The Owen Sound Sun Times e-edition

Closer to God in a private jet?

DAVID SHEARMAN

In 2017, Texas-based televangelist Kenneth Copeland told his followers he received a very specific message from the Holy Spirit: The Lord had set aside a luxury Gulfstream V jet for his ministry's use.

Later that year Copeland purchased the jet, in cash, and soon released a celebratory video, along with a request for $2.5 million for upgrades.

“Let's be aggressive in our faith, in our giving and in our harvesting!” he said in an internet post.

Copeland is one of a number of preachers of the prosperity gospel, a belief that faith, positive speech, and donations to religious causes will increase one's material wealth, who insists that jets are essential to their ministry. “If I flew commercial, I'd have to stop 65 per cent of what I'm doing,” Copeland told a journalist in 2019.

Copeland's jet is a top-tier business aircraft with an intercontinental range. The current price tag for a used plane is $8-$10 million.

In the month of May, 2023 alone, Copeland's aircraft was tracked making flights to several destinations in the U.S. as well as a trip to South Africa. Other preachers with similar tastes for flying have been tracked making similar trips by the social media site, Pastor Planes. It is an investigative project of Trinity Foundation in the U.S. Posting to Twitter and Instagram, it intends to bring transparency to churches, ministries and Christian universities in the U.S. who are using privately owned aircraft.

Trinity Foundation was established in 1972 as a religious, charitable and educational non-profit foundation for promoting the public interest in the State of Texas. By the 1990s Trinity had become the leading “watchdog” of religious media, conducting investigations and providing information used to expose fraud and abuses committed in the name of God.

Pastor Planes suggests the use of private jets is poor stewardship and a waste of donor funds. It aroused the ire of Twitter owner Elon Musk, who ordered their account closed for revealing the home address of a person or publishing the real time location of an aircraft. Pastor Planes pointed out that the flight information is publicly available in real time but they only publish their reports on a 24 hour delay basis. Their Twitter account was restored.

Another flight tracker, Yowie bot, discloses how many people could be fed with money spent on jet fuel used during private flights and the amount of carbon dioxide produced by the flights. Both sites call for greater transparency and accountability to their donors.

I can say categorically that I do not own or lease an expensive business jet. I discovered that the United Church of Canada, at one time, owned a Cessna 170B float plane, CF-FBK. It was named the George Pringle after an early missionary on the west coast of B.C. The aircraft was based at Alert Bay, at the northern end of Vancouver Island. The pilot was a minister who flew to isolated settlements.

I once met an Anglican bishop who was a top-tier member of an airline frequent flyer program. Most of his flying was done between his home in northern B.C. and Vancouver, with occasional trips to Toronto and New York. He did say that he was occasionally upgraded to business class, but the only advantages were better meals and more legroom.

I can think of no reason for a preacher to own a corporate jet. It's a model of ministry that is foreign to me.

Kenneth Copeland, who I spoke of earlier, was once asked why he needed his own private luxury jet. “You can't `talk to God' while flying commercial,” he is reported to have said. Invoking his mentor, prosperity gospel preacher Oral Roberts, Copeland said Roberts faced unsolicited requests for prayer whenever he flew on public airlines, “agitating his spirit.”

“You can't manage that today, in this dope-filled world, get in a long tube with a bunch of demons, and it's deadly,” he concluded.

That's curious. I thought prayer and demons were what the work of a preacher was all about. But I could be wrong.

David Shearman is a retired United Church minister in Owen Sound.

OPINION

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2023-05-27T07:00:00.0000000Z

2023-05-27T07:00:00.0000000Z

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