THE PTL STORY

Here is a chronology of the start up, financial collapse and pending reorganization of the PTL ministry leading to the resignations of its current leadership on Thursday.

1978: PTL, led by the Rev. Jim Bakker, a charismatic, or Pentecostal, minister in the Assemblies of God denomination, buys 1,100 acres in Fort Mill, S.C., spends $1 million on satellite time and equipment to start up PTL-The Inspirational Network.

1979: Heritage USA, the ministry’s theme park, opens.

1980: Bakker has a sexual encounter with Jessica Hahn, a 21-year-old church secretary from Long Island, N.Y., in a Florida hotel.

1985: Richard Dortch, Bakker’s second-in-command, makes $265,000 arrangement for payments to keep Hahn silent about her encounter with Bakker.

March 19, 1987: Bakker resigns from the ministry as the story breaks about his tryst with Hahn and hush money payments with PTL funds. He turns the $172-million ministry over to rival preacher Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority. Falwell appoints a new board virtually stripped of Pentecostals or charismatics, whose practices include speaking in tongues and laying on of hands, compared with the more austere Baptist fundamentalism of Falwell.

May 6: The Assemblies of God defrocks Bakker and Dortch.

May 27: Falwell, at a board meeting, denies he hoodwinked Bakker into giving up PTL.

June 10: The Bakkers return to Fort Mill, their first visit since January.

June 11: Falwell announces that the U.S. Justice Department, the Internal Revenue Service and the Postal Service have launched criminal investigations of PTL’s previous management.

June 12: PTL files for reorganization and protection from creditors in U.S. Bankruptcy Court, saying it owes 1,400 creditors $72 million. That figure was later revised to more than $60 million.

Aug. 17: A federal court judge impanels a 23-member grand jury in Charlotte, N.C., to investigate PTL.

Sept. 10: Falwell fulfills fund-raising promise and takes a plunge, fully clothed, down PTL’s 52-foot water slide.

Sept. 22: Jessica Hahn appears before the grand jury; advance copies of her interview and topless pictorial in Playboy magazine are released.

Sept. 30: PTL’s management files a reorganization plan that would divide the ministry into nonprofit and profit corporations. Creditors complain it doesn’t pay them back quickly enough and some contributors say it doesn’t fairly compensate them.

Oct. 7: U.S. District Judge Rufus Reynolds rules that a competing reorganization plan drafted by creditors and contributors, which could open the door for Bakker to return, can be filed in one week.

Oct. 8: Falwell’s 10-member board, its executive officers and co-hosts of the PTL Club TV show, resign rather than head a ministry that might allow Bakker back. The board’s last act is to enact a clause giving the Assemblies of God authority to name a new board, subject to Reynolds’ approval.