A Really Bad Day at Fort Mill

By Richard N. Ostling

"God has me on a roller-coaster ride," the Rev. Jim Bakker has often remarked. Through tumultuous financial ups and downs, the boyish-looking 47- year-old preacher has become a powerful czar of Christian entertainment. His enterprises encompass the PTL (for Praise the Lord or People That Love) network, carried by cable TV to 13.5 million homes; a daily television talk show, broadcast on 178 stations; and the 2,300-acre Heritage USA at Fort Mill, S.C., America's splashiest Gospel-theme amusement park, which was visited by more than 6 million people last year. His projects, which also include a lavish hotel and various charities, employ 2,000 people, and had receipts of $129 million last year.

Suddenly and unexpectedly, Bakker's control of this seemingly flourishing domain, built over 13 years, came to an end last week. With trembling voice, the televangelist confessed to the Charlotte Observer that he had been < "wickedly manipulated by treacherous former friends" who had "conspired to betray me into a sexual encounter." Following that involvement, Bakker said, he had "succumbed to blackmail" to protect his family and organization. After the news broke, Bakker resigned as head of PTL, handing control of his troubled operation to fellow TV Preacher Jerry Falwell.

According to the North Carolina daily, Bakker (pronounced baker) had a onetime sexual encounter with a 21-year-old church secretary during a visit to Florida. The two met in 1980, at a time when Bakker's 19-year marriage to his TV co-host Tammy Faye Bakker, now in her 40s, seemed to be foundering. (This month Tammy told her TV audience that she was drug dependent; she and her husband are currently being treated at a California center for addicts and their families.) The paper said that during 1985 the secretary and her representatives received $115,000 after she had told PTL officials about Bakker's infidelity. PTL spokesmen would not address the matter of the money, much less whether it had come from PTL coffers. The woman said she was no blackmailer.

The revelations capped a series of aggressive reports on Bakker by the Observer that caused the evangelist to cry persecution. The paper ran a 1979 story alleging the diversion of TV contributions for PTL overseas work into U.S. projects. The result was an FCC investigation, which was halted when Bakker sold off a TV station in Canton, Ohio. The Justice Department later found no grounds for prosecuting PTL. A subsequent story said FCC testimony had accused Bakker and his wife of funneling donations into such perks as a houseboat, a mink coat and a sports car. The Bakkers denied the accusation.

To stem the damage from the newspaper's latest revelations, Falwell pledged an open-books policy at PTL. He then reconstituted the board, adding such newcomers as pioneer Televangelist Rex Humbard and former Interior Secretary James Watt. Falwell also called an emergency meeting of the board for this week. His administrative assistant, Mark DeMoss, indicated that Falwell is not empire building and that his organization in Lynchburg, Va., and PTL will have "separate boards, separate management, separate everything." In the shake-up, Richard Dortch, formerly Bakker's top executive, becomes PTL president.

Bakker, meanwhile, has resigned not only from PTL but from the ministry of the Assemblies of God, a Pentecostal denomination (membership: 2.5 million) based in Springfield, Mo.; he remains on the clergy rolls pending the church's own investigation of the scandal. Dortch has also resigned as an Assemblies minister because the PTL congregation has become independent of the Assemblies. Meeting with Falwell in California last week, Bakker pleaded with the Virginia preacher to assume the chairmanship of PTL's board. Falwell, who is already fully preoccupied with politics, pastoring and his own struggling cable-TV network, said he was not eager to take the PTL helm but felt pressed to do so. Bakker's current problems, said Falwell, might create a "backwash that could hurt every Gospel ministry in America, if not the world."

At PTL headquarters near Charlotte, officials were putting on an optimistic face. Said Dortch: "We really believe there is a tremendous future for this ministry. Our telephone calls have been overwhelmingly supportive." Yet to be determined is whether those expressions of verbal support will translate into the flow of gifts from trusting supporters that are constantly needed to keep any ministry like PTL in operation.

With reporting by B. Russell Leavitt/Atlanta