‘He’s Just A Salesman’: Former Morningside Band Director Talks Bakker’s Ministry Tactics
Grace Street in Morningside, where Bakker films tapings of his show. From the Morningside website
Music minister Mark Dowdy worked as the band director for “The Jim Bakker Show” in 2011.
“The Jim Bakker Show” has broadcast from Morningside, a community in the Ozark mountains, since 2003. Morningside contains the studio, living arrangements of various kinds, shops, a chapel and more.
Dowdy, a lifelong musician, began playing instruments when he was 10 years old and has worked in Kentucky and Nashville, Tennessee, for churches and entertainment venues alike. He’s currently the music minister for Northside Church in Paducah, Kentucky.
Mark Dowdy (left) and religious pianist Dino Kartsonakis after a Morningside taping. Photo courtesy of Dowdy
ReligionUnplugged.com spoke to Dowdy about his time working for Bakker at Morningside and what he came to realize about the method of the ministry there.
ReligionUnplugged: You started working with Jim Bakker in 2011. Before then, what was your impression of him both before and after he went to prison?
Mark Dowdy: I mean, everybody's heard of the scandal, and I heard that he had gone to jail. But when this opportunity came up, I did a little research, and I looked at two things. He supposedly was on the straight and narrow, and I was like, “Everybody deserves a second chance.” I hate to be so materialistic — I guess I'll tell on myself — but the money was so good that I was like, “I can't hardly turn this down.” Plus, you know, it's a way to hopefully do the right thing and use my talents for God.
The bass player for the show had been there for a long time, and I found out later that he and his wife had bought one of those condos that they have all around. He said it was a rip-off. They had basically put their life savings in it and were living day-to-day. He and his wife were very involved in the Bakker ministry, but they suffered a lot financially because it wasn't a great investment.
RUP: Is that just because they were so expensive, or why didn't that pan out?
MD: They were pricey. I don't know all the particulars, other than they were almost stuck there. He told me at one time he felt trapped.
RUP: I'm glad you brought that up because I'm always interested in the compound nature of the place. I see the audience, and I always wonder, are these people from the area, or are they people that are living there?
MD: Just like Bakker, who’s getting older and older every day, the average age of these people was between 60 and 80. Some of them lived in other locations, and they had timeshares there, so they would come in and stay there on a mini vacation. Some of them were local, and there were a few regulars in the crowd. Mostly, they were Jim Bakker tourists. A lot of them would come out to Branson and had been former Bakker followers. You would not believe the contributions that some of these audience members made.
RUP: Based on what I've seen on the website, it seems like there's a lot of those condos, duplexes and different housing options. Were they full when you were there, or was it mostly people coming in and out with timeshares?
MD: Some people were full-time, but it was my understanding that there were still quite a few openings.
RUP: In Bakker’s old show, he liked to do a lot of prophecy and healing, but in his new show, he’s made a transition to prophecy and doomsday preaching. Talk about that culture and that kind of preaching as you remember it.
MD: What I'm about to tell you, I didn't see with my own eyeballs as far as money goes, but I went for drinks with the guy in charge of the warehouse, who also had a very thorough knowledge of product sales.
Bakker sold these buckets of freeze-dried food. To promote it, they would pick one of them, and it would be prepared while we were taping a show. It would be served middle of the way through the show so that the people in the audience could see how yummy—according to Bakker—the food was. I guess, you know, if you were starving, it would be better than nothing.
When I came on board, an earthquake and a nuclear reactor was causing problems in Japan.
He said, “If this can happen in Japan, this can happen here.” He would talk about the fault line that we have here in Missouri and how there was a terrible earthquake over 100 years ago. Then he would try to link it back to the Bible, either through using Revelation or the “end of times.”
But he was selling fear. That is exactly how he sells all of his products. There were literally people showing up with trailers — I'm talking about semi-size enclosed trailers — and loading up hundreds, if not thousands of these buckets of food and all this stuff.
RUP: When I look at prophecy the way that it's used on the Jim Bakker show, I get super skeptical, especially because it’s often trying to make sense of Revelation and tie it down to real world events.
MD: Yeah, Revelation is complicated enough, isn't it? Yes, I do believe that there were prophets in that time, and maybe there's been some since then. I don't know. What I do know is Jim Bakker is not a prophet. The only thing prophet about him is he wants to profit.
RUP: People have said to me, “Well, I just don't understand what kind of people would believe that — or what kind of people would fall for that.”
MD: I’ll say this. They had this one room at Morningside full of old ladies, and they answered all of the mail. They were all about Jim Bakker, but they were good people and seemingly wholesome people. A lot of the people in the kitchen were wonderful — the type of people who’d give you the shirt off their back. They were so generous.
In fact, everybody there was generous in one way or the other, except for the people at the top. I mean, they were the ones really making the money. Everybody else was there because they had a good heart and they thought that Bakker was this anointed person — which, you know, that's between him and God, I don't know. But I say Bakker’s all about Bakker — Bakker and the dollar.
RUP: Did you interact with Bakker often while you were working there?
MD: I interacted with both Jim and Lori a couple of times a week.
I think I'd been there maybe two or three months when one of the directors of the show came up to me and said, “Pastor Bakker wants to talk to you. You know, this is really something for him to talk to you one-on-one.” He was trying to build it up like I was about to kiss the Pope or Tony Soprano.
He had pictures around him of all the presidents he’d met — he had been on Air Force One several times. That's a pretty strong statement when you're sitting there at a desk and have all this hardware on the wall behind you. Bakker starts laying it on super thick, basically prophesying about all the great things I was going to do in the future. Doggone it, I mean, this guy thought he was God. The main thing that's wrong with that is he was using it all to sell his product. He's just a salesman, is what he is.
You know that silver solution? They preached that back while I was there and, as you probably heard, actually got in trouble for it when COVID came around. They were selling that same product back then, saying it would cure everything.
RUP: I also had some people say to me, “I'm surprised that Jim Bakker even believed in COVID.” I said, “I mean, a global pandemic that's killing all these people and causing all this destruction kind of fits pretty well into his doomsday worldview.”
The stage of “The Jim Bakker Show.” Photo via the Morningside website, courtesy of Dowdy
MD: Oh, yeah. That is the way that he rakes in the money. In fact, the bigger the natural disaster, the bigger his income is. Which is a shame. I just guarantee you when he and Lori are in their little palace, when nobody else is around and they're watching TV at night and hear there’s been a natural disaster or fixing to be one, they’re high fiving all over the place.
RUP: From what I've seen from recent broadcasts, Bakker has partnered with some smaller organizations that claim that they're in the country where the disasters are happening and providing specific relief. There are some things about it that seem at least like Bakker has some kind of tangible impact, but I’m curious if you had any insight on that side of things.
MD: What I would like to do is go back and look at the people who have come as guests on the show. There's bishops, there's prophets, there's authors that will come in. I do know that he's pretty loyal to people, especially post-prison. He tries to line the pockets of the people that have been loyal to him. I know that for a fact.
RUP: You mentioned Jim and Lori's home earlier. What is that like on the Morningside compound?
MD: I didn’t go inside, but I talked to several that had. While I was there, they had a pool built — or at least they were talking like they were having a pool built because they were bragging about it.
RUP: Bakker is open about the fact that he went to prison. He’s kind of repentant about it publicly. Then you still have this specific way that he's preaching and doing ministry. In your opinion, was there a change in him from pre-prison Jim Bakker to post-prison Jim Bakker?
MD: Based on what I saw with my own eyes, he was up to the same thing, just doing it a different way — from the condos there at Morningside to the product that he sells through fear.
I would sit there on my stool in front of the piano and get so sick of him trying to link these tragedies to the Bible and then using the “end times” theme to up product sales. I know that most of his money comes from the elderly, and that's not right. You know, as you get older, it's easier to scare people because they're beginning to understand they’re not 30 or 40 years old anymore and a little more frail than they used to be.
RUP: Obviously, you ultimately decided to leave. Was there a moment that you remember being your breaking point — where you thought, “I’ve got to get out of here now?”
MD: Yeah. The guy that hired me to be the band director pulled me aside and he said, “I owe it to you to tell you that I'm getting the heck out of here.”
He told me then that he’d hired me as a private contractor when I came on so I wouldn’t be legally connected to the show in case Bakker would do something and be back under investigation. He said, “I'm not telling you to leave, but whatever you do, when they discover that you're a 1099 employee, don’t let them make you a regular hourly paid employee.”
He put the fear of God in me.
RUP: You mentioned earlier that Bakker makes a really good salesman. Whether it’s his biblical ideas or these doomsday products, do you think that he buys what he's selling?
MD: He really is just all about using the fear to sell the products to line his pockets — and keep the TV show going because he's got an ego out of this world. Is he back and doing the same things? Well, yeah. In a way he really is. He's addicted to what he's doing. He's an egomaniac. He's narcissistic, even if he does some good things along the way.
I hope I can say this with a clear conscience even though I worked at his show, and I took the money. I hope he’s taken down. I really do.
Jillian Cheney is a contributing culture writer for Religion Unplugged. She also writes on American Protestantism and evangelical Christianity and was Religion Unplugged’s 2020-21 Poynter-Koch fellow. You can find her on Twitter @_jilliancheney.