World Changers Church: Know Thy Customer - ' Mixed Blessings '

With two Rolls-Royces, a private plane and the happenstance of his last name, Dollar stirs controversy as his ministry expands.

In addition to being senior pastor, Dollar is CEO of World Changers Ministries, the umbrella organization over the church and three other groups: International Covenant Ministries, a federation of churches that pools ideas on church management; Arrow Records, a for-profit recording company for Christian music; and Creflo Dollar Ministries, an outreach group that promotes conventions and print, video and audio products, as well as Dollar's School of Prosperity.

Critics such as Aaron Spiegel, information-technology director at the Indianapolis Center for Congregations, a consulting group for religious organizations, say media-savvy, technochurch leaders such as Dollar want to use donations to build empires, not spiritual communities.

"The strategy of the megachurches is—and this is not what they say—'Come be a part of our congregation. Get your fill of God on Sunday, and we don't require anything of you other than your body and your money,'" Spiegel says. "I'm not saying there's anything wrong with what megachurches are doing, but other churches are more interested in using technology to build up the existing community."

Dollar doesn't apologize. World Changers thrives, he says, because God wants it to.

Nor does he back away from his "total-life prosperity" teachings that believers are entitled to riches, including the monetary kind. Still, skeptics rankle Dollar.

He occasionally uses a few minutes of a sermon to decry critics. One Sunday in October, he pointedly told the congregation, "Notice you didn't see any cash machines in the lobby. Nobody asked you for your tax returns. All those lies that the devil put out, I condemn those lies right now."

Meanwhile, Dollar's church keeps growing. There's a bookstore, e-commerce sites, TV studio, conferences, events, a private elementary school, fitness center and a second church at Madison Square Garden in New York, where Dollar performs services on Saturday nights, ferried to and fro on the private plane. There are offices in Canada, Australia, South Africa, Nigeria and the United Kingdom, and plans to expand a Spanish-language service he started in June.

By knowing how to market and whom to target, Creflo Dollar has sown some hearty seeds. As he might add, "Heh, heh, heh, hallelujah."

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