(Ministry Watch) Televangelists’ astronomical travel expenses are receiving a fresh dose of scrutiny through Pastor Planes, a new aircraft-tracking project from the Trinity Foundation.
The Texas-based ministry watchdog organization is using the ADS-B Exchange network to track 52 ministry-owned aircraft linked to prominent names such as James Robison’s LIFE Outreach International, Jesse Duplantis Ministries, Joyce Meyer Ministries and Kenneth Hagin Ministries’ Rhema Bible Church. These ministries and many others are spending thousands of dollars per hour to routinely fly around the country and abroad, the Trinity Foundation says.
The foundation is chronicling its daily findings through Instagram and Twitter. One of the more notable flights from last week involved an organization run by prosperity gospel televangelist Jesse Duplantis, who controversially solicited donations to support his purchase of a $54 million Dassault Falcon 7X in 2018. A Dassault Falcon 900 jet registered to Duplantis Ministries’ Voice of the Covenant flew from Bakersfield, California, to Las Vegas last Monday, only to fly out to New Orleans the following morning.
Barry Bowen, who is leading the Pastor Planes project at the Trinity Foundation, posed the question on Twitter, “Is televangelist Jesse Duplantis a high roller in Las Vegas casinos?”
Via @pastorplanes on Twitter
Another notable finding: The Trinity Broadcasting Network’s Bombardier Global Express took an eight-hour flight from Italy to Orlando in late June that could have totaled tens of thousands of dollars. According to the Air Traffic Cost Calculator, it costs $5,042.94 per hour to operate the aircraft, bringing…
(Epoch Times) Pastor Brian Gibson, who has been a target of cancel culture for resisting draconian lockdown measures as well as for exercising his First Amendment rights, has received hundreds of death threats. He and his family have experienced various forms of harassment.
“Just for being a vocal proponent of the First Amendment, just for being someone that supported President Trump, and someone that spoke out actively, I received close to 1,500 death threats. People broke into my house, kicked my gate down, hacked all of our accounts,” Gibson said on EpochTV’s “Crossroads” program.
“It’s amazing what they can do and how coordinated some of these intimidation rings can really be. I think I underestimated what that would really be until it happened to me.”
Gibson and his family were threatened on social media and received intimidating phone calls or mail. It affected his three kids, aged 9 to 15, the pastor said.
“My kids … weren’t able to go home for over a month. And then … we had to sell that home and relocate.”
Gibson took his family to a rather isolated place in the Rocky Mountains to get away, but they were found, even there, and intimidated while spending time in a park.
“I didn’t know if they were going to try to kill me,” Gibson said. “So I went into a convenience store, sent my kids out the back through woods to where we were staying, and I went around…
(WokePreacherTv) Paul Richardson, “Executive Pastor Of Ministry” at West Ridge Church in Dallas, Georgia, leads a liturgical lament with activist Terence Lester, a “Local Missions Consultant” to the church, in May of 2020
PAUL RICHARDSON: We want to take a few moments to just say honestly how we feel. That’s what a biblical lament is, to be naked before God, to become totally transparent. So I’d like to invite you to go first, Terence. How are you feeling today with all that’s going on?
… TERENCE LESTER: Well, it was hard to drive to church this morning. I haven’t slept and had a good night’s rest in a long time…I’m exhausted, literally. I lament the fact that I have to be exhausted in this country because of racial trauma. I lament the fact that every time I speak about race I have to deal with trolls…I had a white pastor literally DM me…snapping on me, cursing at me, sending me articles…other people on the social media platform had to tell this pastor that he was being inconsiderate.
...I lament the fact that I have to deal with psychological trauma from racial injustice. I lament the fact that I have white brothers and sisters who would rather stay in denial then use their voices to correct racial injustice. I lament the fact that I had to see a black jogger get murdered and have that captured and then have white friends ask me, “Was that really racial?” when I’ve never seen a white person be murdered and have that imagery plastered all over national television.
I lament the fact that a white woman called a police officer on a Harvard graduate in a park. I lament the fact that CNN black reporter or commentator got arrested on national television, even before the persons who killed black people. I lament the fact that a DoorDash delivery person who is black was held at gunpoint because he was considered not to fit in that community.
I lament the fact that a knee that people got angry over because a black athlete started taking a knee to protest racial injustice, but it was a knee that took the life of a black man on national television. I lament that.
(Editor’s Note. Then comes the 1-2 punch from the pastor, overcome with guilt and seeking to lay sin at the doorstep of his congregants. If you’r pastor ever tries to pull this with you, kick him to the curb of flee the city, lest they become pillars of salt)
… RICHARDSON: Yeah. Yeah. You know, Terence, today the reason why I wanted us to do this lament together is because I’m just brokenhearted. And I’m broken for what I see in our country. I’m broken and I’m lamenting the ways that people have even come to me and continued to deny that there’s an issue in our country and in our churches. There’s a pastor somewhere who came after you who’s standing to preach today. That’s not the church that Jesus died for.
Terence, I’ve thought a lot about what I’m about to say. I want to say I’m sorry. I want to say I’m sorry for the ways that, in my past, that I have been a denier of this. That there’s still racism in the body of Christ and in our country. Terence, I can’t apologize on behalf of the church. I’m not a senior pastor. You and I know how our pastor feels about this. He’s made it clear he wants to see biblical reconciliation.
I’m not an elected official. I can’t apologize on behalf of a community or a country. What I can do is apologize on behalf of my family. And maybe that’s what we need to do. House to house, family by family, person by person. Say, “Man, I’m sorry. This is not right.” I could write a bad check and nobody’s gonna put their knee on my neck. I went for a jog in my neighborhood after dark the other night and I don’t have to be afraid.
And what I want is a world and a country, and it begins with the body of Christ, with brothers in Christ. What I want is a world full of biblical oneness and reconciliation and a reminder that we are not from a kingdom of America or from a kingdom of race. We are a part of God’s kingdom. We serve a greater king, the greatest king. We have a greater savior who is over all of these things.
And I pray that he would lift us up out of this and that we one day would finally know what it means to be the answer to Jesus’s prayer in John 17. That we would finally be one. That’s my prayer today as we lament this together.
Editor’s Note. This post was created by @wokepreachertv and written on his YouTube page. We cut down his video even further, but he was the source.
(Religioninpublic) Last November, I wrote a post for Religion in Public with the title, “The Data is Clear – Episcopalians are in Trouble.” In it, I used survey data to paint a portrait of a denomination that was on the brink of collapse. One of the most troubling things about the future of the Episcopal Church is that the average member is incredibly old. The median age of an Episcopalian in 2019 was sixty-nine years old. With life expectancy around 80, we can easily expect at least a third of the current membership of the denomination to be gone in the next fifteen or twenty years. That’s problematic when membership has already been plummeting for decades.
But, I came across some data in the last few weeks that I just had to look at in more depth. Before I get into the graphs I have to give some serious kudos to the data team that works for the denomination. I have looked at the websites of all kinds of Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian and Catholic traditions over the last few years. The Episcopalians blow them all out of the water in terms of accessibility and ease of use. Don’t believe me? Well, they have an interactive dashboard of all their churches in the United States. You can sort based on a map, church size, or amount of offering. It’s incredible and can be accessed at this link.
Let’s get down to it, though. How many people actually attend an Episcopal church on an average Sunday? I grabbed a PDF of their membership reports from here and did some quick analysis of the national trends.
In 2009, 725,000 people attended an Episcopal church on…
Editor’s Note. This article was written by Ryan P. Burge and published at Religion in Public. Title changed by Protestia.
Editor’s Note 2. Good. This denomination is thoroughly depraved and ceased long being Christain decades ago, with perhaps only a fraction of a percent of real believers left.
Charisma News continues to be a source of promoting whatever polluting spiritual waste they can scrape from the sewers- this time an article/ press release promoting the wonderful anniversary celebrated by the famed Modalist, and then a video showing his church service.
“Bishop T.D. Jakes’ Dallas, Texas, church, The Potter’s House, celebrated its 25th anniversary on Sunday, July 4, with fanfare, memories and powerful prophetic words, and the signing of a vision statement by Jakes and other bishops….
“There is before us a divine and a holy assignment that I believe to be very significant for what God would have us to do in the 21st century,” ” Jakes told the church before introducing the vision statement…
This all the while reminding us that “Time magazine once called Jakes “America’s Best Preacher” and “The Next Billy Graham”
Far from an orthodox Trinitarian, T. D. Jakes has gone on record as saying he doesn’t believe that Jesus is the second person of the Trinity, but rather is just a “manifestation” of God. In fact, even now his church website reads “There is one God, Creator of all things, infinitely perfect, and eternally existing in three manifestations: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.”
Jakes is a rank heretic and has been for decades. It is unquestionable, but Charisma doesn’t care, as they’ll endorse and purveyor of spiritual strychnine for a couple of cents; their discernment nonexistent and their consciences have been seared years ago.
This is not the first time they have promoted and endorsed Jakes. They have a long history of it, and because they have no regard for the love of truth or foundational Christian doctrine, it won’t be the last.
Editor’s Note. This article was written by Pastor Ed Litton and published at Protestia.com
(Christianity Today) More than 100 students at a Christian boarding school in Nigeria’s northern state of Kaduna were kidnapped early Monday morning.
Shooting wildly, armed assailants breached the walls of Bethel Baptist High School in Maraban Rido on the outskirts of the state capital, Kaduna, at about 2 a.m. on July 5 and took students in the school hostel away at gunpoint, area residents told Morning Star News (MSN).
Efforts were still underway to determine exactly how many students were abducted. A Bethel teacher told Agence France-Presse (AFP) that 140 students were kidnapped while 25 students escaped, but area residents living close to the school told MSN that 179 children were abducted of which only 15 escaped.
Established by Bethel Baptist Church in Kaduna, a member church of the Nigerian Baptist Convention (NBC), the boarding school was attacked after kidnappers overcame security personnel, sources said.
The attack was the fourth mass school kidnapping in Kaduna state since December….
(Reformation Charlotte) In the midst of the exposure of the largest Evangelical plagiarism scandal in modern times, it has become increasingly clear that the vast majority of the leadership in the Evangelical world are frauds. From the newly-elected Southern Baptist president, Ed Litton, who has been criticized for his serial plagiarism of former president, JD Greear–dating back as far as 2013 from what we have discovered–to JD Greear himself, nothing could be more clear than that God’s judgment is on the Southern Baptist Convention.
Some astute watchdogs have uncovered that this scandal runs deep, far, and wide. In an interview with Jim Osman that was published last night, Justin Peters revealed that many Evangelical leaders have been purchasing sermons from a research group that prepares sermon materials for a wide range of Evangelical pastors regardless of doctrinal convictions. That research group is called Docent.
According to Docent’s website, the group “partners with pastors to provide research assistance to lighten their load and help them serve their churches more effectively, ” and will “assist with both sermon and sociological research, offering consultations with experienced ministry leaders, and producing curriculum.” Further, Docent will “carefully pair graduate-level researchers…
To continue reading all about JD Greear’s use of their service, click here.
Editor’s Note. This article was written by Jeff Maples and published at Protestia.
(Capstone Report) Ed Litton, Redemption Church tell conflicting stories on deleted sermons
It might be time for Ed Litton and Redemption Church to compare notes and get their stories straight. Right now, they have told two different, contradictory stories about why the church hid hundreds of Ed Litton’s sermons. According to the Washington Times:
“Mr. Litton said Redemption Church had removed dozens of his old sermons from its website because of a transition in web hosting and to conserve disk space, stating the older messages remain available on YouTube.”
This is filled with false information.
The older messages were hidden YouTube. In fact, no message prior to February 2020 appears to be viewable on YouTube. At first, the church hid over 143 videos. Currently, the church is hiding 85 videos on YouTube.
Plus, Litton’s statement is in direct conflict with the church’s statement to Baptist Press. According to BP:
“By the action of the leadership at Redemption Church we have taken down sermon series prior to 2020 because people were going through sermons in an attempt to discredit and malign our pastor,” the statement from the elders said. “It is our highest priority to care for and shepherd our church.”
(Capstone Report) SBC President Ed Litton on video: ‘I used to lie. I used to tell people 24 hours a sermon… but I would say 8-10 hours average.’
Internet sleuths unearthed video where SBC President Ed Litton admits he lied about sermon preparation time and invented a sermon illustration. Twitter user For the Glory posted a Twitter thread including video and a few select quotes from Ed Litton’s appearance on Sermonary.
According to For the Glory, “In a November 2020 interview, Ed Litton admits and laughs, that he used to lie about his sermon prep time. ‘I used to lie. I used to tell people 24 hours a sermon… but I would say 8-10 hours average.’
(Global News) A U.S. senator has asked that Canada be investigated for violating religious freedom over the arrests of Alberta pastors accused of flouting COVID-19 restrictions.
In a letter released Thursday, Missouri Republican Josh Hawley asked his country’s Commission on International Religious Freedom to consider putting Canada on its special watch list.
“I am troubled that our Canadian neighbours are effectively being forced to gather in secret, undisclosed locations to exercise their basic freedom to worship,” Hawley wrote.
“Frankly, I would expect this sort of religious crackdown in Communist China, not in a prominent western nation like Canada.”
Hawley refers in his letter to the arrests of Alberta pastors James Coates and Tim Stephens.
