Skyway to Heaven

Jay Bakker, the son of former televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, is not the same innocent little pudgy kid whom viewers knew as Jamie Charles. Now twenty-eight, he has piercings in his lip and eyebrow, his arms are sleeved in tattoos, and he plays in a Social Distortion cover band called the Creeps. Bakker is a prodigal son. “Revolution,” the urban ministry he founded, targets skateboarders, hippies, punk rockers, and hardcore kids in Atlanta’s Little Five Points neighborhood.

Growing up, Jay Bakker did not envision becoming a preacher. As a teenager, he drank and drugged while visiting his dad in Rochester, Minnesota’s minimum-security federal prison. Since then, Bakker has turned his life around and kicked drugs and alcohol. After being featured in a 1999 issue of Rolling Stone, he wrote the book Son of a Preacher Man. It recounts how Jay found God after his parents lost the largest television ministry in America, not to mention nearly all of their friends.

Bakker refers to himself as a “grace” preacher. He emphasizes forgiveness, and in particular the “restoration” of ministers—the idea being that a pastor who gets busted for, say, having an affair or embezzling boatloads of money, should be forgiven and allowed to preach again, if he repents. According to Bakker, lack of grace is the biggest reason why many people choose not to go to church.

Bakker believes Christians are too often defined by their outward actions—like attending church and not philandering and not stealing—instead of by the divine gift of grace. “We have a tradition of man’s religion that has no room for grace,” Bakker said. “If we could be saved by a code of morals, God would have just sent us the book.”

One opportunity for restoration especially interests Bakker. Recently, he visited North Central University in Minneapolis, formerly North Central Bible College. This was the school where his parents met in the early 1960s. They left early, because they got married without the school’s permission. After that, of course, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker founded their television program, Praise the Lord, otherwise known as the PTL Club. Even though the Bakkers did not leave on the best of terms, Jim gave money to North Central. He even donated funding for a skyway on campus. But shortly after the PTL Club scandal in 1987, the plaque commemorating Jim Bakker’s charity was taken down.

During his visit, Jay Bakker noticed that the plaque was gone. The next day when he spoke at Eden Prairie Assembly of God, Bakker expressed his desire that it be put back up. “Here’s something my father did out of love and they don’t even keep it up,” Bakker said. “They took the plaque down because, they said, ‘Jim Bakker sinned.’ That sends a message that grace isn’t sufficient for this man.” Vern Kissner, North Central’s plant director, confirmed that the plaque was taken down after the PTL scandal, but he does not know who made the decision. He suggested that the school president at the time, Dr. Don Argue, might know something about it. Argue, who is now the president of Northwest College in Kirkland, Washington, said recently he knows nothing about the disappearance of the plaque.

It’s become a minor cause for Jay Bakker. “Not restoring people is such an anti-Christ message,” he told me. “It just doesn’t make sense.” Apparently, no one at North Central is ready yet for Bakker’s brand of redemption, though they continue to use his father’s skyway.
—Matt Modrich