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The Rev. Charles E. Blair, the founder of one of Denver’s first megachurches, died last Thursday at the age of 88.
He died at 7:20 p.m. surrounded by family members at his home, according to a statement posted on the Web site of Calvary Temple, the church he founded. In addition to the megachurch, Blair also pioneered radio and television evangelism in Denver.
In the 1970s, Blair’s reputation was marred by a securities fraud conviction in which he was found guilty of cheating people, many of them church members, out of $17 million. He has maintained that he did not intend to deceive people.
But in the later part of his life, Blair devoted much time to the building of churches in an extremely undeveloped area of Ethiopia.
In a 2005 interview with The Christian Post, Blair said that his foundation had successfully found 1,000 sponsors within two-and-a-half years to fund the planting of 1,000 evangelical churches in the previously unreached region of Benishangul-Gumuz, Ethiopia, an area bordering Sudan.
Benishangul-Gumuz is one of the most undeveloped as well as unreached regions of the world, where only one percent of the natives have ever heard of the name of Jesus Christ.
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The regional president of Benishangul-Gumuz, Yaregal Aysheshim – a born-again Christian – said the region was 2,000 years behind the rest of the world and 1,000 years behind the people of Ethiopia. Many of the natives in the region do not wear clothes. He had personally asked Blair to help build churches and develop the area.
Blair accepted the challenge and has helped build hundreds of churches in the region as well as orphanages and schools.
“This is one of the greatest experiences of my life in the sense that when you do something for people that can’t do anything for you back, it brings the greatest satisfaction that mortal man can experience,” Blair said to The Christian Post about the project.
“So nothing comes back to us. There isn’t anything they can give to us, they don’t have anything and even if they did they couldn’t get it out of the country. So I think in that sense it has been one of the most satisfying experiences of my life.”
