Truth Unveiled | CJ Lester
Jim Bakker died Monday, October 5, 2026. He was 86.
If you read the headlines this week, you'd think his life ended in 1989. Almost every story leads with the same things: the PTL empire, Heritage USA, the scandal, the fraud conviction, the 45-year sentence.
Those things happened, and I'm not going to pretend they didn't. But Jim Bakker lived 37 more years after he walked into prison. And I want to remember him for what he did with them.
The fall
For those too young to remember, here's the short version. In the 1970s and '80s, Jim Bakker and his first wife, Tammy Faye, built one of the biggest Christian television ministries in the world. "The PTL Club" reached millions, and their Heritage USA theme park in South Carolina drew huge crowds.
Then it all came apart. In 1987, Bakker resigned after admitting to a sexual encounter with a church secretary and paying hush money to keep it quiet. The next year he was indicted on fraud and conspiracy charges tied to PTL's finances, including the sale of "lifetime memberships" to a hotel that was never finished. He was sentenced to 45 years in prison and ended up serving about five before being paroled in 1994.
That's where most stories stop. It's where his story really started.
What happened in prison
Bakker's first months behind bars were devastating. He lost his ministry, his money, his reputation, and while he was inside, his marriage.
But something else happened in that cell. Bakker later admitted he had never even read the Bible all the way through before prison. His work assignment was cleaning toilets. And with nothing left to lose, he started reading Scripture, really reading it, for himself.
What he found shook him. He went back to the verses he had used to preach the prosperity gospel, the message that faith brings health and wealth, and realized they didn't say what he'd claimed. As he later put it, he was sickened to discover he had been teaching false doctrine for years without even knowing it.
He searched the Bible from cover to cover looking for one man or woman of God who lived a charmed life. He couldn't find one. John the Baptist went to prison and lost his head. Paul was beaten and jailed. Jesus himself went to the cross. The Bible, Bakker came to believe, isn't a promise of comfort. It's a call to know Christ, including the fellowship of his sufferings (Philippians 3:10).
He also did something that I think says more about his heart than anything else. He wrote down the names of the people he considered his enemies. Then he prayed for them every day.
And here's a detail that hits close to home for us: one of the last places Bakker served his sentence was the federal prison in Jesup, Georgia. He later said that the small church group there taught him a local church matters more than a television ministry.
"I Was Wrong"
In 1996, two years after his release, Bakker published a 647-page memoir. He could have called it anything. He called it I Was Wrong.
In it, he apologized again and again to the people he had hurt through his financial and sexual misconduct. He confessed the arrogance and foolishness of the lavish life he'd lived. And he devoted an entire chapter to tearing down the prosperity gospel he had once built his empire on.
He didn't see a dime from that book. The royalties went to the IRS and his outstanding legal bills.
Think about how rare that is. How many famous preachers have you ever heard say, publicly and in print, "I taught you something false, and I was wrong"?
The years after
Bakker didn't disappear. In 1998, he married Lori Graham, and together they adopted five children. In 2003, he returned to television with The Jim Bakker Show, filmed in southwest Missouri. Even after a stroke in 2020, he kept going.
When his wife Lori announced his death this week, she said he had given 66 years of his life to preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Being honest about the whole story
I'd be doing you a disservice if I only told you the good parts, and this page is about truth.
Bakker's second act wasn't perfect. In 2020, Missouri's attorney general sued him and his ministry over a product called "Silver Solution" that was offered on his show during the early days of COVID. In 2021, they settled. The ministry agreed to pay restitution to customers and to stop selling the product as a treatment for any illness. Bakker did not admit wrongdoing in the settlement, and his attorneys said he stopped offering the product as soon as federal regulators warned him.
Some people will point to that and say he never really changed. I understand why. But I also know this: redemption is not the same as perfection. Every one of us is a sinner saved by grace, still being made new. The same Peter who denied Jesus three times was the Peter who preached at Pentecost.
Why I choose to remember the repentance
"If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." (1 John 1:9)
The world loves a fall. It loves to replay the worst moment of a person's life, over and over, as if nothing that came after counts.
But the gospel is the story of what comes after. It's the prodigal son walking home. It's the thief on the cross. It's a man in a prison cell, cleaning toilets, opening a Bible he'd preached from for decades and finally hearing what it said.
Jim Bakker's fall is a warning to every preacher, every ministry, and every believer about what happens when money and fame replace the Word of God. But his repentance is a testimony too. It shows that it's never too late to say, "I was wrong," and that God still meets people at the bottom.
That's the Jim Bakker I want to remember.
Please keep his wife, Lori, and the whole Bakker family in your prayers this week.
Let's seek the truth together.
— CJ Lester
Sources
- NBC News, "Jim Bakker, whose globe-spanning PTL ministry fell to scandal and fraud, dies at 86" (Oct. 2026)
- Gray News / Live 5 News, "Controversial televangelist Jim Bakker dies at 86" (Oct. 2026)
- Fox News, "Jim Bakker, 'PTL Club' televangelist, dead at 86" (Oct. 2026)
- TMZ, "Televangelist Jim Bakker Dead at 86" (Oct. 2026)
- Christianity Today, "PTL: Bakkers Write Separate Autobiographies" (1996)
- Christianity Today, "Part of the Truth" (review of I Was Wrong, 1996)
- Christianity Today, "The Re-education of Jim Bakker"
- Religion News Service, "After the fall: on the road from sin to redemption" (1996)
- Associated Press, Missouri Silver Solution settlement coverage (June 2021)
Scripture quotations from the ESV.
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