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Jimmy Swaggart Ministries is a family business, with 17 relatives on the payroll. Jimmy is paid $86,000 annually. Frances and Donnie reportedly receive more than $50,000 each. In 1985 the Swaggarts borrowed $2 million from the ministry to build three luxurious homes in a wealthy Baton Rouge subdivision. They have use of a $250,000 ministry "retreat" in California and say that such luxury items as twin Lincoln Town Cars and handsomely furnished offices come from donors. Swaggart is a hot-selling gospel singer and pianist, but says he takes no royalties on the records his ministry sells.
Hundreds of miles from Baton Rouge, in Virginia Beach, Va., the PTL scandal prompted a historic event: the first summary of finances ever issued to supporters of CBN, the network headed by Pat Robertson. In a four-page document, the organization listed revenues for the year ending March 31 at $182.8 million. Of the revenues, 74% came from donations and most of the rest from Robertson's for-profit, 36.7 million-household cable-TV network. Robertson refused to release full, audited financial records of his operations to TIME, claiming that he needs financial secrecy to compete with the HBO cable network (owned by Time Inc.). Robertson's board consists of himself, his wife Dede and three close associates.
Robertson reported a 1986 salary of $60,000, which he donated back to CBN, and a $104,000 payment covering 1985-87 as a "consultant" to his commercial network. He gets unspecified book royalties and speaker fees, lives in a handsome CBN-built mansion in Virginia Beach worth an estimated $400,000 or more (though he personally paid $200,000 toward the construction and underwrote the nearby horse stables), and drives a Ford Bronco that the ministry provides.
Alone among the big-time televangelists, Oral Roberts makes not even a token effort at financial openness. Only a handful of people know how donations to the cause are used. But according to an investigation by the daily Tulsa Tribune, revenues in Roberts' evangelical empire have been on a steady downward spiral: from $88 million in 1980 to $55 million in 1986. Roberts has told close friends that he desperately wants to keep open his costly and largely vacant City of Faith Hospital, even though he is shopping for another organization to run it. His son and fellow preacher Richard Roberts said this month that the hospital is breaking even: the facility was said to have lost $11 million in 1986. The Roberts clan claims that monthly ministry revenues have begun to rebound from their $3 million April and May low.
In terms of life-style, Oral Roberts is not in the Bakker class. Nonetheless, he has the use of two houses worth $2.9 million, owns a $553,000 home and appears to get whatever other perks he wants. Roberts told an audience last month that he had raised more than $1 billion in his career and "kept less than one-tenth of 1% of all the money." The Roberts association has a nine-member board, including three family members.
Of all the major televangelists, Robert Schuller has the smallest operation, limited basically to weekly broadcasts from the cavernous Crystal Cathedral. The perpetually upbeat preacher and his staff refused for weeks to cooperate with TIME in disclosing finances, but last week stated that the ministry had 1986 operating revenues of $35 million and expenses of $31 million.