Evangelical Resources

A Visit to Ole Anthony and the Trinity Foundation

3:52 pm | Emergent Church

A couple of friends of mine and I finally got our act together and went down a couple Fridays back to visit Ole Anthony and the Trinity Foundation. Most people know of The Trinity Foundation through its religious satire magazine - The Door - or through the work that they do to expose televangelists. In fact, The Trinity Foundation is the only organization in the world that continuously investigates televangelists and exposes religious hucksters who defraud people in the name of God. Less known about the organization is the work that the Foundation does in ministering to the needs of the homeless and poor that find their way to east Dallas. Part homeless shelter, part soup kitchen, and part house church, people involved in the ministry at The Trinity Foundation selflessly serve on a variety of fronts, operating out of former crack houses that now serve as ministry homes.

A couple of my friends and I tried to leave early to make it for the early morning Bible study at 7:30AM, but we were delayed and arrived after it was over. We spoke at length with one of the folks there named John - the “new guy” who has only been with them eight years.

One of my friends was most interested in the work that was on-going investigating religious charlatans. John recalled a number of stories about how the Trinity Foundation originally got involved in the investigations. Apparently the ministry in the early days reaching out to the homeless began to stumble onto situations where people they were helping were on their last legs when they saw Robert Tilton on television. He told people over the air that for every gift that was given to Tilton, God would repay it one-hundred fold. People on the ropes would give the last of their money - often tens of thousands of dollars - to Robert Tilton. Shortly afterward, penniless and homeless, they found their way to the Trinity Foundation, where the folks ministering at the Trinity Foundation started to see a pattern. As a result, they began investigating various televangelists using all the traditional private investigation techniques, including dumpster diving, where they would find trash bags full of letters sent in to the televangelist that hadn’t even been read. The envelopes were opened only for the money and the rest thrown out.

Obviously, operations like this are religious scams. They abuse people’s religious feelings and manipulate them for money, illegally abusing their non-profit status to shelter money from IRS intervention. Special non-profit entities were originally set up in the tax code so that churches and organizations that provide a tangible benefit to society could put more resources into their work. In the case of Christian ministries and charities, this means that they could apply money to ministries in the most efficient manner possible. When people instead set up religious scams, they are in violation of the spirit of the non-profit clauses of the tax code.

But it isn’t just the hucksters that were abusing non-profit tax status, John said. From his perspective, there were many churches that were given tax exempt status with the understanding that they were going to benefit the community by taking in the poor and homeless. Instead, whenever they’ve had a homeless person, their response was not to take them in but to dump them on the Trinity Foundation. Not that the folks at the Trinity Foundation didn’t like being dumped on - that’s why they were there, after all - but that large and well respected churches in the Dallas area could continue to have such a careless attitude towards the poor and homeless so that they couldn’t be bothered with them was shocking.

Of course the other side of the coin is that many churches are under very strict zoning ordinances, I noted. Churches are all too often restricted from buying homes in residential neighborhoods for meeting, and zoning ordinances also require that no one can take residence in a church building, restricting from the outset the ability of a church to build an environment where Christians can do the kind of ministry that they are called to do. It is a strange world when people want the government out of their own bedrooms, but tell other people that they can’t minister to the homeless in theirs.

The Trinity Foundation has been involved with a number of projects to help the homeless in addition to the work they do directly at the Foundation. One of these projects involved converting an old building a few blocks over in housing - naturally a number of the business people in the area didn’t want the kind of riff-raff that a ministry like that would attract. Eventually, however, they were able to win the right to have the area rezoned and move forward with the ministry. They were able to provide one bedroom sleeping areas for people as they started to get back on their feet, and even managed to provide internet service.

Honestly, I was impressed that they were able to provide internet access, but then John said that the problem is that to someone trying to rebuild their life, a telephone line and mail box is much more valuable than internet. When people apply for jobs, they are typically not contacted by email, but over the phone. Someone who has no credit cannot purchase phone service, and is usually left with giving the number to a pay phone, not knowing when a company will call back, who will be answering the phone, and without any chance of receiving the message. A mailbox is fraught with problems as there are always individuals who sift through all the mail looking for money, checks, or any information that they can exploit, so business letters are very easily lost or destroyed. For someone trying to rebuild their life, having a phone line with a reliable answering service is invaluable because it opens up a world of possibilities to post resumes and schedule interviews.

That’s when it hit me - set up an Asterix service with a phone line in Dallas, and populate the system with three or four digit extensions. Each individual extension and voicemail box can be assigned on an as needed basis to a person looking for work. It wouldn’t be much, of course, but to someone looking for work it could be the difference between having live interviews and a job offer versus continuing to be out of work.

John took us out to meet Ole, and introduced us as some young guys that had come out for the Bible study but had run late, and that we wanted to see the Foundation and meet some folks. Of course Ole asked how we had heard of the Trinity Foundation, and John said “Oh they know Bill and Jackie” - the Alnors, since I know Bill through AR-Talk and the work that he’s been doing with the Spiritual Counterfeits Project. We talked a little bit about the book that was recently self-published about the Trinity Foundation, but I said that I’ve pretty much already drawn my own conclusions about the matter and didn’t want to waste a lot of time talking about it.

While sitting and chatting, Ole directed our attention to several issues of The Door, in particular the issue dedicated entirely to Yaconelli. I was about to ask Ole about the relationship between Yaconelli and Youth Specialties and the Trinity Foundation - but to my surprise he offered it on his own. He had no idea why Youth Specialties decided to give The Door Magazine to the Trinity Foundation! Well, that’s good, so I’m not the only person who was confused by this. Ole chuckled at that, and talked a little bit about the history of Youth Specialties, and how that since Yaconelli died that it had become involved in “that Emerging Church crap.” I told Ole that I appreciated his tact and diplomacy in how he gracefully handles controversial matters in the body of Christ He laughed at that and noted that one thing he has never been accused of is having a tactful and diplomatic demeanor.

Shortly afterwards we took a tour of the Foundation offices, where we were shown cabinet after cabinet full of files built up in various investigations that they have done over the years. Most of the files had very simple but descriptive names: “Tilton ‘98″ or “Benny Hinn”. We saw the archive room filled with tapes and recordings made of the course of many years, and a stock room where many of the Foundations’ tapes were kept. Ole also showed us the production facilities and introduced us to several of the staff and a couple of the interns there.

Overall, I felt very comfortable and very much at home during my visit to the Trinity Foundation. The difference in time perspectives stuck me - having been involved with college ministry for so long, four years seems to me to be a generation and a very long time to be involved with people. But John “the new guy” had only been at the Trinity Foundation for eight years. These folks were living out a model of the early church before I was even alive. Pretty much everyone we talked with shared my assessment of the emerging church too - to George Barna it was a Revolution, but the folks at Trinity Foundation seemed to know that the house church movement had been happening for a very long time before the recent emerging craze was a glimmer in the eyes of an emerging church leader. Basically, there really are some very good things coming out of the emerging church movement, but there are a lot of very silly and even dangerous things there as well, and the balance seems to be tipped more toward the latter than the former. Yet here are people who were living out an incarnational Christianity without the benefit of years of seminary training in missiology - Ole himself was very upfront in trying to be clear that he had no credentials whatsoever. I’m much more inclined to borrow insight and thinking from the mistakes and lessons learned in over thirty years of history at the Trinity Foundation than from people who are my own age trying to figure out a new kind of Christianity on their own. I’d take an Ole Anthony over a Brian McLaren - practical daily humble Christianity over self-promoting stylish Religiosity - any day of the week.

The Trinity Foundation is in East Dallas near Downtown, which is not too far from North Dallas. For us, the biggest problem was dealing with the early morning commute given the traffic heading south into downtown. Most of this could be averted by getting out before the early morning rush hour if I wanted to make it for the 7:30AM bible study, and I could make it back to work at a reasonable time. After I get back from Kansas City and the Cornerstone Festival, I might see about trying to visit the Trinity Foundation on a semi-regular basis.