Private Jets for Jesus: The Tax-Free Gospel

Bonnie Parker lived in Windsboro,

Louisiana. She was sick, and for years,

every Sunday she watched Kenneth and Gloria Copeland on television,

hoping to be healed. The Copelands preached the prosperity gospel,

which teaches that faith and giving bring health and wealth back to the giver.

Bonnie Parker gave. Her daughter,

Christy Beach, later said she donated.

Tens of thousands of dollars, possibly hundreds of thousands.

Her husband, Alvin Parker, said she died believing that she had not given enough

to be healed. Around the same time,

a reporter at WFAA in Dallas named Brett Ship obtained flight records

for Copeland's ministry's $20 million jet.

On a trip to a seminar in Australia,

the plane stopped in Maui, in Fiji.

And in Honolulu, for what the Copelands called eating and rest.

The same records showed the jet flying to the La Fonda Hunting Ranch in South Texas.

Bonnie Parker's family asked the ministry for an accounting of what she had given.

They wanted to know where her money went.

Christy Beach told reporters, I just can't comprehend them going on vacation

in a jet that my mom paid for with her life.

The ministry declined to be interviewed and

What it offered instead was a statement from an accounting firm saying

its jet travel complied with tax law.

The family asked for an accounting of one woman's donations and got

a firm's opinion about the airplane.

Hello and welcome back to The Overlap.

This is The Overlap. I'm Joshua.

And I'm Will. This episode is about prosperity gospel televangelists.

Chiefly Kenneth Copeland. The Jets donors paid for the mansions.

They pay no they pay no property tax and a federal tax agency that opened

one examination of a church in all of its fiscal for twenty fourteen.

Copeland's history explains a lot about the Plains.

Before he was a broadcaster, he was actually a pilot.

And the man he flew for was Oral Roberts.

Not far from where I live now is Oral Roberts University.

His own organization is legally a church called Eagle Mountain International Church,

and it does business as Kenneth Copeland Ministries,

based in Newark, Texas, near Fort Worth.

Keep that legal status in mind because nearly every protection we discuss

in this episode attaches to the word quote church.

And this particular church apparently owns an airport.

It's called Kenneth Copeland Airport in Newark.

Reporting from twenty twenty five says Copeland owns five aircraft.

Plane from the Cold Open is a Cessna Citation X.

In 2005, Copeland got his donors to pay for it.

At the time, it was the fastest private jet in the world,

and it cost about $20 million.

Trinity Foundation, a watchdog group that tracks televangelist finances,

says he uses it regularly to fly to his resort home in Steamboat Springs,

Colorado.

Praise Jesus. The paperwork around that plane has its own wrinkle.

In July 2005, the same year the Citation 10 was bought,

a for-profit company called AIR Inc.,

clever name, was created in Newark,

Texas. Its directors were Gasou,

Kenneth Copeland, and Charles G.

Hyde. The Senate Finance Committee staff named Air Inc.,

AIR Inc. in its review of the ministry.

Whatever payments moved between the church and that company were never disclosed.

So what we can say is limited to this,

a church that owns jets and an airport operates alongside a

for profit aviation company with the founder on its board,

and nobody outside has seen the books of either one.

Then in 2019, Inside Edition sent Lisa Guerrero to ask Copeland about

the jets on camera. He gave her two lines that traveled a very long way.

He described commercial airliners as a tube full of demons.

And when she pressed on him specifically about the money,

he said, I'm a very wealthy man.

Just gets better and better. The program also reported at least 143 flights

to the Colorado vacation home.

I want to be careful with that number.

Much of the jet tracking material in this story comes from Trinity Foundation,

which reads public flight data and draws conclusions about where a plane went

and why. Trinity is an advocacy watchdog and it worked alongside

the Senate committee for six years.

Aviation blogs that repeat these figures,

like Arrow Corner and Jetly, mostly repackage earlier reporting.

So 143 flights and the purpose of any single trip rests on a watchdog's reading

of flight data rather than the ministry's own logs.

Because those aren't available.

Where we can, we'll cite the original reporting,

meaning WFAA and the Senate staff report.

The ministry has its own account of its flying and it deserves a full hearing.

It says the planes are used for ministry work about 90% of the time.

For the period from November 2006 to November 2007,

it says its board approved personal use of the aircraft 10% of the time.

And when you have five aircraft,

ten percent of the time can be a lot of ~ lot of time in the air.

Lot of flight hours.

Yeah, it says personal trips are charged and that an accounting firm reviewed

the jet travel and found it compliant with tax law.

If those charges are real and the family paid them,

that that changes the legal picture.

A steamboat springs trip the Copeland's paid for at a proper rate

is a different thing from a trip that donors cover.

The trouble is that the repayments have never been publicly verified.

Nobody outside the ministry has seen the invoices,

the rates, or the checks.

What the public has is a percentage the ministry chose to release and

a summary from a firm it hired.

And take the ministry's number at face value for just a second,

right? Even ten percent of the flying on a twenty million dollar jet is

a lot of personal travel on an aircraft that donors paid for.

And the board that approved it is the board of Copeland's own church.

No conflict there that I can tell.

The newest addition to the fleet came from Hollywood.

The church's Gulf Stream 5, tail number N1967J,

was sold to Eagle Mountain International Church by Tyler Perry.

Sources disagree on whether the sale happened in 2017 or 2018.

Copeland said Perry made the price so cheap for me I couldn't help but buy it.

What the church actually paid was never disclosed.

In Medea and Copeland's defense,

all of this rests on time. He says the Jets let him cover more ground

in a ministry he claims was brought that's brought 122 million people to Christ.

If you accept that premise that every hour saved means more people are reached,

a faster plane,

Or saved.

right, or saved, becomes a ministry expense.

Meanwhile, estimates of his

Personal net worth have been reported at about seven hundred

and fifty million dollars.

Jesus has been generous. And the $122 million figure that we talked about there

for the people that have been brought to Christ comes from Copeland himself.

I'm sure he's been counting. There's no way to check it,

and for the same reason there's no way to check the ninety percent.

Both numbers come from inside an organization that publishes nothing

it doesn't want to, despite the fact that the truth will set you free.

In two thousand seven, the same year WFAA published the flight records,

Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa,

a Republican you might have seen,

~ regularly refused to uphold decorum rules for the FBI director.

It said in a Senate Finance Committee that he opened investigation into

six television ministries Kenneth Copeland,

Benny Hinn, Creeflow Dollar, Eddie Long,

Joyce Meyer, and Paula White.

There's a who's who for you. ~ what he asked for,

what Senator Director Grassley asked for was ordinary.

Records on jets, homes, and vehicles,

plus records of any repayments the leaders had made for personal use

of the ministry property. That last item goes straight at the Copeland claim

we just heard. If personal flights were being charged back,

Grassley's request would have produced the paperwork proving it.

The six splits into two groups,

Joyce Meyer Ministries and Benny Hinn Ministries cooperated.

They handed over material, they changed how they set compensation

and how they governed their organizations.

So the Senate scrutiny produced real reform at two of the six ministries named

in this episode.

And I think they probably had their own struggles to deal with

at Benny Hinn's ministry. But the

Mm-hmm.

other four, we know, Copeland,

Dollar, Long and White, which sounds like a horrific law firm,

Ha

gave incomplete answers or none at all.

The investigation actually ran for more than three years.

On January 6th, 2011, Grassley's staff released a 61 page final review.

A lot of what they learned about the Copeland operation came from outside

the ministry, including from former Copeland Ministries employees.

Those former employees told Senate staff that they had been warned that

if they talked, quote, God will blight our finances.

So if if you're saying if you're threatening for God to do it,

does that make it not your fault?

Is that how that works? Is that like a ~ enforce majeure kind of thing?

Act of God? ~ anyway, sorry, just

I'm not gonna weigh in on that one.

just thinking out loud. For someone who worked at a ministry because they believed

in it, the warning that warning threatens their livelihood and

the vocabulary of their faith.

Meaning like if your whole identity is wrapped up in that in that ministry,

it's a real threat to say you're gonna be cut off or that God's gonna blight your

finances, meaning you're fired.

I would say is it probably the subtext there.

And in this whole story, no investigator had the power to go around

it by compelling the records directly.

Even with the doors mostly shut,

staff found some numbers. Fifteen Copeland family members were

on the ministry payroll. That drew in about $1.5 million in salary just between

the 15 members of his family. Kenneth and Gloria's combined salaries exceeded

$600,000. And on top of those salaries,

the church paid their living and operating expenses.

And if my math is n is tracking here,

you divide one point five million by fifteen people,

and the average comes to a hundred thousand dollars for each family member

on the payroll. Whatever else Kenneth Cole Copeland Ministries is,

it's also the Copeland's family employer.

Then of course there's the land.

The staff review found that John Copeland,

who appeared alongside Kenneth and Gloria in the WFAA reporting,

bought three properties the church owned after an oil and gas field

was found on top of them. The price he paid was seventy three thousand dollars.

The order of events though is what stands out here.

Donated money buys land for the church,

and later an oil and gas field turns up under it.

After the discovery, the land leaves the church for seventy three thousand

and goes to a copland. Nobody outside has reported what that oil

and gas later produced because the church has no obligation to say.

The other holdouts had their own aircraft arrangements.

Creeflo Dahler was CEO of a for-profit company called World Airs,

Inc., and his wife Taffy Dahler was its secretary.

World Airs owns the Gulf Stream the Dollars usually fly on.

It also sold another Gulf Stream to Kenneth Copeland.

So two of the ministries under Senate

Hmm.

investigation were trading airplanes with each other.

Through a for-profit company run by one of the pastors entirely.

The Senate could definitely see that the sale happened,

but it couldn't see the price and who on either side came out ahead.

Eddie Long, the late Bishop of New Birth Missionary Baptist Church,

had a company called Long Charter Air LLC.

It was registered at the church's own address,

at least a Grumman Jet to a Long affiliated organization for $30,000 a month.

And if Long Charter Air was were ever dissolved,

its assets would go to Eddie Long personally.

Run the arithmetic on that one with me.

$30,000 a month is $360,000 a year.

Leaving a religious organization

and landing in the company at the church's address whose assets end up

~ with the bishop. Every lease payment builds value and something long would

eventually own outright.

Paula White, now Paula White Kane of Without Walls International Church

was the fourth hold out. She also gave complete answers,

incomplete answers when ~ the Senate committee probed her organization.

And the ending was anticlimactic.

The ~ staff said they lacked the time or resources to issue subpoenas,

so no one was penalized. Grassley handed the question of reform

to the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability,

which is a private group.

~ ol Anthony of Trinity Foundation said the EFCA has no teeth.

A private counsel can't compel a document any more than Grassley staff choo chose

to, right? So in in three years of federal investigation,

what they ended with was that the matter was passed on to an organization with less

power than the Senate.

Here is the fair counterweight,

and we should give it its full weight.

The Senate investigation found no violations of federal tax rules,

given that there was no evidence,

and no clear proof of wrongdoing.

Copeland was never accused of breaking the law.

When we describe how the system works,

we're describing conduct that nobody has shown or proven in a court of

law to be illegal.

And that's very important, especially when your highest paid ~

co workers are legally married to you,

which keeps you from being compelled to testify against them in court.

And the reason nobody showed it is the same report.

Four ministries declined to hand over their full records,

and the committee decided against subpoenaing those four specific organizations.

An

investigation that can't get the documents can't find any violations in them.

Both facts can be true at the same time.

And the ministries are entitled to the first one.

The reason this fell to a senator in the first place actually goes back

to the year I was born, nineteen eighty four.

That year Congress passed the Church Audit Procedures Act,

Section seven hundred six one one of the tax code.

Before the IRS can even open an inquiry into a church,

a senior IRS official has to approve it.

The church gets written notice and the offer of a meeting.

And any examination is pretty limited,

it's it's only to the three most recent tax years.

Let's put that through a year window against the Copeland timeline.

The citation 10 was paid for in 2005.

Grassley's letters went out in 2007.

An IRS examination opened even a couple of years after that could already

be outside the window for the year the plane was bought.

The rules are built so that by the time an inquiry clears the approvals,

the oldest transactions have aged out.

Churches also start with less on file than any other charity because other

tax exempt groups file a public Form 990 every year,

and churches just don't have to.

And the category of church is wider than most people would actually guess.

Daystar Television Network is classified as a church,

so it also does not have to file a Form 990.

Television network with a church's disclosure obs obligations.

Hold on to Daystar 'cause it comes up again when we go get to the Jets.

Then two thousand eight, a court ruling blocked the IRS from auditing Living Word

Christian Center, Mac Hammond's Church in Minnesota.

Trinity Foundation says that after the ruling,

the IRS effectively stopped auditing churches.

And the government's own numbers bear that out as well.

The government accountability office later reported that the IRS opened

two church examinations in fiscal twenty thirteen and one in twenty fourteen.

That one examination covered every church in the country for a full year.

Now, most recent figures are a little higher and still tiny.

Between October 1st, 2020 and September 30th,

2022, the IRS opened 14 church tax examinations,

according to the law firm Wagenmaker and Oberly,

which Trinity actually cites. That works out to about seven investigations per year.

And Trinity also found that in 2023,

no church lost its tax exempt status as a result of an IRS audit.

Wow, that speaks volumes. Part of the explanation is staffing.

Between fiscal twenty ten and fiscal twenty nineteen,

the IRS lost more than twenty-nine thousand six hundred and eighteen full time

positions. An office that has to get their senior sign-off for every church inquiry

while shedding that many people is going to be open to very few.

And when the IRS does find something,

the public never really learns what it was.

Fines from church audits are kept secret under the Privacy Act of 1974.

So for these 14 examinations, the only outcome anyone outside

can actually report is that none of them cost a church its exemption in 2023.

Any penalty, any repayment, any fighting,

all of that stays sealed.

Now I do want to push back on the version of this story where the

IRS has no options. A federal appeals court ruled that the Church Audit Procedures

Act doesn't protect church records held by a bank.

The IRS can demand those records directly from the bank without going through

the church's notice and meeting process.

Now that shifts some of the responsibility.

The 1984 law slows the IRS down,

and the staffing cuts slow it down a little more.

But the agency has a particular path to church bank records that

the courts have consistently upheld.

The low audit counts come partly from the law and partly from the choices that

IRS has made about where to spend the staff that it has actually left.

Which brings us to November fifth,

twenty twenty two. Copeland flew the church's Gulf Stream,

same tail number as before, ~ which we mentioned,

that came from Tyler Perry from Fort Worth Alliance Airport

to Palm Beach International. So again,

he's flying formerly Tyler Perry's Gulf Stream from Fort Worth to Palm Beach.

The occasion was a Trump rally promoting Mehmet Oz,

who was running for the Senate in Pennsylvania.

Then Mr. Copeland flew back to Texas.

Pete Evans at the Trinity Foundation asked just two questions about that trip.

Did the flight have any ministry purpose?

And was the church actually compensated for it?

Churches are barred from campaigning for candidates under the Johnson Amendment.

And Trinity says the IRS has, quote,

virtually ignored the Johnson Amendment for churches.

So you have a church owned jet flying a church founder to a campaign rally

for a Senate candidate, and the two questions that would settle anything whether

anything improper happened are the same two questions Senator Grassley asked

in two thousand seven personal use and repayment.

Fifteen years later they're still being asked by a watchdog with no power

to get an answer.

And the twenty twenty two flight is recent enough to fall inside

the three year window, or at least it was at the tax filing window

of April twenty twenty six. So if the IRS wanted to actually look at it,

the nineteen eighty-four law would have allowed it,

basically, with senior approval.

But there's no public sign that one was ever opened,

and under the Privacy Act, there wouldn't be a public sign if one had been.

Assume what you like. ~ federal income tax is one layer at issue here,

but property tax is local and at the county level you can put a dollar figure

on what the neighbors cover.

So let's start with 2008. Terrent County appraisers denied a property

tax exemption on one of the ministry's jets,

a Cessna Bravo 550, worth about $3.6 million.

The exemption application required a list of salaries,

and the ministry just refused to provide it outright.

And you can go ahead and read that as a choice.

The ministry had a path to a tax break on a three point six million dollar aircraft.

The price of the break was showing up to the county or showing

the county what everybody gets paid.

It kept the private payroll and gave up the exemption.

That tells you something about how much the ministry values keeping

its salaries out of public view.

So in 2014, John Burnett at NPR reported that Tarrant County exempts thirty million

dollars of Copeland property from local taxes.

That number includes a parsonage,

which is an 18,000 square foot home valued at six point three million dollars.

Across

Not usually associated with parsonages.

right, when I think of parsonage,

I don't definitely don't think of an 18,000 square foot house.

I usually think of a of a rotting cabin with a leaking roof.

Now across

Exactly.

that property the the exemptions excuse about six hundred

and sixty thousand dollars in property taxes from the previous year.

And in 2021, the Houston Chronicle ran an investigation called Unfair Burden

Tax Sanctuaries. By then, the Lakeside Mansion was valued at $7 million,

and Reed Mansion is parsonage.

It's owned

Mm-hmm.

by Eagle Mountain International Church,

and it pays no property tax because it's classified as a parsonage under section

eleven point two zero of the Texas Tax Code.

The Chronicle put the savings at about $150,000 a year.

So those two numbers measure different things,

right? The NPR number covers the whole thirty million dollars of exempt property.

And the chronicle number covers the house by itself,

right? The $150,000 is just what the Copeland's primary home would owe.

That money would otherwise go toward Terrant County services like schools

and police and firefighters, libraries.

So the household around the ministry pays a little more to make up

for the house that pays nothing.

And that comes out to by my count eight hundred and ten thousand between

the two of them. If the three thirty

Something like that.

million was six hundred and sixty and the house was one hundred fifty.

Anyway,

Mm-hmm.

~ local officials haven't simply waived this through.

Jeff Law, the Tarrant County Chief Appraiser,

said in twenty twenty one that he would ask the church to reapply

for the parsonage exemption. And Law's office is the same one that turned down

the Jet exemption in two thousand eight.

So the county has pushed back at least twice,

and in both cases the tool was paperwork.

Make the ministry file and make it show something.

Copeland is is far from the only Texas pastor using this exemption.

In Houston, Bishop IV Hilliard of New Light Church World Outreach

and Worship Centers has a parsonage in Spring,

Texas of nearly 25,000 square feet on eleven point eight acres.

It currently is avoiding about $100,000 per year in property taxes.

And then there's Joel Osteen, a wealthy Texas megachurch,

The one and only

the one and only. None like him.

the wealthy Texas megachurch pastor,

by anybody's measure, pays about two hundred and eighteen thousand dollars

a year in property taxes on his home and doesn't claim the parsonage exemption

Now, Osteen's tax,

to his credit.

yeah, to his credit, I guess. Osteen's tax bill settles one argument.

The parson exit parsonage exemption is something specific pastors

can decide to claim, right? The richest pastor in Houston pays $218,000

per year. He could have tried to avoid.

And Copeland and Hilliard, with houses of $18,000 and nearly $25,000.

square feet decided I'm gonna take that break.

Which also means the exemptions defenders can't claim it's essential

to running a large ministry. Lakewood Church operates with its pastor paying full

property tax on his house.

Now the jets themselves get raised for in public,

right? And the pitches travel from you know preacher to preacher.

In 2015, Creeflow Dollars World Changers Church International in College Park,

Georgia launched its project called Project G650.

The goal was about $65 million for a Gulfstream G650.

The ask was for 200,000 people.

To give three hundred dollars or more each.

The math on that ask is straightforward.

Two hundred thousand people at three hundred dollars apiece comes to sixty million.

And the or more was supposed to cover the last five million.

And this was the same Creflow dollar whose for profit company World Airs already

owned the Gulf Stream Gulf Stream he usually flew,

according to the reporting around the Senate investigation.

Now, to be fair, public backlash actually shut the campaign down within

a couple of days. The ministry had a New York public relations firm,

5W Public Relations, who handled the response with Judy or sorry,

Judah Ingle Mayer, representing Creeflo Dollar Ministries during this entire ordeal.

So public pressure has stopped at least one of these campaigns and stopped it fast.

When the ask is sixty-five million in a single announcement,

people notice. The routine costs,

the parsonage exemption every year,

the lease payment every month,

never produce that kind of moment.

And then old Jesse Duplanis from Destrahan,

Louisiana. In twenty eighteen he asked his followers to support a

new Desalt Falcon 7X, a fifty-four million dollar aircraft,

and said God had told him to believe for it.

follow-up came on November 27th,

2023. Duplantis was appearing at Kenneth Copeland Ministries Telethon when

he announced that he had bought the Falcon 7X.

It was a used 2008 model, and the reported price was 21 million.

The till number is in N7JD, I think it's a shortened tail number there.

~ and the plane is registered to Voice of the Covenant Church Inc.,

which is the legal name of Jesse Duplantis Ministries.

So that that is a correction we do owe the ministry,

right? That the headline figure from twenty eighteen was fifty four million.

And what Duplanus paid came in at less than half of it.

The big round numbers in the appeals tend to overstate what gets spent,

but he bought it on faith.

And the airplane is registered to a church.

So the same protections we walked through for Copeland,

no Form nine ninety, the nineteen eighty four audit rules,

the secrecy around any penalties,

cover a twenty one million dollar Falcon seven X in Louisiana.

Look at where you made the announcement too.

Copeland's Telethon was the stage for yet another preacher's jet.

Trinity Foundation's tracking work,

reported in 2025, connected aircraft to more names.

Bishop I. V. Hilliard, the same pastor with the nearly 25,000 square foot parsonage.

Joni Lamb of Daystar Television Network,

which is classified as a church,

also filing no Form 990.

Keith Kraft of Elevate Life Church in Frisco,

Texas, and Kenneth Copeland.

Hilliard and Lamb are the useful cases there because each one shows

a different protection stacking on top of a plane.

For Hilliard, it's the parsonage exemption plus the aircraft.

For Lamb, it's a broadcast network wearing a church's legal status,

which means the network's plane comes with the church's disclosure rules.

And then the next generation. In June 2025,

Religion Unplugged reported that Copeland's grandson,

Jeremy Pearsons, is raising money for a private jet.

He's the son of Terry Copeland Pearsons,

who heads Legacy Church. The aviation site Jetly put the target

at $2 million for a Cessna citation Bravo.

That number comes from an aggregator rather than original reporting.

Take it for what it's worth.

I do like the unplugged album by religion,

~ but the you read enough of this stuff and it's the righteous gemstone starts

to seem a little understated. ~ this these habits run in the family.

The grandfather flew for Royal Roberts,

built a fleet of five aircraft in an airport,

and hosted the telethon where Duplantis announced his jet.

Now the grandson runs his own church and has his own fundraising campaign

for a new plane.

Now, the defense. And it should get a hearing too.

In 2008, the commentator Doug Weed,

WEAD, argued that about 16,000 corporations operate their own aircraft.

He pointed out that Billy Graham's ministry,

the Mormon Church, and Catholic diocese all use private planes.

And he argued that Pentecostal ministries were being singled out.

And that's a partisan blog post,

and it contains at least one real fact.

Large religious organizations do use private aircraft,

and Copeland's ministry would hardly be the first.

Where the comparison runs into trouble is the Bonnie Parker family.

They gave to a ministry, they asked that ministry where the money went,

and they got an accounting firm statement about jet travel.

The defense covers whether a ministry may own a plane.

It says nothing about whether the people who paid for the plane can see the book.

And the 16,000 corporation figure cuts the other way too.

A corporation's plane gets paid for out of revenue that the corporation earns.

Like it or not, that's capitalism,

but they're paying for it with their own money.

The citation 10 was paid for by donors through direct asks

in a ministry that tells people their giving will get them into heaven.

So let's be specific about where pressure has worked,

because the record has a few cases where it did.

Clearuses in Tarrant County in 2008.

The county required a salary list for the jet exemption,

but the ministry just refused.

And the county denied the exemption on a $3.6 million aircraft.

A disclosure requirement at a county level produced a real tax bill that

any of us could see. Jeff Law's 2021 decision to have the church reapply

for the parsonage exemption uses the same exact mechanism.

Every reapplication is a chance for the county to ask for documents.

The second clear case is the Senate investigation,

at least as far as the two ministries that cooperated were concerned.

Joyce Meyer ministries and Benny Hinn ministries changed how they set

pay and run their organizations.

The scrutiny did that without a single subpoena.

The four that refused face refused,

the other ministries faced no consequence,

and Grassley's own staff said why.

They lacked the quote time or resources to issue subpoenas.

The power existed, and the committee chose not to spend it.

And then, of course, the third is the IRS's bank records route.

So the the appeals court ruling means church records held by a bank

are breachable without the 1984 notice and meeting process.

An agency that wanted to look at where a ministry's money went actually

has a mechanism to do it. The audit numbers,

one examination in fiscal 2014 and 14 across two years more recently.

Show how rarely the agency has actually decided to look with or without that power.

And the fourth investigation is the ~ public project G six fifty.

Project G six fifty died

Yeah.

within days. Duplantis ended up using buying a used plane for twenty

one million dollars. And I mean,

come on, let's pour one out for our boy,

Jesse Duplantis, because having to take a twenty one million dollar plane when

you're hoping for a fifty four million dollar plane,

that's just rough.

It just hurts.

~ yeah, that's just me, man. ~ Inside Edition put a camera in front

of Copeland and got the quotes,

tube full of demons.

Which let's talk about that. I mean,

does he warn his ~ his followers of that?

~ but he got two

No, I do you remember

that interview when it blew up though?

You can pull it.

I I don't I I somehow missed that one.

~ it's on YouTube. He basically says that he can't

fly commercial because commercial airplanes are essentially there's just

tubes full of demons. And demons who come and go have the opportunity

to attach themselves to him while he's in those public airplanes.

it's a good thing the demons can't fly at the same level or can't get

on the ~ citations or the Gulf Streams or any those.

I didn't know demons could fly,

so that was new to me.

Yeah, man, they have all kinds of powers.

Just read this present darkness.

Right.

~ all right, so we got those quotes,

He also said I'm a very wealthy man.

yeah.

Right, yeah, his his other quote was I'm a very wealthy man,

~ which isn't a rare bit of honesty there,

but attention has has changed the behavior at the edges in this case.

At least the pressure got to him,

~ maybe in more ways than one.

But the truth is it does it hasn't really touch parts that never

get their own newspaper article or headline or podcast or whatever.

The parsonage on the lake, right?

Avoids ~ what is it, $150,000 in property taxes every year?

I mean, that's like

Right.

I mean, i in five years you could build a school.

Like you know what I mean? Like you if you gave the library and it

Right. Or pay some teachers finally.

exactly. Or or if you gave the library $150,000 a year.

~

Imagine what we could do with a library,

right? The 15 members, family members that just as staff drew one

and a half million dollars. John Copeland's $73,000 purchase of land that just

so happened to be sitting on an oil and gas field,

right? Eddie Long's $30,000 a month lease of his own company.

He created a company to rent a part of the company back to himself for a profit.

Like

It's literally just capitalism between two corporations owned and controlled

by the same person, where the person in the middle is just making

the money between the two organizations.

The Gulfstream,

I think that's called a shell game.

I I think that's exactly what a shell game is.

The Gulfstream flight to the the Oz rally in Palm Beach,

right? None of those produced any consequence whatsoever that any of

us have been able to find. And under the Privacy Act,

any, you know.

Perjury, penalty, default, whatever,

it would stay completely sealed and completely off the books from us.

And look, I I Sorry.

Sorry.

~ I I I just wanted to to toss in here.

This isn't this has nothing to do with with you know your faith.

If you if you believe in this in in Christianity or if you believe

in these ministries, that's fine.

You know, there's no there's no harm in it,

but there is real harm when they're using it as a methodology for A for them

to get rich, which directly goes against what it says in the Bible.

It's easier for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle than it is for

a rich man to get into heaven.

And I mean this was kind of started by Oral Roberts,

if we're being honest anyway, about the whole prosperity gospel theology.

But also it's hurting real people because they're taking your money

and and telling you that you'll have blessings for it and then just using

it to buy airplanes.

And unfortunately, after the handful of investigations and the lack of any kind

of ~ consequences at all, we're back with Bonnie Parker's family right where they

started. They asked the Copelands for an accounting of what Ms.

Miss Parker gave, and the ministry declined interviews and pointed

to an accounting firm statement.

No senator, no county appraiser,

and no IRS examiner has ever been in a position to give them the number they asked

for, and the ministry's never offered it.

And that's pretty much it, right?

Like that's the real issue here is that that nothing would compel them just

to tell them how much money their mother had donated through the years

to the ministry. Now to be fair,

you know, the sh probably could have pulled bank records and and gotten

it all together. But wouldn't it be at least kind to just give her,

you know, family a a statement of of all of the giving that she had given

to the ministry over the years?

But sh they don't have to, right?

I mean there's no law that makes them.

Right, I guess the other thing she asked for was an accounting of what

the how they spent the money or the family asked for how they spent

the money as well. But even that they could have just released some portion

of it and said 'cause it's not as if every dollar's tracked,

right? And

Right.

once it goes into an account, it just becomes ~ you know,

~ commoditized with the rest of with every other dollar.

So ~ if you take that away, you know,

it's not like they're gonna told her something to give a little peace of mind,

like, hey, we spent you know, tell her at least about how they saved

a hundred and twenty million people and what they spent that money on.

Right.

That would that would give her some peace of mind,

perhaps.

Exactly. And I think I think at all of this though,

it's not it's not just churches.

Companies play this exact game,

even and especially non profits.

It's why we will be doing a future episode on how the rich use non profits

to funnel money back to their own family members without having to pay actual taxes

So for for profit then.

on them. Yes, for profit.

But this was just an expose of private jets for Jesus

The Tax Free Prosperity Gospel Racket.

That's the episode.

Amen.

I'm Joshua.

I'm Will. See you next week.

Make sure to check

us out on FOF.foundation, on Apple Podcasts,

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Help where you can. And like we always say,

bye.