I'm In the Wrong Business

I was struck by an image of Joyce Meyer's family compound recently shown over at DC by Harry McCall. Here it is.

I think it's useful to actually see images of the lifestyle of some of these Christians. This gives us some perspective when we hear their impassioned pleas for money. So I thought I'd browse around and see what I could come up with.

Apparently televangelists are big fans of the private jet. Copeland's is representative, though I could post others. This one cost only $20 million, so he bought a couple. One for himself, another for the wife. I'd seen somewhere that he'd recently bought a third, but I'm not certain on that.

With that many private jets I guess you'd need your own private air strip. Here's an image of the Copeland residence from Google Maps.

Benny Hinn is of course well known for his extravagent lifestyle. This is perhaps partly to do the fact that mainstream media has exposed him a little. He stays in 5000 sq ft hotel rooms while on travel at a cost of over $10K per night. Just staggering. I couldn't find a good image of his home, so this is a screen shot from the youtube clip linked to above. It's worth $10 million. It's a 7 bedroom, 8 bathroom estate on the Pacific coast with 7000 sq ft of living space.

The founders of the Trinity Broadcasting Network are Paul and Jan Crouch. They get by in the Harbor Ridge Mansion. Below is the leaflet from the realtor.

Then there's Creflo Dollar, who is not ashamed to flaunt his lavish lifestlye. Images of his estate are below.

Oh, but that's just crazy Pentecostals. Informed apologists would never fall for such things, right? Guess again. I continue to get impassioned mailings from Hanegraaff imploring me to send cash. "We need $250K pronto to maintain ourselves in the black." Well, maybe if CRI wasn't buying Hank a $60,000 Lexus, or if they weren't paying him $250K or his wife an additional approximately $100K, or maybe if he scaled back a bit and didn't live in a private gated golfing community things might be in better shape.

But why scale back. The faithful keep writing checks. It's hard to turn that money down.