Paul Crouch, faithful servant, joins the Lord in heaven.

"Hello World"

In the mid-1970s, a vision came to Paul Crouch, but it wasn’t what a man of the cloth might have expected. A map of North America appeared on his ceiling, glowing with pencil-thin beams of light that shot in every direction. “Lord,” asked Mr. Crouch, a Pentecostal minister, “what does this mean?”


God, according to Mr. Crouch, had one word for him: “Satellite.”

 Mr. Crouch, who belonged to the Assemblies of God, had been trying to spread the Gospel through a small television station in Tustin, Calif., but the vision changed his business plan. He bought more television stations, then piled on cable channels and eventually satellites until he had built the world’s largest Christian television system — the Trinity Broadcasting Network, or TBN. The controversial pioneer of televangelism, whose broadcast empire was called “one of evangelicalism’s most successful and far-reaching media enterprises” by the Encyclopedia of Evangelicalism, died Nov. 30, said his grandson Brandon Crouch.

 He was 79. Mr. Crouch, who had heart and other ailments, was hospitalized in October when he became ill during a visit to a TBN station in Colleyville, Tex. In early November, the network announced that he had improved enough to return to California. His family did not immediately disclose where he died or the cause of death. TBN was not the first Christian network — televangelist Pat Robertson had launched the Christian Broadcast Network a decade earlier — but TBN surpassed its rivals in scope and ambition, amassing a global audience of millions.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/paul-crouch-dies-at-79-founder-of-the-trinity-broadcasting-network/2013/12/02/68e1856e-5b6d-11e3-a66d-156b463c78aa_story.html