The Reverend Ike, 74: TV and radio preacher
islanders
better known as the Reverend Ike, who preached the blessings of
material prosperity to a large congregation in New York and to
television and radio audiences nationwide, died Tuesday in Los
Angeles, where he had lived since 2007. He was 74.
His death was confirmed Wednesday by E. Bernard Jordan, a family
spokesman.Reverend Ike had suffered a stroke in 2007 and never fully
recovered, Mr. Jordan said.
“Close your eyes and see green,” Reverend Ike would tell his 5,000
parishioners from a red-carpeted stage at the former Loew’s film
palace on 175th Street in Washington Heights, the headquarters of his
United Church Science of Living Institute. “Money up to your armpits,
a roomful of money and there you are, just tossing around in it like a
swimming pool.”
His exhortation, as quoted by The New York Times in 1972, was a vivid
sampling of Reverend Ike’s philosophy, which he variously called
“Prosperity Now,” “positive self-image psychology” or just plain
“Thinkonomics.”
The philosophy held that St. Paul was wrong; that the root of all evil
is not the love of money, but rather the lack of it. It was a message
that challenged traditional Christian messages about finding salvation
through love and the intercession of the divine. The way to prosper
and be well, Reverend Ike preached, was to forget about pie in the sky
by and by and to look instead within oneself for divine power.
“This is the do-it-yourself church,” he proclaimed. “The only savior
in this philosophy is God in you.”
One person who benefited from this philosophy of self-empowerment was
Reverend Ike himself. Along with Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart and Pat
Robertson, he was one of the first evangelists to grasp the power of
television. At the height of his success, in the 1970s, he reached an
audience estimated at 2.5 million.
In return for spiritual inspiration, he requested cash donations from
his parishioners, from his television and radio audiences, and from
the recipients of his extensive mailings — preferably in paper
currency, not coins. (“Change makes your minister nervous in the
service,” he would tell his congregation.)
He would also, in return, mail his contributors a prayer cloth.
His critics saw the donations as the entire point of his ministry,
calling him a con man misleading his flock. His defenders, while
acknowledging his love of luxury, argued that his church had roots
both in the traditions of African-American evangelism and in the
philosophies of mind over matter.
Whether legitimately or not, the money flooded in, making him a
multimillionaire and enabling him to flaunt the power of his creed
with a show of sumptuous clothes, ostentatious jewelry, luxurious
residences and exotic automobiles. “My garages runneth over,” he said.
Frederick Joseph Eikerenkoetter II was born on June 1, 1935, in
Ridgeland, S.C. His father was a Baptist minister of Dutch-Indonesian
extraction, his mother an elementary school teacher who taught her son
in a one-room schoolhouse. The couple divorced when Frederick was 5.
His calling came to him early, he said. “Even when I was a young
child, the other kids came to me to solve their problems,” he told the
writer Clayton Riley.
At 14 he became assistant pastor for his father’s congregation, the
Bible Way Baptist Church in Ridgeland. After high school, he attended
the American Bible College in Chicago, receiving a bachelor’s degree
in theology in 1956. After two years in the Air Force as a chaplain,
he returned to Ridgeland to found the United Church of Jesus Christ
for All People.
Finding the traditional Christian message constricting, he moved to
Boston in 1964 to found the Miracle Temple and to practice faith-
healing, which “was the big thing at the time,” he told Mr. Riley,
“and I was just about the best in Boston, snatching people out of
wheelchairs and off their crutches, pouring some oil over them while I
commanded them to walk or see or hear.”
Two years later, still dissatisfied, he moved to New York City,
setting up shop in an old Harlem movie theater, the Sunset, on 125th
Street, with a marquee so narrow that it forced him to shorten his
name to “Rev. Ike.” There he tinkered with his act, polishing his
patter, introducing radio broadcasts and taking his show on the road.
He began to refine his message to attract a more striving, stable,
middle-class audience, people who wanted to hear that their hard work
should be rewarded here and now. To this end, in 1969, he paid more
than half a million dollars for the old Loew’s 175th Street movie
theater and made it his headquarters, calling it the Palace Cathedral.
In his book “On Broadway: A Journey Uptown Over Time,” David W.
Dunlap, a reporter for The New York Times, described the former
theater as “Byzantine-Romanesque-Indo-Hindu-Sino-Moorish-Persian-
Eclectic-Rococo-Deco style.”
With the move, the Reverend Ike stretched Christian tenets, founding
the doctrine he named the Science of Living and thereby relocating the
idea of God to the interior of the self, calling it “God in me,” with
the power to bring the believer anything he or she desired in the way
of health, wealth and peace of mind. He became, as he told Mr. Riley,
“the first black man in America to preach positive self-image
psychology to the black masses within a church setting.”
By the mid-1970s, Reverend Ike was touring the country and preaching
over some 1,770 radio stations. Television stations in New York,
Chicago, Atlanta, San Francisco, Los Angeles and other major markets
were telecasting his videotaped sermons. A magazine he founded,
Action!, reached more than a million readers.
In 1962, he married Eula May Dent. They had a son, Xavier F.
Eikerenkoetter, who also became an ordained minister at the United
Church and took over the ministry when his father retired. They both
survive him.
Because of his emphasis on material self-fulfillment, Reverend Ike
alienated many traditional Christian ministers as well as leaders of
the civil rights movement, who believed black churches should further
social reform.
His huge income also provoked suspicion. Detractors accused him of
preying on the poor, and the Internal Revenue Service and Postal
Service investigated his businesses. Though its fortunes have waxed
and waned in the last 20 years, the church continues to operate from
the former Loew’s theater, which maintains tax-exempt status as a
religious property and is occasionally rented to outside promoters to
present concerts.
Reverend Ike could be an electric preacher, whether at the old theater
or on the road appearing before standing-room-only audiences. And he
could make his congregations laugh, drawing on the Bible to drive home
his message about the virtues of material rewards. “If it’s that
difficult for a rich man to get into heaven,” he would often say,
citing Matthew, “think how terrible it must be for a poor man to get
in. He doesn’t even have a bribe for the gatekeeper.”
Loki
<islan...@aol.com> wrote:
>The Rev. Frederick J. Eikerenkoetter II, the flamboyant minister
>better known as the Reverend Ike, who preached the blessings of
>material prosperity to a large congregation in New York and to
>television and radio audiences nationwide, died Tuesday in Los
>Angeles, where he had lived since 2007. He was 74.
He is one of those people I thought died over 20 years ago.
Jed
<islan...@aol.com> wrote:
>The Rev. Frederick J. Eikerenkoetter II, the flamboyant minister
>better known as the Reverend Ike, who preached the blessings of
>material prosperity to a large congregation in New York and to
>television and radio audiences nationwide, died Tuesday in Los
>Angeles, where he had lived since 2007. He was 74.
The inspiration for Richard Pryor's "Daddy Rich" character in the 70s
movie _Car Wash_.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074281/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXaI-xsyYTQ
Magnus
> The Rev. Frederick J. Eikerenkoetter II, the flamboyant minister
> better known as the Reverend Ike, who preached the blessings of
> material prosperity to a large congregation in New York and to
> television and radio audiences nationwide, died Tuesday in Los
> Angeles, where he had lived since 2007. He was 74.
>
He was an American original, to be sure. I used to watch him for
kicks, just as I watched Gene Scott. Ike was a happier man than Scott,
though, and sometimes you were persuaded that he believed in what he
was saying. Of course, if your gospel is success and money pours in
from your TV program, it's easy to believe. It all happened for Rev.
Ike.
Magnus
Radioacti...@hotmail.com
> He was an American original, to be sure. I used to watch him for
> kicks, just as I watched Gene Scott. Ike was a happier man than Scott,
> though, and sometimes you were persuaded that he believed in what he
> was saying. Of course, if your gospel is success and money pours in
> from your TV program, it's easy to believe. It all happened for Rev.
> Ike.
>
> Magnus
Both Ike and W. Eugene Scott were con men, but my hunch there was one
huge difference.
Though he was a crook, Ike I suspect sincerely believed in, if not
honored, G-d.
Whereas Scott was a breed apart, truly sui generis among TV preachers.
This is based on, no exaggeration, HUNDREDS of hours of watching Scott
during the 80s in L.A. on Channel 30 KHOF out of Glendale (one of the
few stations ever that the FCC revoked the license of), so mesemerized
by Scott's idiosyncratic tele-grifting. I even attended his flagship
King's House church a couple times just to see him in person, though I
regret never trying to meet him there. And of course having spent so
many overnights watching Channel 30--which had NOTHING but Scott 24-7--
it means I had literally THOUSANDS of listenings of his endlessly
replayed "I Gotta Know" King's House theme song by that cloying gospel
men's quartet.
To this day I have probably a dozen hours of Scott's nonsense on tape,
that I still watch for laughs once in a while. And after all these
years of studying him--including the late Scott's daughter Melissa
who's trying a more conventional approach in trying to keep her
father's flock together these days on cable TV--my personal theory is
that Gene Scott was in fact an atheist.
(And as an agnostic, I normally consider such non-belief something of
a compliment, but NOT in Scott's case, obviously.)
Existentially,
BRYAN STYBLE/somewhere
Louis Epstein
:>
:> He was an American original, to be sure. I used to watch him for
Father and daughter are viewable on the "University Network" satellite
channel (useful in locating that satellite because it's not scrambled).
She's also at pastormelissascott.com (which advises you that "Pastor
Melissa Scott is a registered trademark name" and claims "PO Box 1"
in Los Angeles 90053 [I assume other LA zip codes have PO Box 1s?]).
: (And as an agnostic, I normally consider such non-belief something of
: a compliment, but NOT in Scott's case, obviously.)
:
: Existentially,
: BRYAN STYBLE/somewhere
-=-=-
The World Trade Center towers MUST rise again,
at least as tall as before...or terror has triumphed.
Brad Ferguson
<ab4bd708-f6b7-4999...@x25g2000prf.googlegroups.com>,
<Radioacti...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> including the late Scott's daughter Melissa
Daughter????
Try "third and final wife."
Loki
>x-no-archive: yes
>
>"Loki" <cubby...@aol.com> wrote in message
>news:n61275dlfuh6963d8...@4ax.com...
> Just one more indication you have been consistently wrong in your
>ideas. ;-)
Yeah, some of us do not keep track of people who have disappeared from
the radar for 30 years.
Of course, some of us have lives.
Loki
Libertarianism "rules" Internet political debate the same
way US Communism "ruled" pamphleteering.
Turban Joe Balasootoe
> On Wed, 29 Jul 2009 18:35:28 -0700 (PDT), islanders
>
> >The Rev. Frederick J. Eikerenkoetter II, the flamboyant minister
> >better known as the Reverend Ike, who preached the blessings of
> >material prosperity to a large congregation in New York and to
> >television and radio audiences nationwide, died Tuesday in Los
> >Angeles, where he had lived since 2007. He was 74.
>
> He is one of those people I thought died over 20 years ago.
Ike was someone who had been famous at one point but
dropped out of the scene and it did seem it was a
long time ago so that we would have expected him
to be closer to 94.
KingDaevid
> The inspiration for Richard Pryor's "Daddy Rich" character in the 70s
> movie _Car Wash_.
>
> http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074281/
>
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXaI-xsyYTQ
...and Dick Gauthier's Dr. Will in the original FUN WITH DICK AND
JANE...
kdm
peace 'n oranges...
islanders
>
> He is one of those people I thought died over 20 years ago.
I would have figured him to be at least 20 years older
Del
"Jed" <zyzygy@plenip�tentiary.com.invalid> wrote in message
news:1q1275hhnlk5kmdak...@4ax.com...
Brian Dennehy was a vanilla version in a Miami Vice episode,
"Amen...Send Money."
Del
Del
"Ike" was a good choice----sounds presidential. Otherwise he
sounds like a Nuremberg trial defendant rather than an
Afro/Indonesian American backwoods Southern preacher.
I didn't know until two weeks ago if he were living or dead,
I just completely forgot about him. Back in the day, listening
to his radio show was mildly entertaining.
Del