According to a former staffer in a position to know, Gospel for Asia added Frances Chan (Crazy Love), David Mains (Chapel of the Air), and Damian Kyle (Calvary Chapel – Modesto) to their governing board.
The addition of these men makes GFA’s silence all the more troubling. It seems fair to call these men into accountability for the questions which GFA has refused to answer about their financial and other dealings.
These new members join founder and CEO K.P. Yohannan, his son Danny, his wife Gisela, Chuck Zink, Gayle Erwin, Robert Felder and Skip Heitzig as board members.
In May of this year, I posted a video of a Believers’ Church ordination service which appeared to show ministers kissing the ring of Gospel for Asia Founder and CEO K.P. Yohannan. Yohannan has denied allowing anyone to kiss his ring during rituals of the Believers’ Church. The following video makes it clear that those being ordained are doing something in the vicinity of Yohannan’s hand. If they aren’t kissing his ring, I think any observer could be excused for believing they are.
In an over two hour staff mega-meeting held on May 14, 2015, Yohannan again denied that ring kissing has any place in the church. This meeting took place before the video became available but the audio where K.P. offers a full-throated denial of the practice has not been made available before.
Here is the audio followed by the transcript.
David Carroll: There is one question that I think is on many of your minds and has been I think batted around a bit among us and that is, it’s asked a lot of ways but I’ll just ask it from this question plainly: Has ring kissing ever been a part of the Believers’ Church clergy ordination ceremony? Or I’ll just add: or any, is ring kissing is it required anywhere or is it still part of any of those things? Has it ever happened and if it has, if it used to be something that we did in some ceremony, are we still doing that? Kissing the ring?
K.P. Yohannan: What’s wrong with you? (Laughter) I kill you! (more laughter) Danny, I asked you, what is the meaning of kissing the ring? I thought about finding out what it actually means and obviously there’s submission to you or whatever. Now, if somebody said, ‘I saw somebody kissing the ring of our bishop or my ring, I would not tell that person, you are a liar. But if somebody asks me in your conscience and knowledge, you had taught or asked or has anybody kissed your ring, I would say as God almighty is my witness, it never happened, I never allowed it.
As a matter of fact, the most common, when this rumor started spreading, some Calvary Chapel pastors supposed to go to India and met some disgruntled person who left our ministry and started telling, you know, they’re teaching about kissing the ring. I remember that story came to me and immediately I contacted the field and said, ‘please, you know, we don’t want to be seen as belonging to some other church teaching, please don’t do it, if there is any like that.’ They said, ‘no, we never teach or practice that.’ But then I started wondering why somebody think this. So my thinking is you know the most common thing in China, India, all these countries when you see elders, especially spiritual leaders, what they do basically is they touch the feet, you can see that. And then I basically walk away from that. It has nothing to do with Christianity. It’s just culture. But then what the answer is, no, we don’t practice that, we don’t teach that, we teach against it so that we don’t get labeled by some other denomination but even today when you go to the mission field (unclear), what happens is when you meet the Metropolitan or the bishops and what they do is basically and they start doing this, they take the hand and do like that, and it’s not typically everywhere be like that, in most places, the actually touch the feet and express their honor, their respect.
When people are ordained, this the standard thing and by the way, let me say this to you. I fortunately, unfortunately, I like or not, I’m two human beings. I’m brother K.P., hi, K.P., yo, dude, all that here, people call me by all kinds of strange names. But you know when I bought the flight and land overseas, many have seen me a million times, I don’t look like this, I have a cassock, and I’m the Metropolitan of the church and the spiritual father of 2.7 million baptized believers right now. And when you ordain people you whether I like it or not I just submit to the church; that is, there’s a chair, the Bishop’s Chair, that I sit on. If it’s not me then it’s Bishop _______ or Bishop ____________ and then people are ordained they come and they kneel to get the blessing, and they’re anointed by oil and make the sign of the Cross, and I tell them in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit now you are ordained minister of the church and that is done, that always be done. There’s not going to be any change in that; all cultures do that, I don’t know how it is done here, but they don’t fall prostrate before anyone or anything like that.
There is an odd near admission at the beginning (“I wouldn’t tell that person, you are a liar”), but then he clearly denies it and provides a narrative that makes the idea seem very far from the church. Given his description of the ordination at the end, I wonder why he didn’t explain what the newly minted minister was doing with Yohannan’s hand. In any case, no explanation has been given for the video.
It is hard for me to imagine how staff at GFA can watch the video in light of this denial. Clearly, some explanation is needed for this.
Doing some reputation managing of their own, Reputation Management Consults and/or Gospel for Asia requested that my post on their partnership be removed by Patheos due to a claim that I violated their copyright by using images from reports given to GFA. The request came in such a manner that it is not clear exactly who issued the take down notice, but I believe it was RMC. I have posted many GFA images without problem so I suspect RMC was behind it.
Patheos took the post down while I reviewed the complaint, along with Patheos management. We agreed that the images were fair use but have decided not to press the matter at this time. Instead, readers can review the post reposted below. It is important to note that the facts were not contested. Apparently, the images provided more information than these groups wanted out.
…………………………
(original 8/31/15 post)
In June 2014, a group of former Gospel for Asia staff members sent a letter to GFA’s board alleging a pattern of unbiblical practices involving top leaders, including founder and CEO K.P. Yohannan. Over time, more staff left GFA and joined the GFA Diaspora group (over 100 now).
As the Diaspora group grew, GFA leaders developed several responses. One strategy was an attempt to disseminate positive information about GFA throughout social media. Another was to hire a company to manipulate Google search results by creating many redundant websites with positive information about GFA. To do this, GFA hired Reputation Management Consultants to create the websites. According to an internal document (see below) the fee set aside for this effort was $70,000 (go to the last line item).
According to former staff, the “Reputation mgmt” line item of $70k was required to pay Reputation Management Consultants for seven months. RMC describes itself as follows:
RMC has innovated new strategies and techniques that repair existing damages, clear your reputation, and safeguards against new attacks, all while doubling as an effective online PR campaign.
Links to the February and March reports to GFA from RMC are here and at the end of the article. It appears that RMC created a bunch of websites with positive stories about GFA to influence the results of Google searches.
The goal of the campaign was to “push down” negative information so that it appears “after position 30 in major search engines.”
In addition to an “aggressive linking campaign,” RMC created 18 new websites to promote GFA.
Most of these links go to websites with very little activity beginning in November or December of 2014 and ending in April of this year.
It is possible that the campaign ended early with less than $70 being spent. According to the reports below, RMC planned to take the campaign into April.
As an aside, if anyone reading this wants to give me $70k to create websites and buy domains, I am ready to go. I suspect anyone who has opened accounts or run a blog is amazed that so much money was paid for free social media accounts and sparsely populating a few blogs.
Given the austerity encouraged by GFA’s CEO K.P. Yohannan, it is surprising to see him use donor money to push down negative articles about himself. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised; GFA and Believers’ Church in India are suing Google and Facebook in India over what they claim is false information disseminated on those sites.
If pushing down negatives is what GFA is about, then they need to rehire RMC. This article about K.P. Yohannan’s ring is in the top ten on Google.
In his book Touching Godliness, K.P. Yohannan wrote:
Those in authority should never fight for themselves. We need to simply leave it to the Lord to defend us. He will do a much better job in His time and His way than we ever could. In fact, when a leader fights to establish his authority, he actually loses his ability to lead. (p. 189).
Recently, I posted audio of Gospel for Asia founder and CEO K.P. Yohannan promising staff that GFA would not take out a loan in order to build the new Wills Point, TX headquarters and living compound. Eventually, Believers’ Church in India (K.P. Yohannan was managing trustee at the time and he is also the Metropolitan Bishop and spiritual leader of the church) gave GFA in the U.S. $19.8 million toward the project. The church had to borrow money to make this donation. Furthermore, I asserted that an $11.5 million loan was taken in 2014 with the money used for the project.
Today, I post evidence for the 2014 loan. Below are images from the 46 page Deed of Trust.
GFA borrowed $11.5 million.
GFA May Have Kept Some Information Back
The agreement was based on the use of Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) and pledges that all material statements are correct. This pledge may be in conflict with the audited financial statement for 2013 which failed to disclose that GFA made related party transactions to Believers’ Church, Love India Ministry and Last Hour Ministry.
Furthermore, the bank (City Bank) was not informed that $19.8 million toward the building project came from a loan taken in India by a related party (Believers’ Church). Speaking as a non-accountant, this seems to be a significant and material omission. City Bank did not know that an entity related to GFA had taken a loan in order to provide GFA with funds. If City Bank took the audit at face value, they would have considered that $19.8 million to be a gift with no relationship to GFA anywhere in the world. City Bank might have reconsidered if they knew that an affiliate of GFA (and recipient of millions in U.S. donations) had to take a loan in order to keep the construction project going. The Bland Garvey 12/31/13 audit was completed in June 2014 and the Deed of Trust signed in July 2014. It is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine City Bank, an FDIC-regulated institution, making a $11.5 million loan in July 2014 without relying on the Bland Garvey audit report on the 12/31/13 GFA financial statements. That audit report included the misinformation on the source and nature of the $19.8 million previously raised and spent on the project.
In May and June, I wrote posts about cash smuggling on the part of staff and students affiliated with Gospel for Asia (link, link, link, link, link). GFA leaders gave individual travelers envelopes of cash containing $4500 which was to be carried in personal belongings and then given to Believers’ Church headquarters in India. Since the travelers traveled in groups, the total amount of unreported cash was often over the $10,000 allowed by law. Travelers may take any amount of cash out of the country but any amount over $10k must be reported to Customs and Border Protection. Breaking up the total amount into smaller portions carried by individual travelers in a group to avoid detection (sometimes called “smurfing“) is illegal and can result in seizure of the cash and sometimes criminal charges.
After my reports on the practice, GFA leaders said they stopped sending cash to India via student groups, telling staff they were told by their auditor (Bland Garvey) that the practice was legal. Bland Garvey referred me to their attorney who refused to confirm or deny GFA’s claim. Inexplicably, GFA has remained publicly silent about the reasons for cash smuggling or how the donations were used.
In the mean time, U.S. Custom and Border Protection has aggressively enforced laws on cash smuggling. On the U.S. CBP website, numerous press releases detail enforcement actions related to cash smuggling. For instance just yesterday, USCBP reported the following activity:
LAREDO, Texas – U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers and agents at the Laredo Port of Entry seized $266,000 in unreported currency in an outbound enforcement action this weekend at the Gateway to the Americas Bridge.
“Our outbound team maintained their vigilance, utilized their keen inspection skills and seized a significant load of unreported currency,” said Port Director Joseph Misenhelter, Laredo Port of Entry. “Seizures of unreported currency like this one remove the profit potential from possible illicit activity and help advance our border security mission.”
From the U.S. Customs and Border Protection website
The interception occurred on Saturday, Sept. 12 while CBP officers and Border Patrol agents conducting outbound (southbound) inspections at the international bridge referred a 2007 Chevy Equinox driven by a 22-year-old U.S. citizen from Dallas, Texas for a secondary inspection. CBP officers conducted an intensive secondary examination of the vehicle and discovered packages within the vehicle that contained $266,000 in unreported currency.
CBP officers seized the currency and the Chevy Equinox. The driver was turned over by CBP officers to Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) special agents for further investigation.
Individuals are permitted to carry any amount of currency or monetary instruments into or out of the U.S., however, if the quantity is more than $10,000, they will need to report it to CBP. “Money” means monetary instruments and includes U.S. or foreign coins currently in circulation, currency, travelers’ checks in any form, money orders, and negotiable instruments or investment securities in bearer form. Failure to declare may result in seizure of the currency and/or arrest.
CBP seized $50,510 in unreported U.S. dollars and Chinese yuan from a family that arrived Saturday from China after the family reported possessing $3,000.
CBP seizes $650,117 in undeclared or illicit currency every day. There is no limit to how much currency travelers may bring to, or take from the U.S. However, federal law requires travelers to complete financial reporting forms for any amount that exceeds $10,000 in U.S. dollars or equivalent foreign currency.
Since I last reported on cash smuggling, CBP has reported several other actions relating to smuggling (list, list, list, list, list, list, list, list, list, list, list, list, list, list, and smurfing (list, list, list, list). In GFA’s situation, some groups carried over $100k in cash without reporting the cash to U.S. Customs or Indian Customs.
