Evangelists

Filmmaker Alexandra Pelosi wanted to humanize evangelical Christians with her new HBO road trip documentary, "Friends of God," and she spent months befriending the movement's leader, Rev. Ted Haggard, roasting marshmallows in his backyard, shooting rifles with him and watching his son's football game. He became the star of the film, the telegenic face she chose to help dispel notions of evangelical Christians as "broken hypocrites."

The other day, Billy Graham toured the showy museum that will soon open here to honor his six decades of bringing God's word to the high and the humble. America's best-known evangelist walked through stage-set re-creations of the barn on his parents' dairy farm; the canvas tent where he held his first blockbuster revival; a graffiti-scarred checkpoint at the Berlin Wall, symbolizing his crusades behind the Iron Curtain.

In the hush of a Sunday morning, believers grieved, struggled and forgave as their pastor, the Rev. Ted Haggard, confessed his sins. "I am a deceiver and a liar," Haggard told 9,000 of his followers in a letter read from the pulpit of New Life Church by one of his spiritual mentors. "There's a part of my life that is so repulsive and dark that I have been warring against it for all of my adult life." Men wiped at their eyes. Women clung to one another.

A federal grand jury Tuesday indicted evangelist Morris Cerullo on three counts of filing false income tax returns by allegedly failing to report more than $550,000 in income. Cerullo, president of San Diego-based Morris Cerullo World Evangelism, is charged with filing false individual returns for 1998, 1999 and 2000. "All who partake in this country's benefits have a responsibility to pay their taxes," U.S. Atty. Carol Lam said. "There are no self-bestowed exemptions."

A state appeals court agreed Monday to review its decision to reverse the sale of Orange County's PBS station, a month after calling the Coast Community College District's decision not to sell KOCE-TV to a Christian broadcaster "the rankest form of favoritism." The 4th District Appellate Court's action might include another hearing, but the justices are more likely to reexamine materials already filed.

The thick mud of a Navajo Reservation back road has gotten the better of Father Cormac Antram's Chevy Blazer. We're stuck 10 miles from the nearest pavement, surrounded by sagebrush and spirits. But we have plenty of company. About 50 Navajos have gathered at a private cemetery in Coyote Canyon, about 25 miles northeast of Gallup, N.M., to bury one of their own. Blanche Charlie was 84, a respected member of the tribe and longtime friend of Antram.

Outside the Eso Won bookstore in Baldwin Hills, women hid under their flowered hats for close to five hours, determined to outlast the heat wave and be first to meet T.D. Jakes. A Pentecostal minister with a 16,000-member church in Dallas and a television program, "Get Ready With T.D. Jakes," that reaches nearly 3 million viewers worldwide, Jakes recently launched a third career as an author. "The Lady, Her Lover and Her Lord" (Putnam) is his 14th book in five years.

After he was ordained in 1950, the Rev. Robert H. Schuller set out to preach the Gospel. Along the way, he revolutionized religious outreach--and created the fourth-longest-running TV show in history. Sunday marks the taping of the 1,500th "Hour of Power" program, an occasion that has the Crystal Cathedral founder looking back with wonder on his 28 years on the air. "No one had any idea back then that it would turn into this," he said in an interview Thursday.

Franklin Graham does not look like a rebel. As he strides across the stage to deliver a guest sermon at the Harvest Christian Fellowship church in Riverside, the 44-year-old Graham calls to mind his father, Billy, America's most admired evangelist. The son has inherited his father's shock of well-disciplined hair, though Franklin's is dark while his father's has turned silver.

They do not like to talk about money from the pulpit, and asking for a raise makes many pastors uncomfortable. But when they leave their offices at night, drive by their neighbors' nicer houses and pull their used cars into their driveways, financial issues can no longer be easily dismissed.