Finance ministers: "prosperity gospel" preachers claim to know the Good News--and for a nominal fee, you can have it, too.

WHEN JESUS BEGAN HIS public ministry in Luke 4:18, he announced he had been sent to "preach Good News to the poor." According to a small but growing number of today's televangelists and megachurch pastors, the Good News Jesus came to proclaim is that God means for all of us to be rich--or at least very prosperous.

Advocates of the increasingly popular "prosperity gospel" argue that the faithful have but to ask God for an abundance of spiritual and material blessings, and they will be showered with a bounty of health, wealth, and success in their various endeavors. Of course these blessings will be more abundant for those who place their faith in Jesus and render a healthy tithe to the collection plate.

The Rev. Creflo A. Dollar Jr. has been preaching this "prosperity gospel" for two decades, and if the overflowing congregations and collection plates at his Atlanta-based megachurch are any indication, the message is selling like hotcakes. Begun in a local grade school cafeteria back in 1986, his World Changers Church now boasts a membership roll of over 25,000 and an annual operating budget of more than $80 million. Moreover, Dollar's Changing Your World television show claims to reach a worldwide audience of 1 billion people, and for the past two years the apostle of prosperity has been preaching the gospel of success to sellout crowds at Madison Square Garden, raising $345,000 a month in tithings and donations.

Nor can anyone say that the good reverend doesn't practice the prosperity gospel he preaches. For while Jesus said, "the Son of Man has no place to lay his head," Dollar owns--among other things--a multimillion dollar home in Atlanta, a $2.5 million apartment in Manhattan's tony Time Warner Center, two Rolls Royces, and a private jet. It's easy to see why people would accept his invitation to "Come, follow me."

THE "PROSPERITY GOSPEL" MAY SEEM LIKE GOOD news to a large number of Christians in search of their piece of the American dream, but it is not exactly new news. Religious historians note that back in the 1950s radio and TV evangelists like Oral Roberts (and his Expect a Miracle show) were preaching the prosperity gospel to the same working- and middle-class audiences watching Queen for a Day.

Twenty years later New York's Rev. Ike was sending the gospel of success over the airwaves to 1,500 television and radio stations throughout the land. And a decade later Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker had built an entertainment empire selling the good news of prosperity to folks all over America. Then came the Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart scandals, and all of a sudden prosperous preachers seemed tacky and tasteless.

Still, you can't keep good news down, and in the last several years the Rev. Dollar has been joined by a variety of other apostles of prosperity. Popular evangelists preaching the gospel of God-helps-those-who-help-themselves (and tithe regularly) include the likes of Frederick Price, Joyce Meyer, Benny Hinn, and Joel Osteen, pastor of America's largest megachurch and author of the religious self-help bestseller Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential (Faithwords). And any visit to your local bookstore reveals stacks of tomes preaching the self-help gospel of prosperity and success. America is bullish on the gospel of prosperity, in no small part because the gospel of prosperity baptizes our quest for the American dream of wealth and success.

But is this really the Good News Jesus had in mind?

IN EXODUS AND DEUTERONOMY GOD PROMISED TO deliver the Hebrews from poverty and slavery, leading them into "a land flowing with milk and honey," a land in which there would be no poor in their midst. But, as the prophets reminded the Israelites time and time again, God's blessings and bounty would only be showered on those who showed mercy and compassion to the poor and the outcast. The God of Israel loved and protected the widow, the orphan, and the stranger, and the righteous or holy Hebrew must practice God's liberating and compassionate justice to the poor.

But according to Amos, Isaiah, and Jeremiah, the wealthy and prosperous were often unjust, having accumulated their riches by coveting and stealing the lands and crops of the poor, by cheating the widow and alien in the marketplace, or by driving peasant farmers into crippling debt and slavery. And prosperity itself was regularly described as a spiritual illness, anesthetizing the consciences of the rich, making the wealthy deaf to the cries of the poor.

Indeed, when Jesus reads the scroll from Isaiah in Luke 4:18, the Good News he proclaims for the poor is a liberation from all the injustices imposed by the wealthy and prosperous. In the reign of God all the debts holding the poor in bondage will be forgiven, and anyone hoping to enter that kingdom of God must cancel the debts of the poor and release the bonds of the slave.

Like the prophets, Jesus is suspicious of the attractions and addictions of wealth, and he, too, warns that the hunger for prosperity will deafen our ears to the cries of beggars like Lazarus. According to Jesus the wealthy will find it hard indeed to enter God's reign, and the advice he gives the rich young man still sends chills through our hearts 2,000 years later.

EVANGELISTS PREACHING THE "PROSPERITY gospel" get the Good News half right. The Bible reveals a loving God ready to shower mercy (and milk and honey) upon the poor and eager to liberate them from enslaving debt. But scripture also warns that wealth and prosperity are not signs of salvation in a world where 2 billion of our global neighbors live on less than $2 a day and where 800 million go to bed hungry every night. The Good News Jesus proclaimed to the poor was not a summons to wealth and prosperity but to sharing and compassion.

By PATRICK McCORMICK, professor of Christian ethics at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington.