Sarah Posner, a well known journalist in the US has a piece in Relgions Dispatches about the rapidly growning GodTV which has targeted it’s PR machine toward a younger, less churched and more inclined charismatic demographic around the world. Posner; God TV: Televangelicsm 2.0 God TV was started by South Africans Rory and Wendy Alec in the UK in 1997 and moved the headquarters to the middle East in 2002.

Unlike their forebears at TBN, the Alecs are updated and hip, reflecting the trend in charismatic youth evangelism to be more Avril Lavigne than Aimee Semple McPherson, more Justin Timberlake than Billy Sunday—completely de-sexed, of course. TBN’s Jan Crouch drew her stylistic cues from the big hair, big false eyelashes school of her old friend Tammy Faye Bakker, while Wendy’s hair mimics Jennifer Aniston’s. In a 2005 listing of emerging charismatic evangelical leaders under 40, Charisma’s editor, J. Lee Grady, who has been critical of the financial excesses and abuses of the Word of Faith movement, took a little dig at TBN when he wrote that the Alecs, “produce programs that are hip and sophisticated for younger viewers who can’t stomach most other religious programming. Unless other broadcasters figure out a way to reconnect with younger viewers, it is likely that God TV’s debut in the United States will send channel surfers in the Alecs’ direction.”

They freely admit they are after viewers who can’t stomach most other religious programming.

Recently God TV has been broadcasting live a healing revival of the Canadian evangelist Todd Bentley, from Lakeland, Florida, which Charisma dubbed the “Lakeland Healing Outpouring.” During the revival, which has been ongoing for more than a month, Wendy Alec claimed to have received a prophecy from God that “THIS is just the warm-up party—for what you shall see in the coming days shall even make these days pale—with what I have up my sleeve.” Alec also claimed a few weeks ago that Jesus told her back in 2004 that even though “Satan has been trying to forward the end timeline of the destruction of the entire East Coast of America,” his plans could be thwarted through “enough radical prayer.” She predicted that such a huge revival was coming to the east coast of the United States and that in “less than a decade the East Coast will be called America’s Bible Belt.” She is not, in other words, deterred by pursuit of the impossible.

In fact, it is the impossible that keeps the movement going—after all, one’s quest for purity, in realms spiritual and otherwise, is always an exercise in futility. So there’s always something to do, to pray for, to fast over, to repent for, and to ask for money for. All of that aspiration—and the money funding the revivals that are supposedly needed to win more souls to the chaste life of devotion to a puritanical Christ—provides the fuel that keeps God TV going.

Jersusalem Post

God TV stats:

- 68% of their revenue comes from donations, 19% from advertising (rather circular since ministries are advertisers)
- In 2007 their budget was 20 million pounds, and the 10-15 year goal is 185 million pounds/year.

- GodTV is 3rd in revenue behind TBN and Daystar - they are the fastest growing of the three.

- God TV is beginning to advertise outreach and ‘discipling’ (hospitals, street ministry etc. as a react to current criticism)

- Bentley money solicitation on/for God TV
Source: Business Day, Johannesburg, 9th May 2007

God TV Mission week - February 2008 need 6 million dollars to remain on the air

Prior post: Todd Bentley, Exporting Extremism from Canada