c. 1999 Religion News Service
CLEVELAND _ Imagine sitting in the pew one Sunday morning when an out-of-town minister, claiming to be one of Jesus’ modern-day apostles, suddenly gets up in the pulpit and announces he is the new pastor.
In a lightning stroke, Bishop Matthew Ferguson, who was trying to come up with millions to build a new worship center in St. Louis, shocked members of a landmark Cleveland church that was expecting a $2 million insurance settlement by announcing he would be their new spiritual leader.
He was God’s apostle to Middle America, he told the Pentecostal congregation of lawyers and janitors, of teachers and women on welfare. Ferguson talked of making Full Gospel Evangelistic Center in Cleveland the mother church of a religious empire that would grow to 2.5 million within five years. He told church leaders he would make them millionaires within a year, and free members from their personal debts.
But instead of adulation, the service that Sunday in May broke down to a mass of tears, shock and confusion. Seven months later, more than half of its 300 members have stopped attending the once-thriving church and Ferguson’s church fund-raising efforts are under investigation by Missouri authorities.
If Ferguson hasn’t made millionaires out of his followers, he’s certainly acted like one. Since taking over in Cleveland, he and his wife have purchased a $580,000 home in a tony subdivision and resort property along the fairway of a Jack Nicklaus signature golf course in the Ozarks.
How could an outsider wrest a congregation from a popular home-grown pastor? Ferguson, who repeatedly referred to himself as”God’s man with the plan,”isn’t talking.”Somebody say, `Respond.’ Respond for what? I don’t respond to no devil,”Ferguson told Full Gospel members in a Sept. 5 sermon addressing inquiries from The Plain Dealer of Cleveland.”I tell them to shut up.” But scores of interviews in Cleveland and St. Louis, church records and visits to several services along with taped sermons reveal a tale of human ambition stoked by claims of divine authority meeting the faith of ordinary churchgoers. Ultimately, it became a test of faith.
In the ebb and flow of world religion, Pentecostalism is on the upswing. The combination of emotional worship and emphasis on a personal relationship with God has enabled the faith to grow rapidly in settings from Latin America to Cleveland.
But what has been a substantial source of its power _ an almost unbridled congregational freedom _ also became a source of scandal when human failings were unchecked by any overseeing bodies. What particularly concerns many Pentecostal leaders years after the fall of such national figures as Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart is the popularity of prosperity theology, the idea that faith and earthly riches are inseparable.
Ferguson is a case study in prosperity theology writ large, someone who claims with all the fervor of a new convert to be God’s excellent example of one whose faith has been rewarded in this world.
Not that success came overnight.
In 1977, while Full Gospel was starting out in a storefront, Ferguson was a reservation clerk for Trans World Airlines with a small church in the basement of his home. He would not leave TWA until 1982, when his church was able to support a full-time ministry at Abundant Life Fellowship Church in St. Louis. Ferguson received a master’s degree in education from Washington University in 1976 and a doctorate in theology from a St. Louis Bible college in 1984.
The 56-year-old Ferguson came to Full Gospel in the summer of 1996 as an overseer, someone who traditionally is a source of spiritual help and guidance for the pastor. The Rev. Michael O. Exum, who invited Ferguson, was trying to save his marriage at the same time the church’s financial condition was worsening.
Exum’s personal troubles were such that Ferguson was able to go far beyond the limited authority usually accorded overseers. Exum’s salary and housing allowance were cut, on Ferguson’s recommendation, and Exum eventually left the church.
Appointed by Ferguson to replace Exum was the Rev. William Jordan, a son of the church. Here, after a period of turmoil, was someone members could believe in.
Word began to spread that you needed to arrive early to get a good seat on Sunday morning. A thriving youth ministry attracted some 70 kids on Wednesday nights and Sundays.
But in his own church in St. Louis, Ferguson was having problems raising the money for a new $21 million Abundant Life worship center that he called a prototype for his mother church in Cleveland.
As Ferguson and Abundant Life began gearing up to offer promissory notes to raise money for the project, the financial fortunes of Full Gospel in Cleveland were changing. Full Gospel officials were expecting a $2 million-plus insurance settlement, primarily the result of damage to the roof caused by snow and ice.
In April, according to church minutes, Ferguson appeared before the church elders and board of directors and told them of God’s plan for him to take over as pastor of Full Gospel.”The Lord said, `I sent you as an apostle, there are three I sent to America and you are one of them. … I’m giving you mid-America.'” Ferguson held church leaders to a vow of silence. The congregation would not be told of Ferguson’s plans until the church’s 22nd anniversary in May. Churchgoers responded to the announcement by weeping, wailing and shouting protests.
But Jordan had a surprise of his own. He went to the pulpit and told the congregation that he, too, had gone before God. And God told him to remain as pastor of Full Gospel.
Ferguson announced he would back down, that no church could have two heads. He was going back home to St. Louis.
But then Ferguson heard another voice, this one his wife’s. Vashti Ferguson rushed up to the front of the church and told her husband to get back up to the pulpit. God told you to take over Full Gospel, and you must be obedient to God, she said, according to some members who were at the service.
Faced with an order from his wife, the athletic 6-foot pastor withdrew his resignation and talked about a spirit of”witchcraft”causing all the confusion, according to several people attending that service. He then turned to the church’s elders sitting to his right _ some of whom church minutes show had agreed privately the previous month that he should lead the church _ to confirm his ascension.”It was a coup. I’m telling you it was like a takeover,”said former member Brenda Clack.
Coming from a religious tradition that recognizes God speaks to people today, many Full Gospel members were willing to give the charismatic Ferguson a chance to be their new pastor. Others felt powerless against the self-assured, out-of-town cleric and the church board that supported him.
Ferguson immediately began taking action. He shut down the youth ministry and canceled a citywide youth conference planned at the church last summer. The dance ministry, which met on Mondays, was disbanded. Family prayer Tuesday, Wednesday night Bible study and the Friday night women’s group were canceled. Cherrie O’Neal attended Full Gospel for 18 years but left after one week of Ferguson as pastor.
Prosperity pastors, she said,”get you thinking about being rich, and you end up getting poor.” But there was no effective opposition to Ferguson and Jordan was dismissed.
If members objected to these or other changes, they had scant opportunity to say so. Ferguson canceled the one church business meeting he called.
In the pulpit, the charismatic Ferguson is at once a whirling, animated autocrat who alternately threatens and humiliates members into obedience and a friendly, smooth-talking preacher who schmoozes them with prospects of wealth.”I’m a multimillionaire come to help you get some sense. I ain’t bragging. I’m just telling the truth. I’m a bad boy. When you can start paying cash for your Rolex watch, then you’ve got enough nerve to smirk and cross your eyes at me,”Ferguson said from the pulpit.
In particularly cutting remarks for this economically mixed congregation, the bishop would openly berate people who could not afford to bring laptop computers to church or write him a large check on the spot.”The last two Sundays I went it was so depressing, it would take me a whole week to get over the depression,”said Charlotte Fuller, a 37-year-old mother of two who has attended Full Gospel since she was a teen.”You go to church to be uplifted. When you go to church, he would beat you up.” Sometimes his warnings from the pulpit were ominous.”I’m not threatening anybody, but I’ve seen this happen in ministry and I say this to warn people. I’ve seen it within three years after people start coming against me. I’ve seen it, not just once, not just twice, many, many times within three years _ they either have a stroke, they have some kind of incurable disease or die physically dead.” But life was not getting any easier for Ferguson. By spring, with financing having dried up, construction on the new suburban St. Louis church was at a standstill, said construction manager Oscar Jackson.
Not yet halfway home, weeds sprouted through the steel skeleton of the planned $21 million, 137-acre monument to his ministry. This was to be Ferguson’s Valhalla, a three-building, 130,000-square-foot complex featuring a hotel-like banquet hall, a $650,000 sound system, and a glass and brass grand staircase.
The money problems prompted unusual financing efforts. His attempts to entice investors for the new Abundant Life would be eye-popping, so appealing that one pastor he had solicited viewed them as”heaven on Earth.”Missouri regulators would later question whether they were legal.
In June, he solicited several pastors in St. Louis and Cleveland in letters inviting them to invest in the building project. In the letter, Ferguson offered a range of options, from a return of 12 percent for the first year to 24 percent a year for investments of more than $100,000 made for five years.
Around the same time, Ferguson’s Abundant Life put together a plan in which the church could raise up to $8 million by issuing promissory notes. Investors would be paid interest ranging from 12 percent for one year up to 18 percent annually for five years, documents show.
The robust return is one of the red flags that have prompted an investigation by the Missouri Division of Securities.”Any time you see a higher rate of return, higher than what CDs are paying or something like that, you’re always concerned,”said Mary Hosmer, the division’s assistant commissioner.
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The manager of the religious lending division of B.C. Ziegler and Co., one of the nation’s leading church bond underwriters, said that the Wisconsin-based firm requires its church clients to make weekly payments into a debt retirement fund and to provide prospective investors with collateral, such as a first mortgage.
But the Abundant Life offering had no set schedule of debt repayments and no collateral for investors in the event of default, records show. The high interest rates reflect the risk of the deal, said Ziegler senior vice president Scott Rolfs.”You’re really talking about credit-card type rates,”Rolfs said.
At the same time, Ferguson and his wife became mortgaged to the hilt after a summer spending spree, financing an expensive home in suburban Cleveland and property along the 13th hole of a private golf course in central Missouri’s Ozarks.
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Today, the bishop who had foreseen the beginnings of an evangelistic empire when he took over a second pastorate in Cleveland finds life filled with problems.
Where once more than 300 worshippers crowded the church, about 100 now come to Sunday worship, and 50 or more young people who once came twice a week are down to a handful.
But what happened to the man who was stripped of his ministry at Full Gospel?
Recapturing the early Pentecostal spirit that characterized Full Gospel at its founding as a storefront church in 1977, Jordan and his followers moved out of a YMCA branch last month and into a new church.
On a recent Sunday, some 70 people _ nearly all former Full Gospel members _ filled Kingdom Life Assembly, greeting one another like long-separated relatives with hugs and cries of”Praise the Lord.” Irene Davis, 55, is in her seat 20 minutes early. She is looking ahead, a quiet excitement in her eyes, when across the sanctuary, an old friend from Full Gospel yells a greeting to her. With a big smile, the friend cries out,”We’re still family.” Next to Davis, a woman shouts back in happiness,”We’re still family.” Davis, a smile forming on her lips, also savors the words as she repeats the phrase quietly to herself:”We’re still family.” DEA END BRIGGS
