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Depending on whom you talk to, the Greater Ministries International Church (GMIC) is either the biggest religious Ponzi scheme since the Foundation for New Era Philanthropy scandal or God's greatest gift to Christian missions in decades.

Organizationally, GMIC offices are in Tampa, Florida, where services are held several times each week, but the ministry is incorporated in the Cayman Islands. Staff members give varying answers as to its inception, ranging from 1968 to 1988. It claims to have several hundred "affiliate" churches but is not a denomination. Its founders share many of the ideas of the "common law" and militia movements, and several have prison records. But all insist they are not antigovernment. GMIC appears to handle multimillions of dollars in donations to its "Faith Promise Plan" but operates largely in cash and makes no annual reports or other financial figures available, even to members. As its founder and leader, Gerald Payne, told an Ohio audience last year, "For those who really want a financial statement, I can get you one—we're doing real good!"

Such a response did not satisfy the Pennsylvania Securities Commission, which issued a cease-and-desist order against GMIC in 1995 that it renewed in 1996. In November, state Attorney General Mike Fisher charged in Harrisburg that GMIC is engaged in "fraudulent activity in the name of religion" and obtained an injunction ordering it to stop soliciting new donors in Pennsylvania.

Similar cease-and-desist orders have been issued by authorities in Ohio and California. In late 1997, one of the church's key leaders, Patrick Henry Talbert, was indicted on 15 counts of fraud, racketeering, and grand theft, and has since left the group.

After the Pennsylvania injunction was issued, Payne reacted defiantly. "As long as we pay strict attention to God's holy word how can we go wrong?" he told the Johnstown (Pa.) Tribune-Democrat.

The controversy and litigation swirling around GMIC does not bother Lisa Calkins, a Pentecostal pastor in Confluence, Pennsylvania. "It's been a blessing for us," she told CT.

What kind of blessing? How about monthly payments of as much as $1,000, with which she and her copastor husband, Merle, have purchased a home and visited Ukraine to buy a church building there? "When we got that first $100 back, I was totally shocked, and I figured, what the heck—might as well try again," Lisa Calkins says.

The Calkinses are two among 20,000 to 80,000 (reports vary widely) participants in what GMIC calls its Faith Promise Plan.

The plan's operation is simple: supporters, such as the Calkinses, send a "gift" to GMIC each month, usually in cash. And each month, GMIC returns a sheaf of crisp $50 bills, via Priority Mail, in amounts that ultimately add up to twice the original "gifts."

GMIC insists the plan is a purely religious "gift-in, gift-out" relationship. Securities regulators in California, Pennsylvania, and Ohio call it an unregistered and hence illegal investment program—or worse, a Ponzi scheme, one with potential to rival New Era (CT, Oct. 27, 1997, p. 86), which had $135 million in losses.

GMIC "gifters" are recruited at unadvertised meetings across the country. Many sessions are small, conducted in living rooms. Others draw hundreds. One of the largest occurred in the Expo Center at the Lebanon, Pennsylvania, Fairgrounds on November 21, less than three weeks after the state issued its injunction. The meeting drew nearly 1,000 people.

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January 11 1999, Vol. 43, No. 1