[Vision2020] God Helps Those That Help Themselves

[lfalen]

Reminds me of the Bobby Bear song "Praise the Lord and Send Me the Money"

Roger
-----Original message-----
From: Art Deco art.deco.studios at gmail.com
Date: Sat, 05 May 2012 10:58:26 -0700
To: vision2020 at moscow.com
Subject: [Vision2020] God Helps Those That Help Themselves

> Anyone see one or more local applications?
> 
> __________________________________
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> ------------------------------
> May 4, 2012
> Family Battle Offers Look Inside Lavish TV Ministry By ERIK
> ECKHOLM<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/e/erik_eckholm/index.html?inline=nyt-per>
> 
> NEWPORT BEACH, Calif. — For 39 years, the Trinity Broadcasting
> Network<http://www.tbn.org/>has urged viewers to give generously and
> reap the Lord’s bounty in return.
> 
> The prosperity gospel preached by Paul and Janice Crouch, who built a
> single station into the world’s largest Christian television network, has
> worked out well for them.
> 
> Mr. and Mrs. Crouch have his-and-her mansions one street apart in a gated
> community here, provided by the network using viewer donations and tax-free
> earnings. But Mrs. Crouch, 74, rarely sleeps in the $5.6 million house with
> tennis court and pool. She mostly lives in a large company house near
> Orlando, Fla., where she runs a side business, the Holy Land
> Experience<http://www.holylandexperience.com/>theme park. Mr. Crouch,
> 78, has an adjacent home there too, but rarely
> visits. Its occupant is often a security guard who doubles as Mrs. Crouch’s
> chauffeur.
> 
> The twin sets of luxury homes only hint at the high living enjoyed by the
> Crouches, inspirational television personalities whose multitudes of
> stations and satellite signals reach millions of worshipers across the
> globe. Almost since they started in the 1970s, the couple have been
> criticized for secrecy about their use of donations, which totaled $93
> million in 2010.
> 
> Now, after an upheaval with Shakespearean echoes, one son in this first
> family of televangelism has ousted the other to become the heir apparent. A
> granddaughter, who was in charge of TBN’s finances, has gone public with
> the most detailed allegations of financial improprieties yet, which TBN has
> denied, saying its practices were audited and legal.
> 
> The granddaughter, Brittany Koper, and her husband have been fired by the
> network, which accused
> them<http://tbnnewswire.com/blog/tbn-responds-to-articles-allegations-concerning-network-finances/>of
> stealing $1.3 million to buy real estate and cars and make family
> loans.
> “They’re just trying to divert attention from their own crimes,” said Colby
> May, a lawyer representing TBN. Janice and Paul Crouch declined requests
> for interviews.
> 
> In two pending lawsuits and in her first public interview, Ms. Koper
> described company-paid luxuries that she said appeared to violate the
> Internal Revenue Service’s ban on “excess compensation” by nonprofit
> organizations as well as possibly state and federal laws on false
> bookkeeping and self-dealing.
> 
> The lavish perquisites, corroborated by two other former TBN employees,
> include additional, often-vacant homes in Texas and on the former Conway
> Twitty estate in Tennessee <http://trinitymusiccity.com/>, corporate jets
> valued at $8 million and $49 million each and thousand-dollar dinners with
> fine wines, paid with tax-exempt money.
> 
> In the lawsuits and interviews, Ms. Koper, 26, also charges that TBN has
> spent millions of dollars in sweetheart deals with a commercial film
> company owned until recently by a son of the Crouches, Matthew, including
> poorly monitored investments made after he joined the TBN board in 2007.
> 
> “My job as finance director was to find ways to label extravagant personal
> spending as ministry expenses,” Ms. Koper said. This is one way, she said,
> the company avoids probing questions from the I.R.S. She said that the
> absence of outsiders on TBN’s governing board — currently consisting of
> Paul, Janice and Matthew Crouch — had led to a serious lack of
> accountability for spending.
> 
> Ms. Koper and the two other former TBN employees also said that dozens of
> staff members, including Ms. Koper, chauffeurs, sound engineers and others
> had been ordained as ministers by TBN. This allowed the network to avoid
> paying Social Security taxes on their salaries and made it easier to
> justify providing family members with rent-free houses, sometimes called
> “parsonages,” she said.
> 
> The company did not always succeed. Last year, officials in Orange County,
> Fla., turned down TBN’s application to register the adjacent lakefront
> houses in Windermere as parsonages, saying they served no religious
> purpose, The Orlando Sentinel
> reported<http://www.orlandosentinel.com/business/os-holy-land-lawsuit-orlando-20120419,0,4823344.story>.
> The designation would have resulted in religious exemptions and saved TBN
> roughly $50,000 in taxes a year.
> 
> Ms. Koper said that the company run by Matthew Crouch, 50, who is her
> uncle, had received an estimated $50 million in TBN money over the years,
> with little oversight, to finance religious film projects and television
> shows. TBN recouped only a small fraction of its loans and investments,
> sometimes forgiving large sums in return for broadcast rights of limited
> value, she said.
> 
> She also questioned the justification for providing rent-free houses for
> Matthew, now a TBN vice president, and his wife, Laurie, and separate
> houses for their young-adult sons in Costa Mesa, Calif., including one that
> Ms. Koper said was remodeled at company expense with wall-mounted
> Transformer robot figures costing several thousand dollars, a putting green
> and an indoor basketball court.
> 
> Ms. Koper and her husband, Michael Koper, 28, who formerly managed sales of
> TBN airtime, said they were fired last September after writing memorandums
> to the elder Mr. Crouch about questionable spending. They showed a reporter
> for The New York Times what they said were copies of the memos.
> 
> “People have been conned by my grandparents,” Ms. Koper said.
> 
> But TBN said the pair made their charges only after the company confronted
> them with evidence of embezzlement. TBN later filed and then dropped a
> civil lawsuit accusing the Kopers of fraud, and this week filed a new suit
> in a California court, repeating only a few of the original allegations. No
> criminal charges against the Kopers have been filed.
> 
> Mr. May, the lawyer, offered a broad defense of TBN and the Crouches. He
> said that TBN had indeed ordained hundreds of people who felt a true
> “ministerial call” and that performers at Holy Land Experience, for
> example, were “ministers playing roles.”
> 
> He said that all contracts with the film company that Matthew Crouch led
> until mid-2010, Gener8Xion Entertainment <http://8x.com/>, had been at
> “arm’s length” and provided good value to TBN.
> 
> Mr. May added that TBN owned so many homes because traveling employees and
> guests used them. He said that the remodeled house, in the Lifestyles
> complex in Costa Mesa, was not occupied, but used as a set for youth
> television programs, with the Transformers serving as props. Matthew
> Crouch, through the company spokesman, declined an interview request. But
> Gilbert J. Luft, president of the Lifestyles Homeowners Association in
> Costa Mesa, said that the sons were familiar residents and that the
> association does not permit filming there.
> 
> Extolling TBN’s prominence and programs, Mr. May said the spending that
> some call opulent “is necessary to convey the ministry’s position of
> accomplishment.”
> 
> *The Gospel of Prosperity*
> 
> On the air, the Crouches combine uplifting talk with encouragement to give
> to the Lord, and so be repaid. This “prosperity gospel” is shared by
> several televangelists who appear on TBN. But many conventional Christian
> leaders regard it as a sham.
> 
> “Prosperity theology is a false theology,” said R. Albert Mohler Jr.,
> president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky.
> Between its message and its reputation for high spending, Mr. Mohler said,
> “TBN has been a huge embarrassment to evangelical Christianity for
> decades.”
> 
> While TBN said it provided tens of millions of dollars’ worth of free
> advertising time to conventional charities like the Salvation Army and a
> few million dollars in some years for aid to disaster victims, it is
> forthright about its overriding purpose: “to spread the Gospel to the
> world” through its cable systems, satellite transmitters and, now, via
> computers and smartphones.
> 
> Janice Crouch, called “Mama” on the air, is known for her pink-tinged wigs,
> which look like huge swirls of cotton candy, and for talking emotionally
> about the Lord’s blessings. Mr. Crouch, or “Papa,” is relentlessly upbeat
> as he quotes flurries of Bible verses on signature programs like “Praise
> the Lord.”
> 
> Clearly, many viewers have heartfelt responses. In 2010, TBN received $93
> million in tax-exempt donations, according to its tax
> report<http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/353134-trinity-centers-2010-tax-exemption-form.html>.
> The company also had $64 million in additional income from sales of airtime
> and $17 million in investment income that year.
> 
> It spent $194 million operating its far-flung network and investing in new
> programs. The company was in the red for the year, but could draw on its
> cushion of $325 million in cash and investments.
> 
> Rusty Leonard, an independent tax expert and the leader of Wall
> Watchers<http://www.ministrywatch.com/ww/flash/index2.html>,
> a charity watchdog group that has long criticized TBN for financial
> secrecy, said televangelists often escape penalties for extravagant
> spending because the definition of taxable “excess benefits” is subjective,
> and authorities are reluctant to challenge religious groups.
> 
> Marcus S. Owens, a tax lawyer with Caplin & Drysdale in Washington, said
> that lavish spending by nonprofit organizations could raise red flags for
> tax officials. “The law says that any compensation must be reasonable, and
> the value of a house is part of that,” he said. “Dinner on the company
> every night could be an issue too.”
> 
> At the same time, Mr. Owens said, churches have considerable latitude under
> the First Amendment. Regarding the ordination of untrained workers, he
> said, “absent clear fraud, the government is not going to touch that.”
> 
> A TBN spokesman said executive salaries were recommended by independent
> consultants. In 2010, Mr. Crouch received $400,000 as president, Mrs.
> Crouch $365,000 as first vice president.
> 
> On the air, Mr. and Mrs. Crouch tell viewers that they have almost no
> personal assets. But that only underscores the problem, said Tymothy S.
> MacLeod, a lawyer for the Kopers. “It’s the tax-exempt company that is
> giving them this opulent lifestyle.”
> 
> *Accounts of Extravagance*
> 
> Relatives and former employees agreed that Paul and Janice Crouch seem to
> have deep spiritual feelings and believe they are doing the Lord’s work — a
> belief, according to a former employee, Troy Clements, that seemed to
> justify almost any extravagance.
> 
> Mr. Clements, a former executive at Holy Land Experience, said that when
> employees questioned decisions like remodeling the cafe three times in six
> weeks, Mrs. Crouch said, “No one has told me ‘no’ for 30 years, and you’re
> not going to start now.”
> 
> Mr. Clements, who was sales and then personnel director at Holy Land, said
> that he resigned in frustration in 2008 and that working for Mrs. Crouch
> had often been “surreal.”
> 
> In 2008 and 2009, as Mrs. Crouch began remodeling Holy Land Experience, she
> rented adjacent rooms in the deluxe Loews Portofino Bay Hotel in Orlando —
> one for herself and one for her two beloved Maltese dogs and clothes,
> according to Mr. Clements and Ms. Koper. Mrs. Crouch rented the rooms for
> close to two years, they said.
> 
> Ms. Crouch was seldom without her little white dogs, pushing them in a pink
> stroller and keeping a costly motor home, originally purchased to serve as
> an office, for two years as an air-conditioned sanctuary for her pets, the
> two former employees said.
> 
> In Newport Beach, according to Ms. Koper, the elder Mr. Crouch sometimes
> traveled in a chauffeured Bentley, which TBN says is used to ferry
> television guests in proper style.
> 
> First-class “working dinners” are a way of life. In pending lawsuits, the
> Kopers say that Mr. Crouch, Mrs. Crouch and their son Matthew each ran up
> meal expenses of at least $300,000 per year. Mr. May, the TBN lawyer, said
> this was not accurate but did not offer other figures.
> 
> *A Contentious Exit*
> 
> When Brittany Koper and her husband decided to join TBN in 2007 after
> college, they were tempted by the generous perquisites, they admit. But
> they said that as Mr. Koper completed law school on the side, and Ms. Koper
> her M.B.A., they began to feel uneasy and moved out of their company house.
> 
> Nonetheless, they did borrow company money for their down payment on a
> private home and the purchase of a condominium, and gave Mr. Koper’s uncle
> a company loan of $65,000, among other acts that Mr. May called thefts. The
> Kopers said the loans were authorized in writing by the elder Mr. Crouch,
> with clear repayment terms.
> 
> TBN says Mr. Crouch’s signature was forged. Mr. May showed a reporter
> letters from the fall in which Ms. Koper apologized for lying and lending
> herself company money.
> 
> Ms. Koper said that she had never admitted to breaking the law. She said
> she was pressured by TBN lawyers to show “Christian contrition” and to hand
> over company property and repay their loans.
> 
> In October the Kopers moved to New York. “We just wanted a fresh start,”
> Ms. Koper recalled.
> 
> Her father, Paul Crouch Jr., Matthew’s older brother, was also forced off
> the staff and quit the board.
> 
> He declined to be interviewed, but he wrote in an e-mail, “Getting caught
> in the middle of disputes involving my daughter, brother and parents is
> probably one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to endure.”
> 
> As lawsuits and countersuits swirl, the Kopers are living in the basement
> of his father’s modest house in Elmont, on Long Island.
> 
> Mr. Crouch and an assistant, Matthew and his family, and two pilots are
> nearing the end of a six-week world tour in the larger company jet,
> visiting affiliates, taping programs and scouting new territory for
> evangelism in Rome, Dubai, Israel, Hong Kong and Hawaii.
> 
> “Others may do things differently, and may criticize TBN for how it
> operates, its look, its doctrine and belief,” Mr. May said. “But what is
> absolutely clear is that TBN, with God’s grace, has succeeded where most
> others have failed.”
> 
> Alain Delaquérière contributed research from New York.
> 
> 
> -- 
> Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
> art.deco.studios at gmail.com
> 
>