The Jet and the Widow's Mite

The appeal ran for eleven months. It named four countries the aircraft would serve and showed a map with dotted lines arcing across the Atlantic. It raised $9.4 million, much of it in gifts under one hundred dollars.

Two years of flight logs, assembled from public tracking data and confirmed against fuel invoices, show the aircraft made 214 flights. Eleven left the country. Of those eleven, seven terminated at a resort airfield.

"Every flight is ministry"

Asked about the discrepancy, the ministry's spokesman said that "every flight the pastor takes is ministry, because the pastor is in ministry." Pressed on the resort flights, he said the pastor had preached at a conference there. The conference organizers say the pastor spoke once, in 2023, for forty minutes.

Where the money came from

We reviewed 1,900 donation records shared by three donors who requested and received their giving histories. The median gift was $42. The largest single category of givers, by count, were donors over seventy.

One of them, a widow in her eighties, gave $11,000 over the campaign. She told us she had understood the aircraft would carry medicine. "I would like it back," she said. "But mostly I would like to be told the truth."

The accounting

The aircraft is titled to a holding entity, not the ministry. Depreciation runs through the ministry's books. Insurance is paid by a third company whose registered agent is the ministry's executive pastor.

We publish the invoices, the title record, and the logs. Read them and judge.