NEWS
He believes all the facts in the antenna incident weren’t told by the media.
The people who work for Jerry Falwell believe that no criticism they deem unfair, no matter where it surfaces, should go unanswered. Understandably, they’re busy.
Last year a pastor in upstate New York read an article about Falwell in the Los Angeles Times. It mentioned that Falwell keeps “barking dogs” behind his walled-off mansion in Lynchburg, Virginia.
Retelling the tale in his own column in the Finger Lakes Times, the pastor changed “barking dogs” to “attack dogs.” Sure enough, a letter from Falwell found its way into the Finger Lakes Times. In it, Falwell wearily explained that he owns no attack dogs.
These days Falwell could wish for as much success answering the criticisms of a paper with a little more punch: the Wall Street Journal. Falwell’s bout with the Journal stems from an incident early last Memorial Day, when someone sneaked up to the top of Tobacco Row Mountain near Lynchburg and cut the guy wires to a 138-foot tower owned by WRVL, Falwell’s Old Time Gospel Hour radio station. The tower and the antenna attached to it crashed to the ground, destroyed.
It was a blow. The Old Time Gospel Hour had gone $350,000 in debt to build the station and its facilities, and losing the air time meant losing revenue from the Christian programmers who bought that time for their own use. Insurance covered the tower and antenna in the amount of $70,000, but Falwell wanted to go back on the air from a more stable tower in a safer spot.
He arranged to use a 500-foot tower on neighboring Johnson Mountain. That tower was owned by a Lynchburg television station that had just built a new $4 million tower. WSET-TV general manager David MacAtee let Falwell use his old tower with the understanding that Falwell not make a big deal about it. The reason was that MacAtee didn’t want to confuse the vandal (who has not been caught) into thinking Falwell would be broadcasting from MacAtee’s new tower, lest that $4 million investment be destroyed as well.
Falwell sent out one of his breathless fund-raising letters. It began: “Sabotage!” and it asked for $100 contributions. In it, Falwell mentioned the $350,000 debt he had incurred to build the station, and he noted the loss of revenue each day it was off the air. He didn’t mention the $70,000 insurance coverage, nor did he mention the cost of buying (as he had hoped to do) the larger tower, respecting MacAtee’s fear of more vandalism.
People who sent back money received a second letter from Falwell, explaining that insurance covered the damages, but not the revenue loss or the money to be spent on the bigger tower. Falwell was able to mention the second tower in his follow-up letter because by this time (June 25), MacAtee had been able to arrange security for his new tower.
On July 6, the Wall Street Journal published an article headlined “Moral Majority Finds a Way to Fill Its Coffers off the Devil’s Sabotage.” The article jabbed Falwell for pulling a fast one by appealing for money although insurance really covered the bill. Then the article quoted an angry radio station president in Georgia who received one of the fund-raising letters. He was quoted as saying, “This proves conclusively what sort of person Jerry Falwell is.”
Only then, near the end, did the article mention that Falwell wanted to plug into a different, safer tower at a higher cost, and also that he wanted to retire the $350,000 construction debt. Nowhere at all did the article mention that Falwell himself explained in the fund-raising letter that he was trying to raise more than merely the replacement cost of the destroyed tower. Finally, the Journal headline erred in saying it was the Moral Majority, and not the Old Time Gospel Hour, which was involved. The first is Falwell’s political organization. The second is his religious broadcasting arm. The two are kept wholly separate. Many reporters fail to make the distinction, and because of this Falwell is frequently misinterpreted in the daily press.
Falwell said he had explained all of the details about the tower to the Journal’s reporter before the article appeared, and Falwell believes it was a deliberate hatchet job, especially after the paper refused to print his letter to the editor explaining his side of the story. Charles Stabler, the Journal’s assistant managing editor, said the paper would correct the headline error, but he said that otherwise the article was accurate and that was why Falwell’s letter would not be published.
Although Falwell may have lost the battle with the Journal, his appeal letter has brought in more than $200,000 so far, which should do a little bit to help heal the wounds.
The singer’s evangelism and publishing ministries will continue, his wife says.
Keith Green, founder, president, and pastor of Last Days Ministries, and popular Christian singer and composer, was killed along with 11 others July 28, when their plane crashed shortly after taking off from the ministry’s runway near Lindale, Texas.
Killed with the 28-year-old Green were his son, Josiah David, 3, daughter Bethany Grace, 2, ministry pilot Don Burmeister, 36, and the eight-member Smalley family.
John Smalley, his wife and six children, stopped at Last Days’ 500-acre community on their way from California to Connecticut, where they were to begin a congregation. The Smalleys had known the Greens in California. Green’s wife, Melody, said of the flight, “It was just going to be a little five-to-ten minute buzz around the property.”
Officials from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), the Federal Aviation Administration, and manufacturers of the plane and the two engines are continuing their investigations. But an NTSB investigator said the plane was overloaded (the 12 passengers were in a seven-seat plane and approximately 230 pounds over the 6,350-pound limit) and unbalanced (excessive weight toward the front of the plane may have caused the fatal nosedive).
The plane left the runway at approximately 7:30 P.M., traveled about a half mile toward a wooded area, cleared the first of the trees and began to lose altitude. The plane struck the trees, rupturing and igniting the plane’s fuel tanks and ripping off the right wing.
The accident leaves Green’s pregnant wife, Melody, and one daughter, Rebekah, 1. Immediately after the accident they were visited by elders from surrounding ministries.
Last Days’ Garden Valley location is in an area often called “God’s Country” because many Christian groups have headquarters there, including David Wilkerson’s Teen Challenge, Youth With a Mission, Calvary Commission, Agape Force, Dallas Holm, Second Chapter of Acts, and Jimmie and Carol Owens.
The next day, Melody said, “the place was swarming with reporters; it was a real madhouse.” Services were held on Saturday, July 31, and messages of condolence were received from Jerry Falwell, born-again Guatemala President Ríos Montt, and others.
Green’s death does not mean the last days for Last Days. Wayne Dillard, one of the ministry’s elders, has assumed the pastorate and will oversee the planned expansion of the ministry. Melody will write and edit the newsletter, and is in the process of editing 12 years of Keith’s diaries for possible publication. Nor are Green’s fans through hearing his music: both Sparrow Records and Last Days have unreleased material in the vaults. Melody does not blame God or the Devil for the accident: “There were physical Circumstances that led to a crash and God is going to take it and use it for his glory. I’ve been reading John 12:24 (‘Unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies it produces many seeds’) and realizing that the messenger is not important; it’s the message.”
For Keith Green—whether he was singing in concert or on his five albums, writing in the newsletter, or pastoring at Last Days—the message was “get right with God.”
He viewed himself as a prophet and an “elbow” in the body of Christ: “Some people are hands; some people are elbows. I’m an elbow. I didn’t choose to be that way. I don’t want to be that way. I’d much rather be the mercy shower than the prophetic voice. But I do it in obedience because that’s what the Lord’s called me to do.”
His was a theological hybrid of Jesus movement millenialism and the holiness teachings of nineteenth-century evangelist Charles Finney. Green spoke out against “churchianity,” Catholicism, counterfeit conversions, sin in the church, adding to and subtracting from God’s Word, complacency and a lack of compassion, gospel preaching which says only that “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life,” worship of tradition, and the selling of Jesus junk and commercialization of Christianity.
His stand against the commercialism of contemporary Christian music was unique and radical. He once told Contemporary Christian Music magazine, “The central reason there are record companies is for corporations to make money. Anybody who honestly believes that a record company is there as a service is grossly mistaken.”
After making two strong-selling albums for Sparrow, Green had his contract suspended so he could put Matthew 10:8 (“Freely you have received, freely give”) into practice. He offered to send his third album to anyone for “whatever you can afford.” The album So You Wanna Go Back to Egypt …, which featured the talents of Ralph Carmichael and Bob Dylan, has been called the “worst selling gospel album” in history. Over 150,000 copies have been sent out, reports Melody, and 25 percent of these have been sent free of charge.
Bill Hearn, vice-president of Sparrow, said Green’s Sparrow albums have sold “over half a million copies. He felt that God was leading him to a different recording ministry, and we said, ‘Hey, who are we to tell you what God is leading you to do?’ ” Hearn also said, “Keith was a very close friend of the Sparrow family as well as the Hearn family, and we helped him set up the distribution of the Egypt album with our lists and distributors.”
Green didn’t charge for his concerts either, and said, “I repent of ever having recorded one single song, and ever having played even one concert if my music and, more importantly, my life has not provoked you in godly jealousy to sell out completely to Jesus!”
Last Days Ministries grew out of the open heart/open home policy of Keith and Melody Green, who were married on Christmas morning, 1973. He had been brought up in Christian Science, she had grown up in a Jewish home, and both had traveled through drugs and various religions and philosophies.
In 1975, says Melody, they “met the Lord while attending the Vineyard Christian Fellowship in Los Angeles,” where they also met the Smalleys and Dylan. “Immediately thereafter, because we had come out of the drug culture and the ‘hippie scene,’ we began bringing home people with similar backgrounds, opening our house to them.”
While supporting their mission of domestic evangelism with their “fairly substantial weekly salaries” earned as writers for CBS Records, the couple was robbed, and harassed by neighbors and disapproving Christians. Their response? “Was there really any other choice? We tried to create an oasis for thirsty souls in a world barren of love … but full of religion.”
In early 1978 they decided to mail out a newsletter to 6,000 friends and brethren, and came up with the name Last Days. By August 1978 their Woodland Hills, California, house ministry had expanded to six houses and 40 people. In September 1979 they moved with a staff of 25 to Garden Valley, Texas.
Today, their computerized mailing list has 250,000 names. A new $1 million press chums out newsletters and tracts which, like the ministry’s albums, are available for “whatever you can afford.” The Last Days Intensive Christian Training School trains staff members and spreaders of the gospel, and a new audio and video cassette ministry offers teaching tapes. A Mexico Outreach is ran in conjunction with Calvary Commission. The follow-up program to Green’s concert-crusades has resulted in 159 Bible studies for new believers. And Melody says they will soon begin mailing out a missions magazine listing various options for Christian service overseas.
Asked to evaluate her life with Keith, Melody said, “I have no regrets. Our life has been so fulfilled. We had common visions, dreams and goals, and the work knit us together as one. I think a lot more people—couples and singles—could be doing a lot more than they are.”
As for Keith, his sentiments are found in the notes to his latest album, Songs for the Shepherd. Under the song, “How Majestic Is Thy Name,” his version of Psalm 8, he wrote, “I can’t wait to meet King David and ask him to sing me his original tune to this psalm.”
