell in 1970.

The most striking feature of this group is the extreme authority of the church leadership.  Although pastor-worshipping is common in many Pentecostal and Charismatic churches, The Door seems to take it to a whole new level. 

 

I had a very brief experience with this group during the 1980's while my family was living in New Mexico.  Several of my mother's friends who lived across the border in Arizona attended The Door, and they invited us to go with them.  Even on those few brief visits, we could see that the pastor was viewed as some sort god by the congregation.  The job of the elders appeared to be mainly to act as the pastor's bouncers.  They followed the pastor everywhere and shooed people out of his way.  On one occasion, when someone was whispering during a church service, the pastor merely snapped his fingers and pointed toward the offending individual, and the elders swarmed in, surrounded the woman, and pushed her hastily out of the church.  Fortunately, due to the location of the church, my family never became deeply involved in this denomination. 

 

Over the years, The Door has caught the attention of the media for several bizarre offenses, mostly regarding the extreme measures that they have used to instill fear in their followers.  In 1996, an Indiana court prohibited the father of a five-year-old girl from taking her to the church after she was found to have post-traumatic stress disorder resulting from being forced by the pastor, to put her hands in a bucket of blood that contained a cow heart.  The pastor, Dan Mezzon of Prescott, Arizona, later claimed that the blood was fake, but admitted to using the method to try to scare the 5-year-old away from sex and drugs.  "That's the problem with this generation that does not understand fear," he said.

 

In October 1999, a authorities briefly shut down a haunted house re-enactment of the Columbine massacres that a Santa Fe church affiliated with The Door was using to try to scare the community into repentance.  Two guns used in the re-enactment were confiscated, and then it was allowed to re-open.  Residents of the community complained that the church held similarly tasteless presentations every Halloween, including one in 1997 that showed a girl being raped and beheaded.  Pastor Henry Houghton explained, "We're doing this to present the gospel.  It's the world we live in.  Yes, we're trying to scare them. But they see twice this much violence on TV every week."

 

Former members of this group complain not only about the nearly limitless authority of the church leaders, but also about the extreme level of work required in order to maintain good standing in the congregation.  Many claim that exhaustion is a means of keeping people from leaving--keeping them simply too busy to seriously consider their situation.  Those who do begin to question the teachings of the church are often quickly ex-communicated.  Once former church member was asked to leave merely for asking where the money that he was donating would be going.  The church reportedly waited until his $2,000 check cleared and then informed him that he would be arrested if he returned.

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