With the fall of PTL Club founders Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker and IRS inquiries into their finances, however, television evangelists have found themselves under public scrutiny. Having won classification as a church in 1982, his ministry, already tax-exempt as a religious organization, is no longer required to file financial reports with the Internal Revenue Service.

Yet Swaggart, whose studio is his pulpit and whose audience is his congregation, is not strictly accountable, as a minister is to his parishioners, for the way he spends money. They have helped forge a new form of worship and push the definition of a church to new frontiers. They have financed foreign missions, purchased radio stations and transmitted Swaggart's message around the globe via television. Here in Baton Rouge, the millions have transformed a cow pasture into the 12-building World Ministry Center and the Jimmy Swaggart Bible College. Swaggart - gospel singer, Pentecostal minister and, by some measures, the most watched television evangelist in the nation - runs a ministry that devours money: $600,000 a day now, $156 million a year, by his account. 72838 in the language of Swaggart's computers. It was mailed in response to a Swaggart plea for money: appeal No. 'Yes, Brother Swaggart, you can count on me to help you meet this critical need,' read the donor reply card, mailed back in April with a $100 check. In 1986, Swaggart officials said, they carried more. In 1985, they contained about $120 million, about 93 percent of the ministry's revenues. This is the mailroom of Jimmy Swaggart's World Ministry Center, where envelopes poured in last year at an average rate of 16,261 a day, 81,305 a week, 4,227,860 a year. Then workers extract the contents, placing them in neat little piles: checks here, cash there, letters and reply cards nearby. Their razor edges slit open envelopes, and tiny suction cups pull them wide apart. The machines work relentlessly in this sterile room.

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