“If it’s that difficult for a rich man to get into heaven,” said the U.S. televangelist, quoting the Gospel of Matthew, “think how terrible it must be for a poor man to get in. He doesn’t even have a bribe for the gatekeeper.”
Rev. Ike, who died on July 28 in Los Angeles at the age of 74, was among the first in the 1970s to harness the power of television for evangelizing.
He was fond of saying that his church was for the “do-it-yourself — the only saviour in this philosophy is God in you.”
Rev. Ike was a proponent of the belief that came to be known as “prosperity theology” or “prosperity gospel”. It is a belief that boldly — critics said baldly and wrongly — holds that Christians should feel no guilt over riches. Rather, he argued, they should embrace prosperity as a gift.
A “self-help” element was an important part of Rev. Ike’s ministry, and his church, based in a converted grand 1930s movie house in upper Manhattan, took the name United Church Science of Living Institute.
The requirements of advertising his church from a movie marquee forced Eikerenkoetter to abbreviate his name to “Rev. Ike”.
Born in Ridgeland, S. C., the son of a schoolteacher and a Dutch-Indonesian Baptist minister, Rev. Ike ran afoul of critics, who included fellow African American pastors who said his ministry ignored long-standing social and racial problems.
Others called Rev. Ike a con man who became wealthy at the expense of his followers.
Though he was occasionally investigated by the U.S. government for money matters, Rev. Ike avoided the type of scandals that befell such figures as televangelists Jimmy Swaggert and Jim Bakker.
A stroke in 2007 removed Rev. Ike from the spotlight, though in announcing his death, a family Web site suggested supporters visit YouTube for a video of him preaching.
In one of the videos, apparently some decades old, Rev. Ike exhorts his followers to think positively. “Anything that you can honestly think and feel that you deserve,” he said, “must come to you.”
