Word: springfields
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...Swaggart scandal began to unfold on Feb. 18, three days before his climactic confession service, when the evangelist and his entourage rushed by private jet to Springfield, Mo., for a secret meeting with church leaders at Assemblies of God headquarters. It was a sorry moment for the denomination, which had seen attendance jump by 23.3% between 1979 and 1985. Adherents now number 2.1 million in the U.S., 16.4 million worldwide. Swaggart has been the group's most electrifying TV preacher and road revivalist, and his ministry has expanded lavishly overseas, providing $10.4 million of the denomination's 1987 mission budget...
...incriminating photos taken last fall outside New Orleans at a down-at-the-heels motel called the Travel Inn. The pictures showed a prostitute welcoming a series of men; Swaggart was seen both entering and leaving her room. According to a person present at the ten-hour session in Springfield, Swaggart confessed that he had battled an obsession with pornography since his youth and had been a periodic backslider. He stated that on the night the photos were shot, the woman had taken her clothes off and fondled herself, but he insisted that they did not have sexual intercourse...
...Swaggart and the woman outside the Travel Inn. (The air had been let out of the evangelist's tires to delay his departure.) Gorman then confronted his nemesis. Some sort of negotiations ensued between the two men, but apparently they broke down, and the damning photos landed in the Springfield offices of the Assemblies...
...slap-on-the-wrist penance package infuriated many national Assemblies leaders and church folk in general, who clogged the Springfield switchboard with calls protesting the special treatment. After all, until church law was changed in 1973, a clergyman who made such a confession would have been expelled for two years, though most left for good. Even under today's more lenient rules, it is unprecedented for an Assemblies minister caught in a sex scandal to be barred from the pulpit for less than a year. Headquarters was also perturbed that the Louisiana district had announced its plan publicly rather than...
...signposts point to Springfield. The signposts point to Albany. Fifty miles away. A hundred miles away. I am going further. I am going to upstate New Yorrk, to the far side of nowhere, to the village of Potsdam to cover the Harvard-Clarkson hockey game...