"There's too much money sloshing around and too much of it sloshing around with people with overlapping affiliations and allegiances by either blood or friendship or just ties over the years. There are red flags all over these relationships" -- Frances Hill, a University of Miami law professor who specializes in nonprofit tax law
Doesn't that sound like the U.S. GOVERNMENT and the WAR MACHINE?
"Web of riches raises doubts; Deals by friends, kin of televangelist are questioned" by Eric Gorski, Associated Press | July 27, 2008
NEWARK, Texas - Frances Hill, a University of Miami law professor who specializes in nonprofit tax law:
"There's too much money sloshing around and too much of it sloshing around with people with overlapping affiliations and allegiances by either blood or friendship or just ties over the years. There are red flags all over these relationships."
Kenneth Copeland, 71, is a pioneer of the prosperity gospel, which teaches that believers are destined to flourish spiritually, physically, and financially - and share the wealth with others. His ministry's 1,500-acre campus outside Forth Worth is testament to his success. It includes a church, private airstrip, a hangar for the ministry's aircraft, and a $6 million, church-owned mansion.
A one-time pop singer, Copeland had a born-again experience and enrolled at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Okla. He worked as a pilot and chauffeur for Roberts himself. He describes hearing his own call to preach standing in a dried-up riverbed.
Now a 500-employee operation with a budget in the tens of millions, Kenneth Copeland Ministries has won supporters worldwide through its conferences, prayer request network, disaster relief work, magazine, and television program.
Kenneth Copeland Ministries is organized under the tax code as a church, so it gets a layer of privacy not afforded large secular and religious nonprofit groups that must disclose budgets and salaries. Pastors' pay must be "reasonable" under the federal tax code.
Time for that EXEMPTION to END!!!
Copeland's current salary is not made public by his ministry. However, the church disclosed in a property-tax exemption application that his wages were $364,577 in 1995; Copeland's wife, Gloria, earned $292,593.
Now pass the collection plate, will ya?
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