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The site’s Introduction page looked as if it might have been designed to herald a major Hollywood film. A flock of white doves swooped across the screen, and dramatic orchestral music burst from the computer’s speakers, prompting Anthony to lower the volume. Meanwhile, shots of Bishop Prince in action behind the pulpit cascaded across the display, his voice rising above the music like thunder: “The kingdom is not in heaven! The kingdom is here on earth! Will you be worthy? God wants you there right now!”
The intro passed, and took him to the home page. The site appeared incredibly well designed, with striking, fast-loading graphics, easy to read text, and intuitive navigation. The Web sites of many major corporations paled by comparison.
A “Sow a Seed” button shimmered prominently in the navigation bar. Clicking on it carried him to a page where a video clip of a smiling Bishop Prince immediately began to play. He was dressed in a tan suit and sat in a gold-trimmed chair that resembled a throne.
“God loves a cheerful giver,” the Bishop said in a genial voice that nonetheless carried authority. “We are exhorted to sow seeds for his kingdom, for which we will surely reap a bountiful harvest. Sow your seed for the kingdom and get ready for the blessings in store for you, my friend.”
The video ended, and the site automatically transported Anthony to an encrypted payment page. The church accepted donations online via credit or debit card, and electronic check. You also could set up an automatic bank draft to pay your tithes, and there was a link to the Kingdom Credit Union site, though only church members could join.
“They have their own credit union,” Anthony said.
Lisa looked up from a notepad, where she was scribbling with a pen.
“That’s becoming common these days, Tony,” she said. “Even our church has joined up with other smaller churches to form a credit union. It can be a good thing, if the organization is on the up and up.”
“Maybe. But the thought of these people having access to my money creeps me out.”
He visited a page that enabled you to submit a prayer request. For a small donation, the church’s team of “prayer warriors” would petition God on your behalf, and rest assured that it would be effective, as “God hears the prayers of the righteous.”
Not even prayer was free at New Kingdom.
A link offered a guided visual tour of the New Kingdom Church Campus. He selected it. It was like taking a virtual journey of Disney World. Covering over two thousand acres, worthy of its own zip code, the campus was meticulously planned, populated with aesthetically pleasing buildings, lush landscaping, walking trails, lakes, and environmentally-friendly shuttle buses that transported residents throughout the complex, from the sanctuary to the Kingdom Market.
“This is unreal,” he said. “They have their own warehouse store, Lisa. It looks bigger than a Navy Exchange.”
“Their own store, their own schools, even their own medical clinics and housing. When I went there for my friend’s wedding, I was totally blown away. You’d never have to leave the campus for anything.”
“Incredible.” He stared at the screen. “They have an entertainment complex with bowling alleys, miniature golfing, movie theaters, restaurants.”
“The sanctuary seats around twenty-five thousand, I’ve heard,” she said.
The camera swept over the sanctuary, a massive structure capped with a gold, geodesic dome. A view of the building’s interior showed seemingly endless rows of pews, plush seats designed to keep the faithful comfortable during their worship experience. The main stage, book-ended by giant video screens, was large enough to accommodate a rock concert.
The tour then visited the businesses that the church operated. The enterprises included a publishing company, a food service vendor, real estate management, a television studio, a radio station, and many, many others. They employed a workforce of “over two thousand loyal servants.”
Next was a sweeping front view of the bishop’s home, a palatial structure built of white stucco and stone in the style of a French Country chateau. The sprawling residence sat atop a steep hill overlooking the campus.
The bishop lived in a house fit for a king. Literally.
The tour ended. He chose a page that contained the bishop’s bio.
Bishop Emmanuel Prince was the seventh child of his family, the offspring of an interracial marriage—black mother, white father. His father, deceased, had founded the church forty years ago in the basement of an Atlanta elementary school. Prince had assumed the senior pastor duties about twenty-one years ago, and had led an explosive growth in membership, from eight thousand members to the two hundred and eighty thousand members worldwide the church currently boasted.
He was married to a gorgeous, fair-skinned black woman at least fifteen years younger than him, and had four, school-age children. A video titled, “The Bishop and The First Lady at Home” showed the family interacting at the dinner table, in their mansion, everyone smiling, as if every day of their lives defined harmony and perfection. Prince spoke of “sowing kingdom seeds” daily, and how he and his family had reaped the blessings that came with obedience to kingdom mandates.
Anthony finally clicked away. The site was nothing more than a PR tool designed to fill the church’s coffers.
On Google, he entered “Bishop Emmanuel Prince” in the search field. The engine returned over five million pages of results, the number of hits one might have found for an A-list movie star.
He visited the first few sites. They amounted to blatant, excessively flattering portrayals of Prince and his ministry. “The Prophet saved my life,” one person wrote, and recounted a story of how he had begun to “sow kingdom seeds,” even though he was unemployed and living on meager savings, and how he’d eventually found a new, better-paying job, thanks to the Prophet’s teachings.
Oddly, he found similar testimonials on many of the other sites. The names of the devotees were changed, but the stories were basically identical—someone’s life had been in shambles, but when they began to “sow seeds,” their fortunes magically turned around.
Each personal testimony concluded with a link that went directly to the “Sow a Seed” page on the New Kingdom Web site.
He changed the search to include the bishop’s name, and the phrase, “sow a seed.” He received over one million hits. Although all of the pages might not have been enticements to donate to the church, it seemed likely that a large number of them were.
How much income did the church generate annually from online donations? The sum was probably staggering.
He modified his search to include the bishop’s name, and the word, “controversy.”
The search returned only a couple dozen pages. The first search result bore the title, “Bishop Emmanuel Prince Exposed!” He chose the link.
The site was down.
He clicked back to Google, and looked for the “Cached” page link—a snapshot of the page the last time Google had crawled it. But there was none.
He visited the next site in the results list. The page was up. The text read: “Bishop Emmanuel Prince knows he risks controversy when he declares that sowing a seed for the kingdom will reap blessings, but he is an anointed leader who is moved by God to speak truth to power.”
Other sites in the list either were unavailable, or contained more content praising Prince. None of the inaccessible sites had cached pages.
He altered his searches to include the name of the church, and other words such as “corrupt,” “immoral,” “fraudulent,” “crime,” “felony,” and “murder.” Although many sites appeared for the various searches, the ones he could access did not include any negative statements, and all of the others were down.
They monitor the web, Bob had told him.
It was unbelievable . . . but New Kingdom had apparently scrubbed the Internet of all damaging material. The resources that would have been necessary to ensure that a sanitized image of the church and its leader was presented at all times were surely formidable—about as formidable as the assets that had enabled the fanatics to track them across the city as easily as if they were mice in a maze.
If he launched a blog and posted negative remarks about the bishop, he wondered how long it would take for the church to shut it down. Days? Hours? Did they utilize software that constantly scanned the Web in search of slander? Did they dispatch viruses to infect the servers and disable the sites?
It was an egregious violation of freedom of speech. But he suspected that they cared little for the Bill of Rights.
His imagination, stimulated by the discoveries, kicked into higher gear. What if they had the capability to even learn who was seeking proof of corruption—and could trace the user to the physical address where the user’s computer resided?
There’s no way they can do that, he thought. You’re letting your imagination get the better of you.
But a shudder passed through him. He looked around the café, gazed through the windows to the parking lot. He noticed nothing out of the ordinary, but . . .
Just to be safe, he closed the browser windows, and logged off the network.
Across the table, Lisa was busy at work. Several small squares of paper, torn from a notepad, lay scattered before her. A letter was written on each square in black ink. It looked like a homemade Scrabble set.
“What’re you working on?” he asked.
She glanced up at him, blinked as if surfacing from a trance.
“Following a hunch,” she said. “I think Bob created an anagram using Kelley’s name, and I’m going to solve it.”