Televangelist D. James Kennedy dies

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Televangelist Rev. D. James Kennedy dies

Posted on Wed, Sep. 05, By ELINOR J. BRECHER, Miami-Herald

The Rev. D. James Kennedy never fully recovered after suffering a heart attack on Dec. 28, 2006.

The Rev. D. James Kennedy, the controversial televangelist who built Fort Lauderdale's Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church into a politically powerful house of prayer on a foundation of Biblical fundamentalism, died Wednesday morning.

He suffered a heart attack on Dec. 28, 2006, and never returned to the pulpit. He gave his last sermon four days earlier on Christmas Eve. Last week, at 76, he retired as the church's senior pastor.

For nearly 50 years, Kennedy led a congregation that grew from 45 in the McNab Elementary School auditorium to an estimated 10,000 at what's now a megachurch at 5555 N. Federal Highway -- the fastest-growing church in America from the late 1960s through much of the 1980s.

With a steeple tall enough to require aircraft warning lights -- 30 stories -- and a world-class, 6,500-pipe organ, the church is the nucleus of a $37 million evangelical empire that includes Westminster Academy, Knox Seminary and Evangelism Explosion International, an outreach program.

Kennedy's Coral Ridge Hour television broadcasts reportedly reached three million viewers in 200 countries. With equal fervor, he preached the Gospel, promoted Bible study, family values and the power of prayer, and decried secular humanism, homosexuality, abortion, global warming and the public schools.

He served on the National Religious Broadcasters board, and was inducted into its Hall of Fame in 2005.

A leader of the schism that created the conservative Presbyterian Church in America in 1973, Kennedy co-founded the Moral Majority, the Coalition on Revival and the Alliance Defense Fund, which brings ''religious liberty'' and ''family preservation'' litigation.

He also served on the national board of the Coalition for Religious Freedom, underwritten by Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church.

Kennedy campaigned tirelessly to tear down the constitutional wall separating church and state. In 2005, Rolling Stone called him ``the godfather of the Dominionists [and] the most influential evangelical you've never heard of. A former Arthur Murray dance instructor, he launched his Florida ministry in 1959, when most evangelicals still followed Billy Graham's gospel of nonpartisan soul-saving.

''Kennedy [preached] that it was time to save America -- not soul by soul but election by election ... [George W.] Bush sought his blessing before running for president ...'' the Rolling Stone piece said.

Kennedy once preached that he and his followers' ''job'' was to ``reclaim America for Christ, whatever the cost. As the vice regents of God, we are to exercise godly dominion and influence over our neighborhoods, our schools, our government, our literature and arts, our sports arenas, our entertainment media, our news media, our scientific endeavors -- in short, over every aspect and institution of human society.''

Coral Ridge Ministries' Center for Christian Statesmanship, which sought to convert to evangelical Christianty elected officials who would then openly proclaim their faith, closed last spring but reopened two weeks later under the Evangelism Explosion umbrella, so that Coral Ridge could return to its core mission of evangelism.

At the time, conservative columnist Cal Thomas called Kennedy 'one of the best educated and most compelling of all the cultural conservatives who sought to use the political process to reverse the `moral slide' in America.''

Fort Lauderdale gay-rights activist Wayne Besen calls him something else: 'a source of great pain for gays and lesbians, distorting our lives on a national level. The whole `ex-gay' movement we see nationally was jump-started by Coral Ridge Ministries ... Kennedy popularized this idea that has caused a lot of suffering for gay people,'' that homosexuality could be ``prayed away.''

He was ''far to the right of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell,'' Besen said. ''He gave a platform to Roy Moore,'' the Alabama judge who lost his job in 2003 for refusing to remove a Ten Commandments monument from courthouse grounds and in a 2002 ruling called homosexuality an ''inherent evil'' that makes gays ''presumptively unfit'' to raise children.

Although Kennedy never directly affiliated with the extremist Christian Reconstructionist movement -- which prescribes the death penalty for ''practicing'' homosexuals -- he was closely allied with several movement leaders, including George Grant, a former Coral Ridge vice president.

The ministry's political-outreach arm, the Center for Reclaiming America, sponsored efforts like the 1998 ''Truth in Love'' campaign that promoted ''ex-gay'' ministries offering to ''cure'' homosexuals.

Grant and movement leaders appeared on The Coral Ridge Hour and at church-sponsored Reclaiming America for Christ conferences.

Born Nov. 3, 1930, in Augusta, Ga., into a family of non-churchgoing Methodists, Kennedy attended the University of Tampa on a music scholarship -- he played the clarinet -- but dropped out after two years to teach at an Arthur Murray dance studio.

There he met his future wife, Anne Lewis, sold her $500 worth of lessons and fell in love.

In a 1980 interview, he told a Miami Herald reporter that by then, he hadn't been to church in a decade. By chance, he heard a preacher on the radio ask: 'Suppose that you were to die tonight and stand before God, and He were to say to you, `Why should I let you into My heaven?' What would you say?''

The question affected Kennedy profoundly, especially after the preacher added that anyone ``was entitled to enter heaven, to enjoy eternal life as a free gift.''

In addition, Lewis had challenged his assertion that it was possible to be a good Christian without attending church.

Not long afterward, Kennedy decided to become a minister. He earned a bachelor of divinity degree from Georgia's Columbia Theological Seminary in 1959 and accepted a job at a new church in Fort Lauderdale.

Wednesday morning, the church's website posted a final statement from Kennedy:

``Now, I know that someday I am going to come to what some people will say is the end of this life. They will probably put me in a box and roll me right down here in front of the church, and some people will gather around, and a few people will cry.

``But I have told them not to do that because I don't want them to cry. I want them to begin the service with the Doxology and end with the Hallelujah chorus, because I am not going to be there, and I am not going to be dead. I will be more alive than I have ever been in my life, and I will be looking down upon you poor people who are still in the land of dying and have not yet joined me in the land of the living.

``And I will be alive forevermore, in greater health and vitality and joy than ever, ever, I or anyone has known before.''