A recent telethon by Kenneth Copeland Ministries became a forum for prosperity preachers to talk about their private jets and raise money for a new one.
During the Ministerios Kenneth Copeland’ 2023 VictoryThon fundraiser, Jesse Duplantis announced his ministry purchased a $21 million Falcon 7X jet. Jesse Duplantis Ministries already owns a Falcon 900 jet.
Sobre el September 20th broadcast Duplantis also told TV viewers that he had previously given away two jets.
According to AviationDB, Jesse Duplantis Ministries has previously owned a Cessna 500, a 1124 Westwind, and a Falcon 50.
The Cessna 500 was transferred to Keith Moore’s Faith Life Church in 2004 but has since been retired from service. The 1124 Westwind was transferred to Mike Mille’s White Dove Fellowship in 2006 and sold again in 2022. The Falcon 50 was transferred to Mac Hammond’s Living Word Christian Center in 2020.
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During the same broadcast, Pastor Jerry Savelle joined Duplantis and George Pearsons, senior pastor at Kenneth Copeland Ministries, on stage to announce his ministry was giving a seed offering of $100,000 while trusting for a Falcon 900 jet:
Savelle said, “I was sowing for the future . . . but the Lord recently told me. He said, ‘There’s something bigger, better, faster and more range in your future.’ Well, I know when He talks about future, you sow a seed because seed is about future. So tonight, I brought another seed because I’m believing for a Falcon 900 now . . . [Savelle hands a check to Pearsons] This is a hundred thousand dollars out of my aviation account.”
Jerry Savelle Ministries already owns two jets: a Falcon 50 (tail number N920JS) and a Cessna 560 (tail number N229JS).
Forty minutes later the telethon featured healing evangelist Nancy Dufresne telling viewers a series of stories about people allegedly healed while watching her broadcasts.
Almost 10 years ago Edward Dufresne, the husband of Nancy Dufresne, and pastor of World Harvest Church, was killed when his privately-owned Cessna 500 (tail number N610ED) exploded over Kansas. Dufresne’s pilot also died in the incident.
Prosperity Gospel on Display
Word of faith theology, better known as the prosperity gospel, is the ideological foundation for the teaching and preaching featured on Kenneth Copeland’s TV network.
During the telethon, the hosts encouraged their audience to repeat a positive confession. According to Got Questions, “Positive confession is the practice of saying aloud what you want to happen with the expectation that God will make it a reality.”
George Pearsons tells the audience, “Everyone in here say this after me.” Then Pearsons begins the positive confession with Duplantis and the audience repeating each phrase. “In the name of Jesus, I have sown my seed and I believe the 100-fold return is working for me all the time.”
The prosperity gospel has generated incredible wealth for Kenneth Copeland. His daughter Kellie Copeland refers to her dad as she tells the audience, “It doesn’t even make sense that you could be debt-free, give all your money away and have more money and be known as the richest preacher in the world.”
While Kenneth Copeland does appear on some lists as the world’s wealthiest preacher, those lists are incomplete. Brazilian televangelist Edir Macedo is probably the richest preacher in the world. Macedo is head of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God and controls the second largest TV network in Brazil.
This report was originally published by Trinity Foundation.
Barry Bowen es un miembro del personal de Fundación Trinidad, una organización pública sin fines de lucro con sede en Dallas, Texas, que ha estado rastreando el fraude religioso y ayudando a las víctimas durante más de 30 años.
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18 Respuestas
This is pathetic. I pray for all the gullible people out there who follow these so-called ‘preachers’.
It’s reportedly a maxim among the wealthy that there’s two things you don’t buy, but rent or lease instead – planes and boats, because they require a lot of expensive maintenance plus pilots in the case of planes. And unlike cars and trucks, they aren’t used a high percentage of the time – they sit a lot. I worked in a marina one summer and some of the boats never left their moorings, or if they did go out, it was just once or twice.
Jesse DuPlantis spent $21 million on one of his jets. That amount of money would buy 21,000 passenger flight tickets at $1,000 each or 14,000 at $1,500 each. And even if DuPlantis flew 250 times a year – a very high amount, he’d have over 80 YEARS of $1,000 ticket flights and over 55 YEARS of $1,500 flights. Of course there may be an entourage on board but the numbers still can’t justify such expenditures apart from vanity.
Warren Buffett, who knows quite a bit about wealth, owns Netjets, where Netjets owns a fleet of several hundred jets and it then sells fractional shares or leases for the jets to businesses or wealthy individuals. It’s quite a profitable business.
I was a pilot on corporate Jets for 42 years and am familiar with the costs of flying and maintaining private jets. I don’t see how any “Christian”ministry can justify the cost of owning and operating one, that includes Franklin Graham.
But let me help you understand. They are not Christian ministries. They are prophet err profit centers. And I was once part of the cults of the eighties. Then God gave me discernment and realized they operate off of convincing people that if yuh go against them your going against God. Sad but true.
I’m not aware of prosperity gospel in the UK being in any way as prevalent as it seems to be in the USA. But online reference to its occurrence in the USA, has got me thinking a little.
It’s arguable that in their origins, most religious projects have possessed a fertility aspect. Propitiating the god of the religion improving prospects of better gathering and harvesting. Or, at least, this is a common presumption of origins of religions and worship of gods.
So I’ve been wondering whether reflecting on commonality between fertility and prosperity in the prosperity gospel movement, would provide any insight.
I’m thinking mainly of the faith process and experience of adherents. Are there similar dynamics there in play.
It may be that prosperity/fertility type claims occur beyond the confines of the prosperity gospel movement and community. I’m thinking of where some Christians are arguing that adherence to Christian thinking and practice yields “better sex”.
I don’t think so, Colin. This is little more than good old avarice on a commercial scale. They’re snake oil salesmen dressed in pastor suits. They promise wealth, health and happiness in exchange for your money, and share the same DNA as pyramid schemes and other investment scams. If you fail to gain the wealth they promise, than that’s on you not them — they will blame your lack of faith for the shortfall.
Before I moved to the US from the UK, I saw a BBC documentary about Americans who were trying various schemes to get rich quick. I can’t remember them all, but there was a group of stay-at-home moms who spent hours every day entering phone-in competitions that offered cars and vacations for prizes, and being pretty successful at it. They also talked to the owner of a business who was training young women how to meet and date multimillionaires.
Americans in particular have long equated having wealth with being virtuous. If you’re a successful person, you must be doing something right, morally speaking. It’s not true, of course, but many people believe it, especially among conservative Americans, a large majority of whom are Christians.
It’s this belief and desire for wealth that the Word Faith movement taps into. These pastors openly brag about their opulent wealth because they know their viewers believe they are blessings bestowed by God upon His faithful servants, and they want in. It’s all part of the scam.
Thank you Mike for the helpful cultural interpretation of equating wealth with virtue.
It helps to explain this extraordinary phenomenon which seems to flourish in some North American “Christian” cultural conditions where credulous folks virtually throw money at these audacious frauds.
Yes Colin- I think you have idnetified the root. Idolatry. You will discover many of these same men also have many sexual partners both male and female. “Therefore, treat the parts of your earthly body as dead to sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed, which amounts to idolatry.”
Herein lies the problem… “but the Lord recently told me.”
Many are the con artists of the Word of Faith (Greed) praying upon the gullible to believe them and send them money.
2 Timothy 4:3–4 (ESV): “For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths.”
Thanks to Mark Smith and Brian Churchil for using their work experiences to explain why purchasing private jets is financially unwise.
The Evangelical Industrial Complex finest example of what it means to be corrupt……..
I feel sorry for all the grandmas, bubbes, abuelas who have given their widow’s mites to keep these charlatans in the lap of luxury. Dante had remarkable prescience in seeing so many clergy in the 4th Circle of Hell.
The Word of Faith movement promises health and wealth, at a price. If you do your research, you will find that it promotes a false gospel and a different Jesus. It preys on the vulnerable, desperate and seekers after significance. It’s the biggest scam since Tetzel sold indulgences to the gullible adherents of the Roman Catholic Church in the 15th Century. Copeland is it’s high priest and chief snake oil salesman.
Kenneth Copeland doesn’t fly commercially because commercial airplanes are “long tubes full of demons.”
https://iharare.com/watch-i-dont-want-to-get-in-a-long-tube-with-a-bunch-of-demons-prophet-justifies-buying-private-jet-with-church-funds/
This is nothing new. I remember watching Copeland and DuPlantis yukking it up and boasting about their private jets on Christian TV way back in the 1990s. Clearly they have not an ounce of shame since no amount of criticism or self-reflection has changed their brazen behavior one iota in the last 30 years.
It’s funny how some scammers from that era, like Robert Tilton, were found out and their careers demolished as a result, whereas others just powered through and continued to prosper.
It’s rare that you’ll find me speechless. But I can’t. I am simply unable to can.
I did some more research and according to freely-available info online, the Falcon 7X jet Jesse Duplantis owns has an average fixed cost of about $655,000 a year. And by fixed, that means the annual cost that must be plane to keep the plane operational. This amount must be spent even if the plane just sits in a hangar or on the tarmac and is never used.
Variable costs are the costs related to actual flights of the plane. Estimated costs for operating a Falcon 7X are $3000 per hour, with the fuel burned comprising half of that amount. I looked at Duplantis’ schedule posted on his website for the next 30 days and it looks like he has about 18 hours of flight time planned. I multiplied that by 11 (I figure he takes a month off each year) and got 198 hours per year, which I rounded up to 200. The total for variable costs is thus $600,000 per year ($3000 per hour times 200 hours). Add it all up and it costs Duplantis at least $1,255,000 per year to operate the Falcon 7X. That amount of money would buy a lot of airline tickets and would be a much better use of donations from Christians.
I was trying out a church and I didn’t realize Nancy Dufresne was only a guest. I thought she was a Main Pastor, and was going to stop attending. She was extremely full of herself and giving herself so much glory about all her books. One of her other friends wrote a book. She said it was great and she said we should just scratch his name off and put her name on there as author. She was bashing her volunteers and saying just because I dismissed you doesn’t mean God does. Yeah whatever lady God didn’t tell you that.