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TechnoratiBut Lawrence Swicegood, spokesman for Kenneth Copeland Ministries, said in written responses to questions that no Copeland family members receive improper benefits through their ties to the church.
All revenue from the church's business interests — including an oil and natural gas company it owns — go into the church, Swicegood said.
He said that Kenneth Copeland has never exercised his veto power over board decisions, a provision meant for emergency use. Even so, Swicegood said, the board is scheduled to meet in August to vote on taking away that ability.
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Kenneth Copeland has always dreamed big.
Growing up in West Texas next to an Army air base, Copeland wanted to fly. He also wanted to sing pop songs. He realized both ambitions and didn't stop there.
In 1957, when he was 20, Copeland scored a Top 40 hit called "Pledge of Love" and sang on "American Bandstand."
The journey that led to the pulpit began several years later. 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.
Copeland was greatly influenced by Tulsa prosperity preacher Kenneth Hagin, locking himself in the garage with Hagin's tapes for seven days before moving back to Texas to start his ministry in the late 1960s.
Now a 500-employee operation with a budget in the tens of millions of dollars, Kenneth Copeland Ministries has won supporters worldwide through its crusades and 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, a term that gives churches wide latitude.
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. It's not clear whether those figures include other earnings, such as special offerings for guest preaching or book royalties. Another 13 Copeland relatives were on the church's payroll that year.
In the 1980s, Copeland's church purchased land on the shores of Eagle Mountain Lake from the estate of a Texas oilman. Afterward, it discovered added value underground: an oil and gas field.
Grassley, the senator leading the televangelist inquiry, has quizzed Copeland about Security Petrol Inc., a wholly owned — and for-profit — subsidiary of the church created in 1997 to manage that resource.
Swicegood said Security Petrol was established to protect the church from the liability risk of oil and gas production and to minimize interference with the church's religious activities.
No company officials — including John Copeland, its president — has received compensation or profits from the company, and all revenue goes to the church for general operations, Swicegood said. Reserves from gas wells in the church's name were valued at $23 million last year, county records show.
Speaking at a ministers' conference in January, Kenneth Copeland accused Grassley of twisting reality to make it look like the natural gas "was making us rich off of the ministry's property. Bull. That's stupid." Continue »
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