Category: Joyce Meyer

A three-year investigation into financial improprieties at six Christian ministries whose television preaching bankrolled leaders’ lavish lifestyles has concluded with the formation of an independent commission to look into the lack of accountability by tax-exempt religious groups.

The investigation report issued this week details the ministries’ luxury homes and cars, trips on private jets and expensive gifts, including two Rolls Royces that a third party reported was given to the Dollars as a gift from the church.

The first-degree murder trial of Christopher Coleman, accused of strangling his wife and two young sons, has been postponed until next year. The delay came after a flurry of defense motions was filed Friday, most of which concerned the state of Louisiana’s death penalty.

Coleman is the 33-year-old former head of security for Joyce Meyer Ministries in Missouri.

Police documents state that Coleman, who is in the Monroe County Jail without bail, wanted to divorce Sheri Coleman and marry his girlfriend, Tara Lintz, a Florida dog track waitress, was a high school friend of Sheri Coleman’s.

Christopher Coleman was the personal bodyguard for Meyer.

Media-based televangelists benefiting from tax code exemptions are warned — Sen. Chuck Grassley is a terrier-like congressional inquisitor with time and a big stick on his side.

“I am not threatening them, at this point,” the Iowa Republican said.

The St. Louis Dream Center, an arm of the Joyce Meyer Ministries, settled a wrongful death suit Friday with the parents of DeAndre Sherman, one of five children who drowned in 2006 at Castlewood State Park.

Four televangelists, under investigation for the way they raise and spend money, did not turn over financial information by Thursday, the deadline set by the Senate Finance Committee, including one preacher who challenged the committee to subpoena him.

Joyce Meyer Ministries said Wednesday it is fully cooperating with a U.S. senator’s investigation into its finances and is confident the inquiry will show the popular Fenton-based TV evangelist is in “complete compliance” with the law.

ST. LOUIS – The mother of one of the five children who drowned last month during a church outing to an eastern Missouri state park has sued the church and Joyce Meyer Ministries, claiming negligence and inadequate supervision. The wrongful death lawsuit, filed Tuesday in St. Louis Circuit Court, also said the ministries and its St. Louis Dream Center church did not have parents’ permission to take 50 children to Castlewood State Park in St. Louis County on July 9. The suit by Angela Washington, the mother of 16-year-old DeAndre Sherman, also says church officials failed to exercise care in