Joyce Meyer's message: Give to me and God gives to you
Everything she has came from him: the $10 million corporate jet, her husband's $107,000 silver-gray Mercedes sedan, her $2 million home and houses worth another $2 million for her four children.
It's been nothing short of a miracle, says Meyer, a one-time bookkeeper who heads one of the world's largest television ministries. Her Life in the Word organization expects to take in $95 million this year.
"Here I am, an ex-housewife from Fenton (Mo.), with a 12th-grade education," she said. "How could anybody look at this and see anything other than God?"
Describing herself as sexually abused when she was a girl and neglected and abandoned as a young wife, Meyer has remade herself into one of the nation's best-known and best-paid TV preachers. She has taken her "prosperity through faith" message to millions.
Meyer, 60 and a grandmother, runs the ministry with her husband, Dave, and the couple's four children. All of the family, including the children's spouses, draw paychecks from the ministry.
But the way Meyer spends her ministry's money on herself and her family may violate federal law, legal and tax experts say. That law bars leaders of nonprofits — religious groups and other charities — from benefiting privately from the tax-free money they raise.
Wall Watchers, a group that monitors the finances of large Christian organizations, last month called on the Internal Revenue Service to investigate Meyer and six other TV preachers to determine whether their tax-exempt status should be revoked.
Wall Watchers tax expert Rod Pitzer says federal law requires that any compensation — salary and perks, including housing for ministers — must be reasonable. "Reasonable" means that the benefits to Meyer and her family roughly equal what other ministers in their St. Louis area receive from their congregations, he said.
For example, Pitzer said, Meyer's use of church money for five homes in South County — for Meyer and her husband, and for each of their four children — seems "abusive."
But Meyer says there's nothing wrong with the ministry paying about $4 million to purchase, renovate and maintain the five homes. As she sees it, the ministry-owned homes simply are parsonages for her church.
Meyer and her lawyer say she scrupulously abides by all laws.
From a 15-minute St. Louis-area radio show in 1983, Meyer's ministry has spread to virtually every corner of the civilized world, largely through the reach of satellite and cable transmissions and the Internet.
To give is godly, she says. Never fear giving too much in the name of God. Fear, she said, is the work of the devil.
Her lectures end with the same plea she has been delivering for a decade: "Make your checks payable to Joyce Meyer Ministries/Life in the Word. And million is spelled M-I-L-L-I-O-N."
In September, the ministry says, an East Coast woman gave stock worth that amount. Meyer then asked for more.
In St. Louis last month, Meyer asked for a $7 million check. "That would really bless me," she said.
Meyer's 20 or so conferences each year, where followers usually have their only opportunity to see and hear her live, are part old-fashioned tent revival, part motivational rally and part unrelenting sales pitch.
"God does not need our money. The giving thing is not for him, it's for us," Meyer told her Detroit audience in September. "I should not have to work to try to support myself."
Today, her TV shows, regional conferences and fund raising from her Web site bring an average $8 million a month to her ministry. Of that, the ministry says it spends about 10 percent — $880,000 a month — on charitable works around the globe.
In September, an Arabic-language translation of her program began airing six times a day on the Life Channel network in the Middle East. Meyer hopes to use the network to bring the message of Christianity to 31 Islamic nations.
The former Holy Rosary Catholic Church rises from the corner of Margaretta and Clarence avenues like a hulking giant. Just four years ago, the church in the O'Fallon Park area of St. Louis was little more than a tired neighborhood relic, desperate for life and purpose.
Not anymore.
In the fall of 2000, the church and adjacent school were reborn as the St. Louis Dream Center, an ambitious, privately funded effort of Joyce Meyer Ministries.
This year, Joyce Meyer Ministries will contribute nearly $2.8 million to the operation of the Dream Center and get back about $600,000 in donations there, a ministry spokeswoman said.
Extensively renovated, funded and staffed by Meyer's ministry, the Dream Center offers a wide range of Christian-based, social-service programs, from a teen drop-in center to nursing-home visitations to efforts to reach out to area prostitutes and the homeless.
"The Bible said that Jesus came for the sick and not the well," Meyer says. "We're just trying to relieve suffering any way we can."