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Televangelists Keith Moore And Creflo Dollar Acquire Multi-Million-Dollar Jets

por Barry Bowen
keith moore jets televangelist
Televangelist Keith Moore and his Faith Life International has purchased a Dassault Falcon 7X jet, which was listed for sale at $17.5 million. (TRR Graphic)

The ministries for televangelists Keith Moore and Creflo Dollar recently purchased new jets, totaling tens of millions of dollars.

After a fundraising campaign with a goal of $10 million, Moore’s Faith Life International purchased a used Dassault Falcon 7X jet, which was listed for sale at $17.5 million on the website AircraftVx. A new model would have cost $60 million.

The Federal Aviation Administration disclosed the purchase when it certified the jet in May. The jet’s original tail number was N1902C, but has been changed to N37KM. Tail numbers are the aircraft equivalent of license plates for cars. When ministries purchase a jet, the ministry founder’s initials are frequently used in the tail number.

In addition to the Falcon 7X, Faith Life International also owns a Dassault Falcon 900 EX (tail number N7KM) and Raytheon 390 (tail number N8PJ) jets. Pastor Moore is a licensed pilot and certified to fly all three jet models, but both Falcon jets require an additional pilot in the cockpit.

Similarly, Creflo Dollar’s property holding company World Heir recently acquired two used jets: a Gulfstream G-IV (tail number N878SM) and a Learjet 60 (tail number N978SM).

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Initially, Dollar asked his flock for 200,000 donors to give $300 each to fund the purchase of a new $65 million Gulfstream G650 jet. However, the preacher faced immediate backlash due to critical international news coverage.

creflo dollar
Televangelist Creflo Dollar (Photo: Instagram)

So, instead, Dollar’s property holding company World Heir acquired two used jets: a Gulfstream G-IV (tail number N878SM) and a Learjet 60 (tail number N978SM). The latter jet was sold recently to Trigger Air LLC, with the terms not disclosed.

Trinity Foundation searched for but didn’t find any example of Dollar disclosing to his congregation World Changers Church International and TV audience the recent purchase of a 2010 Gulfstream GV-SP (also known as G550) with the tail number N600JD.

Aircraft Shopper Online reports the sale price for the Gulfstream G550 was listed at $18,650,000. The FAA certified the jet on June 17.

Dollar, who is not a licensed pilot, uses the jet to fly to speaking engagements around the country and apparently for some vacations. On August 19, his new private plane flew to the island of Aruba and returned to the Atlanta area today; it is not known if Dollar or his family members traveled on these flights.

flight creflo dollar
Details of the recent Aruba flight on the World Heir-owned private jet (Screengrab: FAA)

Este artículo fue publicado originalmente por Trinity Foundation.

Barry BowenBarry Bowen es un miembro del personal de Fundación Trinidad, a public nonprofit based in Dallas, Texas, that has been tracking religious fraud and helping victims for over 30 years. 

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35 Respuestas

  1. Praise God!!! Celebrities, political leaders and corporate executives have jets. Ministers of God spreading the Kingdom of God should have jets too. They fly all over preaching, and have to go as God leads them… being subject to Delta, American Airlines and airports isn’t God’s best. God is a God of abundance and I know Keith Moore has believed God for that jet. Praise God! Rejoice when they persecute you!!!

    1. Stacey, Or instead of flying “all over” preaching, why don’t they simply fund the equipping and empowering of local preachers? Gods word can be delivered from the humblest of preachers- do you really believe that Jesus needs these blokes to fly all over the place?

      1. Yes indeed the gospel is to be preached to the corners of the earth but for millions upon millions for luxurious accommodations? That does not seem to be in line with what GOD cares about considering the theme of scripture from Genesis to Revelation.
        I think about these preachers and their fancy lifestyles – it’s so contrary to the example of Jesus.
        Yes words are being preached but is the gospel reaching the people?

      2. Sure would hate to witness about Jesus Christ to the person sitting next to you on a commercial jet.!! God would never orchestrate that would He?

  2. How come it’s ok for the Jeffrey Epsteins of the world to own a jet but not a minister? I agree that there is indeed alot of corruption, glitz, glamour, and thievery in the “church” but just because someone has a jet is not fact enough to convict of wrongdoing. No one was richer than king Solomon..yet he prayed for wisdom.May I suggest you seej wisdom as well before posting articles that are geared at supposition. Our job is to lead people to Christ alone. Thankyou.

    1. It was not OK for Jeffrey Epstein to have a private jet. Almost nothing Jeffrey Epstein did was OK. But, what does that have to do with whether it’s right for a pastor they have a private jet? What’s good for the creepy child rapist is good for the man of God?

    2. I get the point, although I don’t think it’s ok for Epstein to have a jet – given the alleged purposes to which that jet was put to use or how it may have been acquired. A better comparison would be… why don’t we begrudge any number of rich businessmen, celebrities or sports stars their assets? Because they acquired their jets, yachts or whatever by earning them. Not through charitable donations – either explicitly, or implicitly (rerouting funds raised for other reasons, which, with conditions, is legally allowed).

      I see no reason to begrudge a rich businessman his jets… whether he is a Christian minister or otherwise. However, with Christian ministers, such expressions of wealth raise the question of the source of these funds. But that can be quickly dispelled with transparency and accountability – open up the books and demonstrate that such assets have been acquired using revenue generated for services or products rendered. Or, show that the money came from funds raised explicitly for the acquisition and maintenance of the jet(s). In this latter case, it’s now on the people who choose to donate their hard earned money towards someone else’s jet. I just pray that they don’t fall for the manipulative tactics sometimes used to raise such funds, that’s all.

      1. I agree with most of the points you made.
        I can’t think of any situation though where a minister would be justified asking for donations for a jet airplane, and then ongoing funds to pay for the use of the jet and travel costs.
        No one person is that indispensable to the fulfillment of the great commission that it should cost multiple millions of dollars!
        The “flock”is being sold a prosperity gospel in which the concern is not for lost souls but for material blessing to be returned to them. And then that “gospel” being preached is just spreading that false gospel to the ends of the earth.
        I can’t find an angle to look at it from and see anything other than pure evil at work.

        1. Tricia Russell, I don’t disagree. However, at the end of the age, these people are accountable to God, not me or my opinions. This doesn’t mean that I don’t have strong convictions about such things.

          On the flip side, I think the “flock” should wake up and stop funding such purposes. Why is the ‘prosperity gospel’ seductive to so many? The root cause may be in how self-centered or self-serving one’s faith is. When Jesus and the Bible become a means to an end (any end), rather than Jesus being the be all and end all in Himself, that’s where the person becomes open to error and deception. Unless one’s core faith motivations change… there will be no lack of hooks and bait where the fish are biting.

  3. Are there any commercial plane sharing coops that could be used instead of outright ownership?

    If so, those who do not want to be mobbed in airports could still travel with less expense perhaps.

  4. If these ministers made it clear that they were asking people to donate money for their jet(s), then the responsibility is on the people who chose to donate. I’ll withhold my opinion on whether such expenditures are over the top or not, why these ministers need more jets than the average person has cars, or whether such donations and assets should be tax exempt. That said, buying a jet is only the beginning of expenses.

    How much on average does it take to multiple jets – Keith has three. Annual operating costs (pilots, hangar, maintenance, etc.) can be significant. Do these ministers solicit donations for ongoing operating costs? If not, where is that money coming from?

  5. Well, as Rev Ike used to say: “I don’t want my pie in the sky, I want it now”. And now is all they are going to get. As a great minister (Jesus) once said: “Truely they have their reward”.

  6. Your implication that a preacher owning an airplane is fraud exposes your bias. Until the gospel of the kingdom is preached throughout the whole world, preachers will have to travel! Check their preaching schedules and see if they could do their jobs using commercial airlines. When you have 300 plus speaking engagements per year, air travel is a necessity!

    1. Char,

      Of course these preachers can travel via commercial airlines and still keep their preaching schedules, even with a schedule of 300 speaking engagements per year. This mode of travel would not be a deterrent. Are you suggesting that gospel preachers without their own personal jet are incapable of meeting their scheduled speaking engagements, even if such scheduling encompasses 300 different engagements? If “yes”, please provide evidence.

      Also, as long as the world’s population continues to increase (which also means an increase in the world’s various religious faith traditions), tell me, realistically, how ‘the gospel of the kingdom’ will ever truly be preached throughout the whole world? Please explain how this would be possible, since 2,000+ years after Jesus walked, the objective of ‘the gospel of the kingdom’ (still) appears to be a moveable goalpost, as long as the world’s population continues to increase.

    2. “The whole world” in the eyes of the author, to the original audience, and in the original language didn’t mean planet earth. It meant the known Roman world, same as it was used in Luke 2:1 and Colossians‬ ‭1‬:‭5‬-‭6‬. That’s already happened many times over. The money wasted on extravagant planes would be better spent funding local ministries run by native pastors. Not to mention projects to help native people overcome drought, poverty, and disease in their own communities. In the case of Keith Moore, a foolish church in Green Mountain Falls, CO donated money for him to buy the plane. Listen to the opening remarks. https://legacychurch.family/featured-message/

      1. Jesus’ instruction to his followers in Acts 1:8 “remotest part of the earth” does mean planet earth. But that doesn’t mean that it takes multi-million private jets to do that.

    3. I agree. I’m a fairly new subscriber and the bias is obvious. I never look forward to this “report” because the purpose of the “report” is to slam ministry.

    4. I’m suspecting a few things here….
      1. You (like most of us) don’t know what the Gospel really is… what most of these preachers, Especially this type of preacher is preaching is NOT the gospel – so we would all be better off if they Couldn’t preach their gospels…
      2. You (like most of us) don’t really Know these guys and therefore probably don’t know what kind of ego trip this kind of thing is for these kinds of ‘preachers’… I doubt they care about the real Gospel nearly as much as you do or think they do…

      May God have mercy upon them, clip their wings and bring them to repentance before it’s too late…

  7. I mean, it was 70% off, at that kind of discount it’d be stupid NOT to buy it LOL. Just kidding.

    But seriously… I wouldn’t give to a ministry so they could buy a 3rd jet.

    But, you know, they were above board that they wanted to buy a jet or jets, they raised funds to buy them, then they bought them. So I don’t have anything to complain about here either.

  8. 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.

    Keith Moore apparently spent $17.5 million on a Falcon 7X jet. That amount of money would buy 17,500 passenger flight tickets at $1,000 each or 8750 at $2,000 each. And even if Moore flew 250 times a year – a very high amount, he’d have 70 YEARS of $1,000 ticket flights and 35 YEARS of $2,000 flights. Of course there may be an entourage on board but the passenger capacity of this jet is between 12-16. The numbers 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.

    1. I always check the scheduling and the dependability if I fly. And I’ve learned the airlines are diligent in neither. If I traveled enough these days, I wouldn’t depend on commercial airlines.

  9. I did some more research and according to freely-available info online, the Falcon 7X jet Keith Moore 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. So it costs at least $1 million a year in total costs just to have and operater this plane. That amount of money would buy a lot of airline tickets and would be a much better use of donations from Christians.

    Also, a Falcon &x needs a hard-surface runway of 6000 feet or so for take-offs, which means that many smaller airports can’t accommodate it. So if you need to use a major airport, why not fly commercial like everyone else?

  10. I was a pilot for 42 years on private jets, I know what it costs to operate and maintain them. In my thinking there is no way any ministry can justify the cost. Not even Franklin Graham that has a private jet, a Falcon 50. The people that support this do not know or understand scripture. Jesus did not ride around in a gilded chariot, he used the most common form of transportation in his day, walking.

  11. Remember why Kenneth Copeland said he needed a jet? Because he doesn’t “want to get into a tube with a bunch of demons.”

    Also…Creflo Dollar has the most on the nose name for a conman ever. It’s a testament to human gullability that he’s done so well. In the 1800’s he would have been called Creflo Snakeoil.

  12. Then there is Benny Hinn and his private jets. I remember years ago someone did a parody of Hinn with the music to “Benny and the Jets” by Elton John.

  13. A shepherd needs to be with his sheep, and the sheep must know his voice, no? I don’t see how Dollar and Moore can be spending those huge amounts of money and time on those private jets and fulfill the primary mission of a pastor/shepherd.

    And given that both endorse the heresy of prosperity theology, I am at one point happy that they are not fulfilling the Biblical role of pastor. Less people deceived.

  14. Using a private sheep funded jet to freely spread the gospel to the remotest regions on the planet (where airstrips are non existent) could work.

    But alas, using a private sheep funded jet to attend paid for speaking engagements at mega churches preaching to those already converted would not work.

    1. larry,

      But these types of jets require long paved runways. these are not the types of planes that can land at remote, unimproved airstrips with short runways.

      1. Brian Churchill you are very knowledgeable, I do agree.

        The places are so remote the locals would have to clear a long strip of land to create a temporary although bumpy temporary landing strip.

        It would be fun to watch these pastors land there and show us how their jet brought the gospel to the ends of the earth. That’s my wishful thinking anyway.

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