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Falwell has been relatively forthcoming about his income. He earns $100,000 annually, with unspecified additional income from speaking engagements (he receives about $5,000 an appearance, and makes a dozen or so each year). No other members of his family work in the ministry. Falwell recently received a $1 million advance from Simon & Schuster for his autobiography; the first draft was completed in June. The preacher and his wife Macel are making payments with interest to the ministry on an 1834 dairy farmhouse, purchased in 1980 for $160,000 and given to his church. The televangelist's Thomas Road Baptist Church pays the household utilities, as well as health and life insurance. Falwell drives around Lynchburg in a four-wheel-drive GMC truck and boards a small jet for out-of-town trips.
Like most of the other major televangelists, Falwell is not a member of the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability, a Washington-based group with 376 members. The council was set up in 1979 to enforce a not terribly rigid ethics code for independent Protestant fund raisers; Billy Graham is a member. The group insists that the boards of its ministries cannot have a majority of family members or insiders and that they must release audited financial statements.Falwell left the organization in 1983.He can at least claim to be responsible to a nine-member board of outside businessmen who serve without remuneration. One of them is Texas Wheeler-Dealer Nelson Bunker Hunt, whose family currently faces a $1.4 billion bankruptcy proceeding.
Aside from PTL, few ministries produce more controversy than the television empire of Louisiana's pugnacious Jimmy Swaggart. It was Swaggart who prodded his denomination, the Assemblies of God, into defrocking Bakker. The bayou spellbinder boasts the highest U.S. ratings for a televangelist, and his shows are broadcast by 3,200 stations in 145 countries. Swaggart has lately provided journalists with audited financial statements of his ministry for 1984 and 1985, and this month an unaudited two-page financial report went out to donors, with pie charts showing the ministry's income and outgo. Just how much of the Swaggart financial story is told in the reports is hard to determine.
Swaggart is frank about his powers as head of Jimmy Swaggart Ministries. "The board does not run these organizations," he says. "Legally it has the final say. If it said, 'No, you can't build a Bible college,' I couldn't build one. But you know what I'd do? I'd fire the board, because I'm the spiritual head of this organization. It can't run without me." Swaggart's board is unlikely to rebel. It consists of himself, Wife Frances, Son Donnie, Daughter-in-Law Debbie, Ministry Lawyer William Treeby and four clergy chums. Swaggart says he is accountable to his denomination, the Assemblies of God, and provides it with audited financial rundowns.
The Swaggart organization has been involved in several convoluted legal disputes. Among the charges leveled against Swaggart over the years, the most serious was a 1983 accusation that contributions to a children's aid fund went for other purposes. The operation was undoubtedly sloppy, since money raised went into the general fund, and only after 1984 did the outflow of children's aid match the $21.8 million in donations.