Hi Mark,
If you are interested in John Metcalfe, I can give you some information.
Metcalfe is a prolific writer of religious books. He was converted in the 1950s, ordained to the ministry by Lloyd-Jones, but in the late 1960s developed a theological system that set him outside of the Reformed Church. I suppose that he is unknown in the USA because he refuses to have a web-site or for any of his material to be shown on the internet.
I read a number of his books as a new Christian and was fascinated by him for some time. As I'm sure Ian has told you, he insists that law has no part whatever in a Christian's life. He has two other erroneous doctrines which to my mind are more serious, but I won't name them here without permission of the management. Certainly, neither Gadsby nor Huntington nor Philpot would own him.
However, Metcalfe's chief menace to the Church of Christ is that his books aim to separate the believer from his church and to make him wholly dependent upon Metcalfe. In his books he attacks Calvinism, Arminianism, Brethrenism, Anglicanism, Presbyterianism indiscriminately and commits all their adherents to hell. His reader is therefore left without any support but Metcalfe, so he ends up at home on the Lord's day, reading Metcalfe's books, listening to his tapes, singing his hymns (yes, really!) and making him (Metcalfe) rich. I have spoken to those who are in his cult, those who have escaped, and even to his own daughter (via internet). If these sources are to be believed, if you attended his church in Buckinghamshire, you would find a legalism and authoritarianism that would shock you.
Ian Potts is certainly under his influence, but how far I am unable to say. Certainly, he has left the excellent Congregational Church his parents belong to, joined and left a Reformed Baptist Church and is now (last I heard) attending a hyper-Calvinist church somewhere. This is the fate of those who fall under Metcalfe's teaching; they become spiritual Flying Dutchmen, doomed to wander from church to church but never able to settle because of Metcalfe's baneful influence.
Metcalfe also suffers from delusions of grandeur. Here is his own review of one of his books:-
'This concise and unique revelation of the Epistle to the Colossians has the hallmark of spiritual originality and insight peculiar to the ministry of John Metcalfe. It is as if a diamond, inert and lifeless in itself, has been divinely cut at great cost, so that every way in which it was turned, the light from above is enhanced and magnified to break forth with divine radiance showing colour and depth hitherto unsuspected.'
Modest huh?
I hope that gives you the information that you want.
Every blessing,
Steve
