In the past decade of so, your GetReligionistas have written a steady stream of posts about how America’s rapidly growing flocks of nondenominational believers have made the vague and complicated world of evangelical/charismatic Christianity even harder for journalists to understand and, thus, cover with some degree of accuracy.
That was complicated, wasn’t it? For more info, surf this massive file of URLs linked to the work of chart-master Ryan Burge and then this recent Memo from religion-beat patriarch Richard Ostling, “Story of the Year: Rise of the ‘Nons’ — put them alongside Nones, NIPs, Nonverts, etc.”
This trend has affected some incredibly important news stories, such as the Jan. 6th riot at the U.S. Capitol and attempts to find justice for victims of clergy sexual abuse.
This brings me to an email that I received the other day from a journalism professor friend that addressed an essential issue in this important NBC News report: “Florida pastor and his son are arrested in alleged $8 million Covid scam.”
This jprof asked this question: “What made him a pastor?” That isn’t an irrelevant question, since this man’s ministerial status is mentioned in the headline and the lede. Here’s the overture:
A Florida pastor and his son were arrested … on charges of fraudulently obtaining more than $8 million in federal Covid relief funds and attempting to use some of the money to buy a luxury home near Walt Disney World.
Evan Edwards, 64, and his son, Josh, 30, were taken into custody five months after an NBC News report raised questions over why they hadn’t been charged in the alleged scam, which federal prosecutors first identified in court papers in December 2020.
No one really knows the number of scams that were linked to the billions and billions of government dollars spent in COVID-19 relief programs. It’s a huge story with untold local, regional, state and national angles. International angles? Don’t go there.
Scams linked to religious ministries deserve coverage, obviously, in part because of the hypocrisy angle that reporters may not attach to similar scandals involving businesses and secular nonprofit groups. That word — “pastor” — is crucial.
Thus, the question: “What made him a pastor?” This leads to other gasic, factual questions that may or may not be included in the work being done by prosecutors.
In other words, what is the name of his church? Who ordained this man? Where did he attend seminary? Was he linked to any recognized networks of parachurch ministries?
This is where the nondenominational ghost lurks in the background. It is highly likely that the accused was “ordained” in a nondenominational church or her simply “ordained” himself, perhaps using an online ordination website. Here’s a warning sign: The “ministry” websites for “ASLAN International Ministry Inc.” are thin, to say the least. Check of the number of followers on this Pinterest page. YouTube? The videos appear to have been lifted directly from an audio Bible-reading program (sample here).
“What made him a pastor?” The answer is that he claimed to be a pastor. In the nondenominational age, that is that. Thus, the NBC News states as a fact that this man is a “pastor,” even though there isn’t a shred of evidence that this word is accurate, in terms of the taint this places on men and women linked to organized denominations and ministries.
The NBC report contains lots of information about the alleged crimes, and that is good. Readers can also follow this case at MinistryWatch.com, an always valuable link.
What do prosecutors know? Read this NBC material carefully:
The case dates to April 2020, when Josh Edwards applied for a $6 million Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan to cover payroll, rent and utilities for his family’s ministry. In the loan application, he claimed that the organization, ASLAN International Ministry, had 486 employees and a monthly payroll of $2.7 million, according to a federal forfeiture complaint.
ASLAN International was ultimately approved for an $8.4 million loan.
But when federal investigators showed up at the ministry’s office in Orlando, the door was locked and workers at the neighboring businesses told them nobody was ever seen inside, the complaint says. A review of the ministry’s website found that the donation links were inactive and sections of text were apparently lifted from other religious sites, according to the complaint. …
Evan and Josh Edwards knew that ASLAN’s actual number of employees and actual monthly payroll expenses were “significantly lower, or entirely nonexistent,” says the indictment prosecutors filed in the Middle District of Florida.
There’s plenty more of that. Things are always going downhill when a story mentions bags of shredded documents and digital devices “stuffed into so-called Faraday bags, which block radio frequencies to keep them from being tracked.”
But back to the very important religion angle, which does not appear to have been important enough for additional research. “What made him a pastor?” Once again, what do we know about this family and its ministry? There is, to be blunt, one sentence: “The Edwards family did missionary work in Turkey for many years before moving to Florida in 2019.”
How to we know that? No idea. Is there some kind of document trail or some link to a nondenominational, legal parachurch organization? No idea. This is just religion, after all. And it really doesn’t help that we are dealing with nondenominational Christianity. Again. There are no facts, it would appear.
Maybe this cloud of confusion is relevant? Maybe readers need to know that we are almost certainly not dealing with a “pastor,” in the same sense that this word applies to the hardworking, honest clergy that they may know?
Just saying.
FIRST IMAGE: Information contained on the Pinterest page for ASLAN International Ministry Inc.
