Writing to friends from his Minnesota prison cell, Jim Bakker has denounced the riches-through-faith creed that fueled the rise and fall of his PTL empire.
Fifteen years after founding the religious-entertainment complex near Fort Mill, S. C., and three years after going to prison for defrauding many of those who followed him there, Bakker now admits God doesn’t just bless the rich.
“If that be the case,” Bakker wrote recently, “then gambling casino owners and drug kingpins and movie stars are blessed of God…. I have asked God to forgive me and I ask all who have sat under my ministry to forgive me for preaching a gospel emphasizing earthly prosperity.”
The former televangelist, who is serving an 18-year sentence for bilking followers out of millions of dollars, had apologized previously only for hurting those who trusted him.
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Columbus Dispatch
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From “Jim Bakker,” Wikipedia.org:
In his 1996 book, I Was Wrong , former television evangelist Jim Bakker admitted that the first time he actually read the Bible all the way through was while he was in prison, and that it made him realize he had taken certain passages out of context — passages which he had used as “proof texts” to back up his prosperity teachings. He wrote:
“The more I studied the Bible, however, I had to admit that the prosperity message did not line up with the tenor of Scripture. My heart was crushed to think that I led so many people astray. I was appalled that I could have been so wrong, and I was deeply grateful that God had not struck me dead as a false prophet!” [1]
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1. Jim Bakker, I Was Wrong (Nashville, Tennessee: Thomas Nelson, 1996), p. 535.