Last year, Swaggart logged more than 84,000 miles in the air.ĭespite its size - about $150 million in assets, according to his 1985 financial statement - the ministry remains a family operation, run by Swaggart, his wife, Frances, and their only child, Donnie. So farflung are Swaggart's holdings and activities that he has traded trailers and buses and his old DC3 for a sleek Gulfstream jet, once owned by the Rockefeller family. Swaggart's Child Care International builds schools and sponsors feeding programs for children in dozens of impoverished countries, and his donations flow to missions run by his mother church, the Assemblies of God, the church with which Jim and Tammy Bakker were affiliated. In the distance, a construction crane looms over the skeleton of a college classroom hall.īeyond Louisiana, ministry-owned radio stations carry the gospel message to cities in Texas, Oklahoma, Ohio, Florida and North Carolina. On the east is the center, where the flags of 126 nations flutter in the sultry breezes, symbolizing Swaggart's television reach. On the west is Minnie Bell Swaggart Hall, the 12-story dormitory named for his mother on the grounds of the new Bible College. The 257-acre development is bisected by Bluebonnet Boulevard. When he wheels his beige Lincoln Town Car past the guarded gates of his family compound here and drives the seven miles to his headquarters, Swaggart confronts a complex so large that he says he is awed that God should have chosen him to control it. And Swaggart, who initially played a role some have likened to "the grand inquisitor" in Bakker's ouster, has found the attention turned to him.įor Swaggart, a high-school dropout who preached his first sermon on a Louisiana sidewalk, much is at stake. With the fall of PTL Club founders Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker and IRS inquiries into their finances, however, television evangelists have found themselves under public scrutiny. Having won classification as a church in 1982, his ministry, already tax-exempt as a religious organization, is no longer required to file financial reports with the Internal Revenue Service. Yet Swaggart, whose studio is his pulpit and whose audience is his congregation, is not strictly accountable, as a minister is to his parishioners, for the way he spends money.
They have helped forge a new form of worship and push the definition of a church to new frontiers. They have financed foreign missions, purchased radio stations and transmitted Swaggart's message around the globe via television. Here in Baton Rouge, the millions have transformed a cow pasture into the 12-building World Ministry Center and the Jimmy Swaggart Bible College. Swaggart - gospel singer, Pentecostal minister and, by some measures, the most watched television evangelist in the nation - runs a ministry that devours money: $600,000 a day now, $156 million a year, by his account. 72838 in the language of Swaggart's computers.
It was mailed in response to a Swaggart plea for money: appeal No. "Yes, Brother Swaggart, you can count on me to help you meet this critical need," read the donor reply card, mailed back in April with a $100 check. In 1986, Swaggart officials said, they carried more. In 1985, they contained about $120 million, about 93 percent of the ministry's revenues. This is the mailroom of Jimmy Swaggart's World Ministry Center, where envelopes poured in last year at an average rate of 16,261 a day, 81,305 a week, 4,227,860 a year. Then workers extract the contents, placing them in neat little piles: checks here, cash there, letters and reply cards nearby. Their razor edges slit open envelopes, and tiny suction cups pull them wide apart. The machines work relentlessly in this sterile room.