A court-appointed trustee says he will sell Jim Bakker's former satellite network to Oral Roberts University for $6 million at the end of the month unless he finds a buyer for the entire PTL complex. ``I do have a firm deal with Oral Roberts University. However, in the contract, I expressly reserved the right to sell all the assets until the point of approval of the sale of just the network,'' the trustee, lawyer Dennis Shedd, said Thursday. The 500-acre Heritage USA Christian retreat founded by Bakker in Fort Mill and 1,700 acres of undeveloped PTL land in South Carolina have been for sale along with PTL's broadcasting holdings since April 1988. Shedd filed legal papers in Columbia on Thursday asking U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Thurmond Bishop to approve the sale of just the television production equipment and PTL satellite and cable leases to the Tulsa, Okla.-based university May 31. The Roberts ministry has been plagued by tight finances, especially since donations to television evangelists plummeted following the 1987 scandals of Jimmy Swaggart and Bakker. In September, Oral Roberts, a 72-year-old faith healer, closed his City of Faith hospital and medical school and put his home and other ministry-owned property on the market to repay $25 million in debts. The Tulsa World newspaper quoted Roberts' son Richard as saying God told his father ``in what my dad believes is his last major charge from God, to create a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week global Christian, charismatic healing network.'' Richard Roberts said regents approved the offer this week, and the university made a down payment of $1 million raised from longtime backers. Mark Swadener, chief financial officer for the ministries, told the newspaper he thought the network could provide a vital source of revenue for the university. He called the plan to purchase the network ``an act of faith.'' The ministry also was seeking guaranteed access to the airwaves at a time when secular networks are displacing evangelists on Sunday mornings in favor of news shows and cartoons, the newspaper reported. Bakker was convicted last fall of fraudulently raising $158 million from PTL contributors and is serving a 45-year prison sentence in a federal prison in Minnesota. In Charlotte, N.C., the evangelist who introduced Bakker to church secretary Jessica Hahn pleaded guilty to lying to a federal grand jury about why he set up the meeting, which eventually led to Bakker's downfall. U.S. District Court Judge Robert Potter was expected to sentence John Wesley Fletcher later this month, Fletcher's lawyer said Thursday. The perjury count could carry a sentence of eight to 14 months. Fletcher denied during a September 1987 appearance before the grand jury that he brought Miss Hahn to a hotel to have sex with Bakker. He later testified he had lied. The broadcast network purchased by Roberts is operating with a skeleton staff of about 10 employees. It broadcasts shows produced by other evangelists such as Jerry Falwell, James Robison and Richard Roberts. At the time PTL declared bankruptcy in June 1987, the satellite network was carried on 1,300 cable systems that had 12 million subscribers. According to court papers filed Thursday, that has slipped to 800 systems with 6.4 million subscribers. Even in its weakened condition, the PTL network would be a major plum for Roberts, said Jerry Rose, president of the National Religious Broadcasters Association. ``You're still talking about a major network that has an awful lot of potential,'' Rose said. Besides PTL, there are four other religious satellite networks in the United States: Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network, the Southern Baptist Convention's ACTS network, Paul Crouch's Trinity Network and Jimmy Allen's LIFE TV. Other evangelists such as Roberts buy time on those four networks.
