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Over the years, a region of Copeland’s relatives and friends have done just that, The Associated Press has found. They include the brother-in-law by a lucrative deal to go-between Copeland’s television time, the son who acquired church-owned real estate for his ranching pursuit and saw it more than fourfold in price, and board members who together have been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for speaking at house of god events.
Church officials say no undivided improperly benefits from one side ties to Copeland’s vast evangelical ministry, which claims more than 600,000 subscribers in 134 countries to its flagship “Believer’s Voice of Victory” receptacle. The board of directors signs off on important matters, they say. Yet church bylaws give Copeland veto power over enter decisions.
While Copeland insists that his interposition complies through the law, independent tax experts who reviewed information obtained by the AP through interviews, church documents and public records have their doubts. The web of companies and non-profits tied to the televangelist calls the ministry’s integrity into question, they say.
“There are far too many relatives here,” said Frances Hill, a University of Miami law professor who specializes in nonprofit task law. “There’s too much money sloshing around and too a high deal of of it sloshing surrounding with people with overlapping affiliations and allegiances by each blood or friendship or accurate ties over the years. There are red flags all over these relationships.”
Copeland, 71, is a pioneer of the prosperity gospel, which holds that believers are destined to flourish spiritually, physically and financially — and share the wealth with others.
His ministry’s 1,500-acre campus, behind an iron gate a half-hour drive from Fort Worth, is testament to his success. It includes a church, a sequestered airstrip, a hangar conducive to the ministry’s $17.5 the great body of the people jet and other aircraft, and a $6 million church-owned lakefront mansion.
Already a well-known figure, Copeland has come under greater scrutiny in recent months. He is one target of a Senate Finance Committee sifting into allegations of questionable spending and lax financial the having to answer for at six large televangelist organizations that preach health-and-wealth theology.
All have denied wrongdoing. But Copeland has fought back the hardest, refusing to answer most questions from the inquiry’s architect, Republican Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa.
Copeland’s church also has invited an Internal Revenue Service audit, which would keep information private, and has launched a sophisticated Web site, Believers Stand United, to “serve regulate the enter short.”
The Senate committee didn’t set out to determine whether Copeland or the others broke the principle, although it could provide information to the Internal Revenue Service if something seems flagrantly wrong, a committee aide said. The main goal, Grassley has said, is to figure loudly whether existing tax laws governing churches are sufficient, which could carry sweeping implications with regard to all scrupulous organizations.
The committee could subpoena Copeland if he remains uncooperative. Neither he nor John Copeland, his son and the ministry’s commander executive officer, responded to interview requests.
But Lawrence Swicegood, spokesman towards Kenneth Copeland Ministries, said in written responses to questions that no Copeland line of ancestors members hold improper benefits end their ties to the church.
All revenue from the church’s avocation interests — including an oil and natural gas company it owns — go into the church, Swicegood said.
He declared that Kenneth Copeland has at no parturition exercised his veto power over board decisions, a provision meant for exigency exercise. Even so, Swicegood said, the board is scheduled to meet in August to vote on taking at a distance that ability.
Kenneth Copeland has always dreamed assuming.
Growing up in West Texas nearest to an Army air base, Copeland wanted to float. 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 conduct and chauffeur despite Roberts himself.
Copeland was greatly influenced through 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 tardy 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 beg 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 “intelligent” while burdened with the federal tax code, a term that gives churches wide extent.
Copeland’s current allowance is not made public through dint of. 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 unobscured whether those figures take in other profits., 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 fortune 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 temple created in 1997 to manage that means.
Swicegood said Security Petrol was established to protect the body of christians from the liability risk of oil and gas production and to minimize collision with the church’s devout activities.
No company officials — including John Copeland, its president — has received compensation or profits from the company, and total revenue goes to the church for general operations, Swicegood said. Reserves from gas wells in the church’s name were valued at $23 million in conclusion 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 elastic fluid “was making us rich distant from of the office of a clergyman’s characteristic. Bull. That’s stupid.”
It’s not the still business venture tied to the church.
While natural gas platforms sprouted adhering church land, John Copeland, a self-described “cowboy at heart,” pursued a side business in cattle and horses. Beginning in 1993, John Copeland leased body of christians land to run his business, El Rancho Fe, Spanish during the term of “Ranch of Faith.”
Five years later, the house of worship separately sold John Copeland land for his ranch and residence, Swicegood said.
Swicegood said appraisals were transacted to induce fair market value with a view to leasing and selling the land, adding that the let benefits the church. John Copeland be under the necessity of improve the land, and county officials confirmed the church gets a roughly $100,000 annual tax break for putting it to agricultural application. The church board approved the transactions.
While the purchase excellence is not public record, the 33-acre property would have been worth about $93,000 that year, said John Marshall, charged with execution director of the Tarrant Appraisal District.
The land is now valued at $554,160 by the district.
Until recently, El Rancho Fe sold registered American Quarter Horses and three other horse breeds. On its Web site, convenient establishing and the integrity of the Copeland praise were used as selling points.
“We are a family you know and a tribe you trust,” it said.
John Copeland and his wife, Marty, no longer betray horses but continue to operate the human trash business, Swicegood aforesaid.
Ellen Aprill, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles and a former U.S. Treasury Department official, said leasing and selling come to land to the church’s top executive raises concerns. Under IRS rules, nonprofits can be penalized or lose their tax-exempt status if an executive, plank member or other insider receives an relating to housekeeping benefit above and beyond what the organization gets in return.
“The church and its board must get hold of great care to make sure the payments are unblemished to the church,” Aprill said. “The church says it does. But is not clear how we can subsist assured of.” Douglas Neece, the firm’s president, said Kenneth Copeland Ministries is Integrity Media’s biggest client, accounting for just over 50 percent of its occupation.
Neece is Kenneth Copeland’s brother-in-law. Neece’s son, Joel, likewise works for the company.
The church’s board was informed of Neece’s relationship to the Copelands, Swicegood said. Their television life is bought at market rates and the ministry gets a discount from Integrity Media, he said.
Douglas Neece said his company charges a “deeply discounted” commission below the industry standard of 15 percent. “We earn our money,” Neece said. “That’s just the way it is.
“We have nothing to conceal one’s self.”
The money involved is material. In a 1997 filing in Tarrant County, Copeland’s church related it paid a “related party” $22 very great number for “telecast and magnitude media expense” that year and received a discount of $1.7 the great body of the people on the transaction. Similar figures were cited for 1996.
Integrity Media, meanwhile, is the father fellowship to a horse-breeding operation and real estate company that owns a Learjet, records show. Although they are wholly owned subsidiaries of Integrity Media, Neece played down the connections.
“The subsidiaries don’t have anything to do with the media-buying corporation,” he said. “We’ve had several through the years, and these things are not united through the Copeland ministry.”
Whatever the venture — whether it’s buying TV time, land deals with a church executive or artless gas wells — Kenneth Copeland Ministries cites its 11-member provision of directors as an important check in succession the organic structure’s integrity.
Kenneth Copeland serves as board chairman, and his wife, Gloria, is a board member. Records conduct other members include or have included fellow televangelists Jesse Duplantis, Mac and Lynne Hammond, and Jerry and Carolyn Savelle; Oklahoma architect Loyal Furry; retired Texas pastor Harold Nichols; and Arkansas businessman John Best.
As chairman, Copeland has veto power over any resolution he deems “not in the best financial or operational interests of the Church or not in promotion of the nonprofit religious purposes of the Church,” church bylaws say.
Such refusal to sanction power is highly unusual, say academics who study nonprofits. Swicegood said the provision was meant to give Copeland push power to prevent the church from doing anything “repugnant to its Christian purposes and mission” — although the bylaws don’t lay that out. Swicegood said the church plans to remove that provision and adopt others that “reflect contemporary best practices in nonprofit governance.”
Board member Best, in a written reply to questions, said he’s admitted “100 percent accessibility to anything I wanted to take heed and have always seen the highest level of integrity and honesty.”
Other board members one and the other declined comment, did not respond to meeting requests or could not subsist located. The church has emphasized that board members act in the church’s best concern.
Some board members, however, receive a dress that experts like Hill, of the University of Miami, said undermines their independence. While board members don’t get salaries, some who are ministers get paid for oratory at ecclesiastical body events through offerings and honorariums, Swicegood confirmed.
The sums involved are usually kept secret. But in seeking tax exemption for its aircraft fleet in the late 1990s, the meeting-house revealed that it paid board members a total of $87,000 in “cash contributions” and almost $1 million in honorariums and “benefit purposes” in 1996 and ‘97.
Swicegood said the church’s independent compensation committee approves all payments to board members.
Marilyn Phelan, a Texas Tech University law professor and author on nonprofit law, said the practice could embarrass problems in an IRS audit. Both the IRS and Texas state law hinder benefits beyond reasonable compensation for insiders, including board members, she said. If violations are found, nonprofits can throw away their tax-exempt status and board members can face penalty taxes.
As the Senate Finance Committee considers its nearest footprint, Copeland is not backing down. His ministry is portraying the examination as an spring upon on religious liberty.
At the same interval, it is influencing forward with a swollen fund-raising scheme: soliciting donations for new television equipment so Copeland can be broadcast in high-definition. ap.org. AP researcher Rhonda Shafner contributed to this story.
