It has been speculated by Baton Rouge’s real estate community that Swaggart became a real estate magnate in order to keep his ministry afloat, selling what was no longer the focus of the ministry, turned his 12-story dormitory into a 300-room apartment complex and leasing office space to the state and local businesses. He’s built more hospitals and helped more people around the world.” Buying and sellingĪt its peak in the early and mid-1980s, the ministry was bringing in nearly $142 million annually. “I wish people knew the real heart of Jimmy Swaggart. “The ministry has had its problems, but it’s still a great ministry,” Goux says. Despite the dwindling crowd, Swaggart remains a charismatic and powerful speaker, delivering a fire-and-brimstone sermon about the dangers of sin. Where thousands of people regularly attended his services, the number of worshippers was down to a few hundred one recent Sunday morning. That second fall from grace-Swaggart’s son Donnie announced that his father was temporarily stepping down for “a time of healing and counseling”-reduced Swaggart’s ministry to a fraction of its size. He was found in the company of another prostitute after the pair was pulled over by a policeman in Indio, Calif. Three years later, as Swaggart’s ministry started to recover, there was another huge setback. The image of the weeping pastor and his admission-“I have sinned”-became one of the defining moments of the year and was widely rebroadcast, discussed and parodied. 21, 1988, Swaggart made a tearful public confession of sin, one day after it was reported that there were photos of him with a prostitute in an Airline Highway motel room in Metairie. “That was one of the epicenters of Baton Rouge,” developer Mike Wampold says, “and one of the finest parcels of real estate assembled in the state.” And it all fell apart So many people came from out of state to visit his church that a 120-room Quality Suites was built at I-10 and Bluebonnet in part to accommodate them. Swaggart, a Ferriday native whose parents became Pentecostal evangelists and whose first cousins include Jerry Lee Lewis and Mickey Gilley, was not only one of the biggest private employers in Baton Rouge, but also one of the city’s leading tourist draws. His thriving church complex consisted of more than a dozen buildings, including dormitories, television production studios and warehouses to handle the bundles of mail that came into the ministry every day. The centerpiece was a 7,500-seat church, in front of which the flags of 40 nations flew, representing each of the countries where Swaggart’s services were televised.īy 1986, Swaggart was the country’s top-rated televangelist The Jimmy Swaggart Telecast was broadcast by upwards of 200 television stations and watched by two million households. Seven years later, Jimmy Swaggart World Ministries had purchased more than 200 acres of land along Bluebonnet Road stretching from I-10 to Perkins Road. “You could see with the expansion that was planned for Bluebonnet and the expansion of Baton Rouge, that was the place to go,” Goux says. After Goux acquired the land, he went back to his own business. Swaggart told Goux to start negotiations with D.H. That’s what we were looking for,” Swaggart says. We needed land to construct our ministry. “I didn’t think about the potential for this area. But he could see that section was a growing area with plenty of available property. When Swaggart first looked at the land that would become the core of his ministry, Bluebonnet Road was still being built. “But we all looked at the piece of property and prayed about this and decided that was the place where we needed to be.” “There was not a whole lot out on Bluebonnet,” Goux says. Frances Swaggart, Jimmy’s wife, liked a site at I-12 and Airline Highway. Goux, now living in Mandeville, says he checked out sites along interstates 10 and 12. Ronald Goux, who was serving as vice president and chief executive officer of Swaggart’s ministry, was tasked with looking for a new site to replace its Goya Avenue headquarters behind Bon Marché Mall. Jimmy Swaggart was rapidly running out of room for his church, which had settled in Baton Rouge a little more than 10 years earlier. The article was written by Timothy Boone. This article originally was published by on Tues October 9th, 2007.
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