Edifice Rex: Grubstaking the Gospel

Television preacher Rex Humbard, 51, means business in Akron, Ohio. Last month—despite pending litigation by neighbors—he ordered pile drivers to begin construction of Ohio’s tallest building next door to his posh Cathedral of Tomorrow. The 750-foot structure will serve as a transmitting tower for his new commercial UHF station, and it will house a revolving 250-seat restaurant near its top—to help pay the $3.9 million building costs financed by a Teamsters Union pensionfund loan. Opposition has been sparse; the tower will generate more than $50,000 in local taxes annually.

Profits from the station will be used to help stake the Cathedral’s ministry, the same as profits from other Cathedral-related enterprises, says business manager Ellis Baird. These other enterprises range from girdle manufacturing to publishing, videotape production, and real-estate management.

In June, Humbard’s Cathedral acquired Akron’s huge downtown Cascade Plaza, including the twenty-four-story Akron Center office building and $20,000 annual air-rights payments from two others, for an estimated $10 million from contractor John Galbreath. Galbreath required no cash from Humbard, will stretch the down payment over ten years, and may forgive most of it, says Baird. Meanwhile, Humbard hopes only to keep abreast of the mortgage and says he expects no profits from the deal for at least five years. “Paul made tents for a living,” he explains. “We’re gonna rent buildings.”

Humbard plans to move the Cathedral business offices to the center and also to open a counseling clinic. No contributions to the Cathedral will be used to support any of the business operations, Baird vows. This includes the estimated $80,000 a week pouring in from those who tune Humbard in on more than 350 stations, mostly UHF. Humbard’s TV bills are reportedly about $100,000 a week.

A year ago the Cathedral purchased the nearby Shoppers Fair building for $3.1 million, also financed by the Teamsters. Humbard converted it into television studios, a restaurant, Sunday-school rooms, and offices for an advertising agency he bought. Local taxes yield $43,000 yearly.

Next month, says Humbard, he will open the most modern videotape facility between New York and Hollywood. Producers, directors, and other staffers have already been hired, and negotiations are under way involving several large Midwest firms that may let Humbard produce their TV ads. As a by-product, Humbard’s own TV ministry stands to be enhanced—and subsidized.

Under recent federal laws the Cathedral must pay income taxes on profits derived from its new businesses, and on businesses owned prior to this year beginning in 1976. Baird says the Cathedral will sell the latter as soon as possible. Unity Electronics of New York City has already been sold, and Real Form Girdle company in Brooklyn is up for grabs. Humbard bought these firms in 1965 after paying off the original Teamsters mortgage on the Cathedral.

Humbard’s business associates are holding their corporate breath over one of the latest acquisitions: the Mackinac College campus in upper Michigan (see May 7 issue, page 37). Humbard reportedly plunked down $3 million for the thirty-two-acre island campus, valued at $15 million, and announced plans to open his own college in September, 1972, to replace the Moral Re-Armament school that folded three years ago. Many blamed the isolated site and bleak winters for enrollment decline.

But Humbard says he can turn the liability into an asset. Last month he told the island’s residents he will buy additional land and turn the campus into a ski resort during winter months. Students will spend these months in work-related “cooperative educational programs” in businesses and industries elsewhere. Construction of the ski run has already begun, and ski instructors have been hired. During summers the campus will double as a Bible conference center and family vacation spa. Meanwhile Humbard is scouting for faculty and students.

The 6,000 who attend the Cathedral’s Sunday-morning services have no say in business affairs. The church and business operations are under the supervision of a six-person board; Humbard and his wife Maude Aimee are to of them.

The Cathedral’s ministry budget is $600,000 this year, with the bulk earmarked for mortgage payments and $25,000 designated for missions. The church has thirty paid staffers, half of them ministerial. It operates eighteen Sunday-school buses.

Humbard and brother-in-law Wayne Jones, the Cathedral’s assistant pastor, came to Akron in 1953 as an evangelistic team. They rented theaters and built up a following, then erected the $3.5 million Cathedral in 1958. (They were rescued from bankruptcy by the Teamsters) In lieu of salaries the pair lived on “love offerings” until the board put them on salary two years ago. Humbard gets $25,000 a year (from bond interest not the collection plates) plus housing, autos, and an executive-style expense account. He flies to out-of-town meetings is a private four-engine Viscount prop-jet.

The Humbard road show is largely a family affair: his wife, sister, and two sons all sing; Jones helps with platform chores and announces the offerings. Humbard preached to 8,000 at the recent Canadian National Exposition in Toronto, and this month he was scheduled to preach at Carnegie Hall.

The folksy Arkansas-bred Humbard, a fundamentalist, comes across on TV as a half Bible-belt Baptist, half hillbilly Pentecostal evangelist. He often mixes up verb tenses. His image is sometimes incongruous, as in his latest TV special aired on 344 stations from a beautiful Hawaiian coastal setting. Against an instrumental backdrop of “Beyond the Sunset” Humbard twanged out a recitation to his wife.

“I told my husband I’d live with him in a tent when he asked me to marry him,” Maude Aimee told a reporter when Humbard bought the Akron Center. “He was so poor we couldn’t afford a house. But I said I’d rather live with a man I loved than to live in luxury. Who would have thought it would come to this?”

Man From Miracle Valley

“Compassion Explosion” is what handsome, 31-year-old Don Stewart, successor to revivalist A. A. Allen, calls his current campaign. Some 15,000 people jammed New York’s Madison Square Garden September 11 to shout choruses, clap hands, sing praises and listen to the electric words of the evangelist from Miracle Valley, Arizona.

About half of the audience were black or Puerto Rican. Many had come for the healing sessions, the climax of Stewart’s meetings and a hallmark of the A. A. Allen operation. Allen died last year of acute alcoholism (see July 17, 1970 issue, page 38), and Stewart was “anointed” to take his place.

Located on a 2,400-acre tract about 100 miles southwest of Tucson, Miracle Valley enterprises have a staff of 200, a mailing list of 400,000 supporters, and a yearly budget of $3.5 million. The center includes a dozen major buildings, a two-year Bible college, a publishing plant, a motion picture and television lab, a 2,500-seat church, and the “Pool of Bethesda” healing residence. The organization has licensed about 8,000 independent evangelists.

“The Compassion Explosion may not have broken out in the beautiful temples and churches and synagogues of the outer world yet—but it has broken out in the hearts of you, and in the hearts of thousands of youth in the Jesus Movement,” Stewart told the New York audience.

During the healing service, apparent arthritis victims and drug addicts reportedly were cured. A thousand-voice predominantly black choir presented numbers during the three-hour meeting. It ended with an altar call during which about one-third of the audience streamed forward to receive Christ.

Most of the New York meetings were held in a huge tent set up in the Bronx. Following three weeks there, Stewart was slated to take Compassion Explosion to Dayton, Ohio, and thence to Knoxville, Tennessee.

Stewart, who stands six feet tall and weighs 200 pounds, said that he receives no fixed salary but that occasional offerings for personal expenses average about $50,000 a year.

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