Posted Jan. 21, 2008 – The Rev. Creflo Dollar, the TV preacher whose Bling Dynasty is being probed by a ranking U.S. Senator, says that he has sold his $280,000 Rolls-Royce and donated the money to his children’s ministry.

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“If you want good news, I sold the Rolls Royce and donated the money to our children’s ministry,” the Atlanta-area minister told ABC’s Nightline TV news magazine. “But I didn’t sell the Rolls Royce to please everybody … because there’s nothing wrong with having a car that members of church bought for me.”

Dollar, along with several other televangelists who preach the gospel of prosperity, said that he has spent his own personal wealth purchasing 100 cars for elderly and single mothers, and that he has bought houses for people. And, regarding his large estate in Atlanta and his $2.4 million apartment in New York, Dollar says that those purchases have nothing to do with the $69 million his church brought in last year. They were bought with the money he earns from his many private business deals, he said.

As for the private jet, he says he needs it, like a carpenter needs a hammer, as a tool to carry out God’s work. And for anyone who thinks being a Christian means you need to pledge to a life of poverty, they need to go back and read the Bible, he says.

I say pick the Bible up and read it for yourself," he told Nightline. "And as you begin to read it, you'll go through the entire Bible and find out that Abraham, the Bible says, was rich. Isaac and Jacob was rich. Joseph was rich. Solomon was one of the richest people in the world. These were all servants of God. Well, why in the world would God allow his son to come and not be at least to the level of those servants?

Not everybody agrees, including the Rev. Dr. Joseph Hough, president of Union Theological Seminary in New York .

This claim that Creflo Dollar makes that Jesus was rich is so ludicrous as to hardly bear examination," he said. “All of the people who followed Jesus were poor people …. Ninety-five percent of the people who lived in the culture that Jesus was part of were very poor people. It is wrong to make people believe that if they follow a certain formula, that God somehow is going to transform their circumstances.

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