New York religious life has lost one of its most colorful characters this summer. Rev. Ike (Frederick J. Eikerenkoetter II, the son of an African American and a Dutch Indonesian) is dead at 74.
Rev. Ike was born in South Carolina and started his first church there. He moved to Boston and gained some fame as a faith healer and preacher, but it was in Harlem, on 175th & Broadway in Manhattan, that he achieved his greatest fame. He and his congregation, said to have been more than 5,000 at its peak, bought a vacant Loew’s 1930 movie palace and restored it to its gilded, opulent splendor. He called it Christ United Church, or more popularly, the Palace Cathedral.
Early on Rev. Ike lost patience with the more Biblical Christianity of his parents (they were Baptists). He believed in the power of positive thinking even more than Norman Vincent Peale and Robert Schuller. He taught his followers that the true God was ‘God-in-you” who wanted you to become rich. He sneered at the Bible’s warning that the love of money was the root of all evil and taught instead that the lack of money was the root of all evil. He loved money and encouraged his listeners to imagine swimming in it.
He was one of the first megachurch preachers to promise that all gifts to him would be returned to the individual with interest by God. His radio and TV broadcasts went out over 1,700+ stations and his magazine had a circulation of many hundreds of thousands. The church owned a fleet of Cadillacs, Bentleys, and Rolls Royces. He loved it—“My garages runneth over,” he said.
He was too flamboyant even for Pentecostals and they distanced themselves from him. But his ideas now are much more mainstream than they were in the 1960’s. Whether you call it “Word of Faith,” “Prosperity Gospel,” or “Name it and claim it theology,” there are plenty of preachers today telling their audiences to forget about patiently enduring suffering. In their world, materialism is not only not sin, it is the core philosophy. As Ike used to say, “I don’t want my pie in the sky by and by. I want it now, with ice cream on top.” Upon receiving a donation, he would send prayer cloths or other trinkets, assuring donors, “You can’t lose with the stuff I use.” His son Xavier has inherited the franchise.
Ike got big by pandering to the materialistic appetite that lurks in us all. But he was wrong. His message didn’t come from the God we meet in the Bible. Paul wrote to Timothy, “People who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction…Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.”
And you? What do you most want from God?
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Straight talk. Real hope.
