TOP STORY: JIM BAKKER: Televangelist takes to the pulpit in wake of conviction

c. 1996 Religion News Service NEW ORLEANS (RNS)-Former televangelist Jim Bakker, bathed in a standing ovation from a nearly full church Sunday (Feb. 25), preached a new gospel of humility he said he learned in prison. But Bakker, convicted in 1989 for bilking 116,000 followers out of nearly $158 million, did not acknowledge whether a […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

NEW ORLEANS (RNS)-Former televangelist Jim Bakker, bathed in a standing ovation from a nearly full church Sunday (Feb. 25), preached a new gospel of humility he said he learned in prison.

But Bakker, convicted in 1989 for bilking 116,000 followers out of nearly $158 million, did not acknowledge whether a federal court jury was correct when it sent him to jail six years ago.


It was a rare appearance, although apparently the beginning of a more public role for Bakker, who said he seldom leaves his farm in North Carolina and goes only where he feels at home.

That place Sunday was the Rev. Marvin Gorman’s Temple of Praise Church in New Orleans, where nearly 400 people listened to Bakker for an hour and a half.

Many said later they welcomed him back into active life.”He’s been to the bottom. He’s suffered. He has been purified,”said Vivian Collins, 47, of nearby Marrero, La.

Bakker, who served four and a half years in prison, has made few public appearances since he was released from federal custody.

Prosecutors said he oversold vacation shares in Heritage USA, a South Carolina vacation and retreat center, and diverted $3.7 million of believers’ money to sustain a lavish lifestyle.

Bakker’s federal prosecution and the collapse of his PTL Ministries was preceded by disclosure in 1987 that he had a sexual encounter with former church secretary Jessica Hahn in 1980 and authorized the use of some $265,000 in ministry money to buy her silence.

Bakker’s wife and TV co-host, Tammy Faye, divorced him in 1992 and married former PTL contractor Roe Messner.


Bakker is still on parole, but he might be undertaking a more public life again. He will be a featured speaker at a major Pentecostal rally in Oklahoma in April and has signed a contract for a book about his downfall, said Lee Grady, executive editor of Charisma, a magazine that covers the Pentecostal movement.”I think there will be a large number of people who will take Jim Bakker seriously now,”Grady said.”Christian people are very forgiving. There are a great many people hoping to hear Jim say he’s made a sincere turnaround.” That clearly was the sentiment at Temple of Praise, where some worshipers said they are unconvinced Bakker ever did anything wrong.”I own a business with 24 people,”said Harold Brown, 67, who divides his time between New Orleans and Texas.”I understand the buck stops with you, but he can’t know everything everyone else was doing. Let me say it this way: If he did do anything wrong, it was in what he didn’t know rather than in something he did.” Bakker told congregants Sunday he underwent a radical theological shift in prison. Jabbing the air overhead, he said his preaching in his PTL days consisted of”a point here, a point there, and a whole lot of bull in between.” That represented the”gospel of prosperity,”as opposed to his prison discovery of the”gospel of meekness,”he said.

In his address, Baker encouraged prayer for”that good man”President Clinton, compassion toward prisoners, service to those with AIDS and racial reconciliation.

But he discussed the purifying ordeal of his own prison experience without ever explicitly acknowledging whether he was guilty of the crimes the jury laid to him in 1989.

He came closest in what was nearly his first line, when he asked forgiveness of any in the congregation whom he had offended or hurt. Later he said he was ruined because he did not appreciate that”money is the root of all evil.””I skipped over that; it was a fatal mistake,”he said.

But he frequently also cast his imprisonment in terms that clearly implied that it was a tempering ordeal for one specially chosen.

At one point he said rival preachers brought about his imprisonment. He also said”God put me in prison”to better know him. And newspaper ads promoting his appearance depicted him as a”prisoner of the Lord Jesus Christ.” Ole Anthony of the Trinity Foundation, a Dallas enterprise that monitors televangelists, said his organization has been collecting evidence that while in prison Bakker maintained the role of an innocent in newsletters to former contributors.


In one made available by Anthony, Bakker’s daughter, Tammy Sue, a singer who joined him in New Orleans, offers for sale for $100 each bound copies of her father’s presentation before a federal parole commission.

The appeal, with brochures, audits and other documents, represents”the first time he was able to tell the whole story,”with evidence not allowed at trial, she wrote. Her offer is dated July 1, 1994, the day Bakker left jail for a halfway house.”My problem is he puts forth these two faces. To the general public, he is repentant and asks for forgiveness,”Anthony said.”Through his daughter’s fundraising letters, he says he’s innocent. My problem with him is his duplicity.” Bakker appeared at Temple of Praise at the invitation of Gorman, whose image, like Bakker’s, was tarnished by an episode of adultery. Gorman was the head of a thriving television ministry when in 1986 fellow televangelist Jimmy Swaggart of Baton Rouge publicly accused him of having a number of adulterous affairs. Gorman contended there was only one, but was ruined nonetheless.

Neither Bakker nor Gorman would make himself available for an interview. But in their remarks both men, former Assemblies of God ministers, indicated they feel a certain kinship after losing their prosperity and influence in public scandals in the 1980s.

Gorman, however, has been slowly rebuilding a church, which was nearly filled Sunday.”We’ve been hoping to have Jim preach here for years, even while he was in jail,”said Gorman’s son, Randy.”He was always supportive of my father. And we know what it means to be hurting.”

LJB END NOLAN

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