The suburban Atlanta megachurch pastor who lobbied his congregation to buy him a private jet, and then shut down his fundraising Web page in the face of widespread criticism, plans to go ahead and acquire the luxury twin-engine aircraft after all, his spokesman tells
Newsmax TV.
"We're still buying the airplane," Vic Bolton, spokesman for Creflo Dollar Ministries, told "MidPoint" host Ed Berliner on Friday.
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"The ministry that we have is worldwide," Bolton said, explaining his boss's need for a $65 million Gulfstream G650 jet. "It has offices on every continent. We've got people in some churches scattered around the world. We've got 20 something fellowship churches, and a couple of flagship churches here in the U.S. We've got a ministry that has approximately 300 speaking dates a year for our pastors."
Bolton said that various people who work for Dollar and his ministry often fly commercial, but that Dollar himself could not do likewise and still meet the enormous demands of his schedule.
Listed at No. 46 on a Newsmax list of America's top 100 Christian leaders, Dollar is one of the most visible and successful of the so-called "prosperity preachers" who say that accumulating wealth is not in and of itself a sin, and that personal riches can be a sign of God's favor.
But his plea in March for money to buy a jet prompted ridicule and suggestions he was soaking his parishioners to fund a lavish lifestyle.
The "Project G650" Web page was pulled, although a critic of Dollar saved the official fundraising video
to YouTube.
Dollar himself was defiant.
"You cannot stop me from dreaming," he said in a sermon in April, urging his flock to "dream about what the devil says you can't have."
CNN estimated Dollar's annual salary at $27 million. Bolton said on Friday that figure is "inaccurate" and "exaggerated a bit" but declined to clarify.
"I'm not sure how they arrived at the wealth figures," he said of CNN and other news organizations, but he added that, yes, "There is a lot of money changing hands" at Creflo Dollar Ministries.
"There's a lot of money flowing in and out of ministry," he said, "but you have to realize that this church is a megachurch not because of anything special about what it does, but because of the numbers of people who choose to engage.
"There are tens of thousands of people in our churches," he said, "and there are tens more thousands in our fellowship church. We have some 3 million donors around the world who support, contribute, buy books and tapes, and who come to conventions."
"No one has to give their money to the church," said Bolton. "It's a choice."
He said the church uses its considerable income to do good works worldwide.
"We build houses in Brazil," said Bolton. "We dig wells in Africa. We build clinics. We ship people to every place there's a disaster on the earth. It's just the scope and scale of a ministry that large that makes the numbers so large."
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