Word: bakkers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Bakker's sense of vision was highly erratic as well as expensive. In 1977 he suddenly announced a push for a worldwide network of missions; months later he abandoned that project and broke ground for what was to become Heritage USA. In 1986 Bakker raised $3 million in the span of a month to erect Kevin's House, an adjacent 14-bedroom home for handicapped children. Today only two youngsters live there, and federal investigators are wondering where the money went. The principal victims were PTL's "Lifetime Partners," an estimated 120,000 heads of households who pledged...
Aside from PTL, few ministries produce more controversy than the television empire of Louisiana's pugnacious Jimmy Swaggart. It was Swaggart who prodded his denomination, the Assemblies of God, into defrocking Bakker. The bayou spellbinder boasts the highest U.S. ratings for a televangelist, and his shows are broadcast by 3,200 stations in 145 countries. Swaggart has lately provided journalists with audited financial statements of his ministry for 1984 and 1985, and this month an unaudited two-page financial report went out to donors, with pie charts showing the ministry's income and outgo. Just how much of the Swaggart...
...government intervention, which no religious denomination welcomes, the probity of the major TV preaching empires will continue to rest with the character and personality of their leaders. Still, none of the other important figures shows any signs of being as perplexing, as grandiose or as misguided as Jim Bakker, who now says that "if God ever lets me resume television, I hope that I will be able to do it differently." Supporters of America's other video evangelists can only hope that they will never hear their spiritual leaders ask for the same kind of second chance...
...Money. For six hours, harassed officials of the embattled PTL (for Praise the Lord or People That Love) ministry were confronted at a public bankruptcy hearing by members of the flock that had supported the $203 million religious empire created by its ousted leaders, Jim and Tammy Bakker. The officials struggled to assure PTL donors that the foundering television- and-theme-park ministry, now about $68 million in debt, might soon turn a profit. Asserted the new PTL chief operating officer, Harry Hargrave: "We will be able to pay our debts. We are very confident of that...
Someone apparently less confident, though, was Televangelist Jerry Falwell. The Lynchburg, Va., preacher, who took control of PTL after Jim Bakker's March 19 resignation, looked grim as he faced studio cameras later in the week on PTL's regular morning television show. Falwell told viewers that donations had taken a nosedive since PTL formally filed for bankruptcy on June 12. If $1.75 million is not raised by July 31, he announced, PTL might be forced to stop broadcasting on some of the 161 stations that, for a fee, carry the ministry's born-again message. Said Falwell: "There...