Mike M’s Testimony
Mike M. shared some of his experiences with Jessica G and Quinn in June 2025. Jessica G and Quinn co-wrote the following summary, which was then reviewed by Mike for accuracy and approved by Mike for public dissemination.
Mike met Dave Cottrell in 2004/2005 through Scottsdale Bible Church. Dave officiated Mike’s wedding in 2010. Several years later Mike confronted Dave with some of his concerns. Mike then stopped attending Friday Night.
One of Mike’s concerns was that Dave would orchestrate dysfunctional relationships / living situations / etc.. Mike had told Dave that he was attracted to both women and men. Dave suggested that Mike move in with three other men. After he moved in, Mike discovered that all of the other men had same sex attraction, but Dave was fully aware from the get-go. Since Dave did not share this information up front, Mike was unable to decide for himself if this would be a good living situation for him. (At the time the men held the wide-spread evangelical belief that same-gender sex acts were sin.) Mike interprets this as one example of Dave intentionally creating situations that would result in crises, so that Dave could come in and save the day.
Mike also identified a trend of unusual or controlling requests from Dave. These included:
In the first few months of Mike being at Friday Night, Mike expressed that he could get out of an uncomfortable situation if he had $1,500. Mike was just sharing the situation, not asking for money, and it was not an emergency. Yet Dave volunteered to give him $1,500 from the community fund. Afterwards Mike felt grateful to Dave. Looking back he wondered if Dave was trying to use the money to engender goodwill towards Dave. At the time, Mike was on the fence about his involvement in the community.
Dave asked Mike to go to another man’s house because the man was feeling tempted to look at pornography. Mike stayed overnight. Dave knew at the time that Mike was attracted to other men, so Mike feels it was odd that Dave asked him instead of a straight man.
Dave asked Mike to drop everything one night to spend time with a man dying from cancer, that Mike did not know well, when Mike was only 22.
One time, the Friday Night group was at In-N-Out. Dave asked Mike if there was any reason why he wouldn’t ask a certain woman on an “edification appointment” (this is a term Dave invented for a kind of platonic date). Mike hesitantly indicated there was no particular reason he wouldn’t. Dave said that if he wanted to be a part of prophet school (a type of discipleship group), he needed to ask the woman out right now, over there. Mike said no. He was eventually invited to attend the “prophet school” but it was 4-6 months later. Mike felt that Dave was testing his obedience (notably, to Dave, not God). It seemed that his inclusion was conditional.
During these earlier years, Mike discipled another man. Mike later learned that the man had psychosis. The man described his experiences to Dave, who then claimed it was spiritual warfare. This led the group to encourage the man to practice listening prayer, but that involved him engaging his internal voice. This made the man’s psychosis worse. It ruined Mike’s relationship with him and the man left Friday Night deeply hurt by the experience. This an example of Dave acting confidently in high-stakes situations where he is inexperienced and uneducated.
Several years later Mike was engaged to be married. He and his fiancee attended pre-marital counseling with Dave and Kathy. Mike told them that had previously had sex with men. Just a few months before the wedding, he shared that he did not know if he had STDs or was HIV positive. Looking back Mike said that his fiance was right to express concern over him hiding this information. But at the time Dave minimized it. According to Mike, there were multiple substantial issues that were minimized by Dave and swept under the rug, which ended up causing problems in the marriage. At the time, Dave’s enablement fit Mike’s needs, because he wanted to get married. However, Mike now feels that they needed an adult in the room to speak objectively rather than someone with an agenda, and that Dave had an agenda to create unhealthy / chaotic situations in order to make people dependent on him. Quinn asked if there was ever a time where someone called out the minimization of serious issues. Mike said his fiancee definitely vocalized it at the time, and that the response from Dave was basically to say we can get past whatever obstacle there is. Mike also said that Dave’s minimization of serious issues taught Mike that he could lie and get away with things.
Finally in the mid-2010s Mike attended Friday Night and stayed late into the night asking Kathy and Dave about homosexuality. After getting frustrated with the conversation Kathy went to bed, around 2am. Mike continued the conversation with Dave. Mike worked his way through the various passages and explained why he thought homosexuality was not a sin. Dave got visibly frustrated. Dave looked at Mike and said, “Well, Michael, which one of them’s the bitch, then?” Mike was caught off guard and deeply hurt by the comment, and shut down. Despite the fact that he was currently in a heterosexual marriage, the comment made Mike feel like there was something wrong with him. This ended the conversation and Mike left. He shared the story with his wife, who pointed out the misogyny implied in Dave’s words – essentially that in an ordinary heterosexual relationship, the woman is the bitch by virtue of being the receptive sexual partner.
Mike looks back at his time at Friday Night and can also see how parts of it were good, particularly the friendships he made. This was one of the reasons that when he eventually left, he did not publicly announce his concerns. He had taken his concerns to SBC and said that several other people had as well. He thinks this may have contributed to SBC asking Dave to stop teaching. But he also thinks that SBC made a mistake in that they stopped monitoring Dave. This allowed Dave to continue to recruit people from SBC to Friday Night.