I guess I'll have to say yes. I was 15-16 when our bishop died, his son inherited the church. And almost everybody knew what he was doing. My mom didn't know because she's not into the church clicks and stuff like that. But I knew because my friend at church told me during a sleepover. They gave him a year of training then he became pastor. I left about 4 years ago, I grew up and out grew them.

I don't know if the second pastor was a minister when he became a pastor. They sort of have this if the pastor doesn't tell you then you don't need to know mentality. I didn't ask my mom because she's the type to come back with a little slick comment like; if you come to church more often you would know. Or doesn't really matter, you shouldn't question who God has called. I know my mom so I just left it alone.

Why a lot of grown folks do not go to church.

Does not make sense to us.

The unquestioning and time put in just does not make sense.

I grew up in a mega church that taught that ministers need to have education and time to prove thier calling. Of course the time was short when it came to his son.

I have issues with money and how people are treated regardless of how much they pay.

Here is another website for Jericho City of Praise. City of Praise This must be the new site. Here is the old website. Not sure why there are two websites...http://jerichocop.org/

Do not see 2009 information..

I dont understand this,if the church has a board what is the purpose of the board ..........Every major buisness has a board and that board is there to ensure a code of ethics a moral guidline a high standard of transparency and acccountabiltiy where people money are concerend........... ..I dont like the idea of children inheritng churches from there parents someone needs to tell this man his parents did'nt build that church .I heard a mega church pastor 1 sunday morning about how he built his ministry and no one was going to get it but his son because he built it...........These people are delusional....he didnt build anything .......if they want to be buisness men they need to go and take personal buisness loans and pay back there loans by themselves like others do when they build companies........... In the church it is different people pay tithes and offferings as a covenant with god not with them ..........so how their any pastor leave hs church almost as if it is there own personal belonging to their children dont they understand the diffference between a buisness and a church thats not their personal money .......now i have no problem with an offfspring stepping up to pastor a church after their parents die if they are capable.......... However the board should be the one with the responsibiltity to apppoint and make those decisions without fear of being punished by the spitefulll,wickednes s vengefull behaviour of those who have appointed themselves mini GODS IN THE BODY OF CHRIST.

I have a problem with a child inheriting the church, whether by board approval or not.

The exception is if the kid has successfully pastored other churches. And I don't mean that Daddy set him up there. If they worked hard and got through school, they won a job on their own, and the chuvh they pastored exceeds the size of their father's church.

Judge blocks pastor from handling church funds at Jericho

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/...2GI_story.html

By Avis Thomas-Lester, Published: July 15

A Prince George’s County Circuit Court judge granted a temporary restraining order Friday forbidding the Rev. Joel R. Peebles, the pastor at the center of a battle for control over the multi-million-dollar Jericho City of Praise in Landover, from collecting tithes and offerings during church services.

The court order is the first legal action in a court battle that began in October, just days after the death of Peebles’s mother, Apostle Betty Peebles, who co-founded the church and grew it into one of the region’s largest and most influential ministries, with more than 15,000 members and millions in assets.

A group of church employees who claim that in the months before her death Betty Peebles gave them authority to manage the church’s finances had petitioned the court for the restraining order to block Joel Peebles, 41, from handling the money. Joel Peebles, who has been acting as senior pastor of the church since his mother’s death, has countersued, challenging the employees’ authority and the way they have managed the church’s money.

In a two-hour hearing, Judge Dwight Jackson also approved a motion to establish a mediator to help negotiate a resolution and ordered the employees to provide the church’s financial records, which attorneys for Joel Peebles requested five months ago.

“You can’t have drama like that” in church at offering time, Jackson said, admonishing the participants.

The order will be good for 10 days in the interest of “peace and order and maintaining the status quo,” he said.

Afterward, both sides claimed victory.

“I feel like this is a tremendous victory,” said Joel Peebles, the only surviving child of the ministry’s founders. “We have been able to gain transparency in all things. We were negotiating for exactly what was produced in this hearing.”

Isaac Marks, the attorney for the employees, countered that they had been successful in preventing Joel Peebles from collecting money. A church official testified that Jericho collected upwards of $300,000 a month for the first several months of the year.

“They are happy there will not be drama in the church,” Marks said. “They didn’t like drama and don’t want drama. They want the church services to run as they should.”

Jackson’s order follows a dust-up over the offering at the 11 a.m. service two weeks ago, when the church’s security team stepped in when Joel Peebles’s 28-year-old nephew, Joshua, who has sided with the employees, tried to grab an offering basket. As dozens of church members watched in disbelief, Joshua Peebles, the son of Joel Peebles’s late brother, James Peebles Jr., was hauled out of the sanctuary by the security officers.

During Friday’s hearing, Marks showed scenes from a DVD of two church services July 3 that allegedly showed members being “intimidated” by offering collectors for Joel Peebles as they attempted to place their envelopes in the white buckets.

In his lawsuit, Peebles is seeking to have the employee group stripped of any power over the church, claiming that it seized control after his mother’s death without appropriate authority, is not qualified to run the business side of the church and is secretive in the way it spends the church’s money.

The attorneys for both sides met with Jackson in chambers after the hearing. They agreed on retired Circuit Court judge Stephen Platt as the mediator. Marks agreed to submit the financial documents that Joel Peebles requested by July 22, and Jackson set a hearing for Aug. 2, when he is likely to tackle the issue of which group has the legal right to control the church’s finances.

Jackson refused a request by the employees to order Joel Peebles to return $70,000 in offering he collected in recent weeks. During the hearing, Peebles testified that he has deposited the money in an account at PNC Bank and uses it for church-related expenses.

He has pledged that none of the money he collected will be used for legal fees.

After the hearing, Peebles’s attorney, Timothy Maloney, said that he was pleased by the result of the hearing. “Pastor believes the business of the church should be taken out of the courts and put back into the sanctuary,” Maloney said.

So, the chairman of the deacon board is saying that he was tricked in resigning from his position. He signed a document, but he didn't know what he was signing. This should be a very interesting court case. They are right about one thing....the enemy is Satan (sex, money and power).

Often, in church you do not know who is Godly or who is Satanly.

See the photo of the surviving Peebles family. I believe this is the nephew who went after the basket of tithes and offerings (top left holding the baby). I wonder what made him side with the other employees and not his uncle. This young man lived with his grandmother (Apostle Betty) just before she passed.

Friends say Jericho founder questioned son’s readiness to head ministry in Landover

By Avis Thomas-Lester, Published: August 1

For about two months in late 2009, Joel R. Peebles had no idea where his mother was. She didn’t answer when he called her cellphone or respond to knocks on the door of her home in the gated Woodmore community in Prince George’s County.
Unbeknownst to her son, Betty Peebles, the pastor who’d transformed Jericho City of Praise in Landover into a multimillion-dollar ministry conglomerate, had written a new will and quietly admitted herself into a Baltimore hospital for cancer treatment, acquaintances said.
A group of longtime Jericho members say that in March of the same year, she also signed papers naming them to a revised board of trustees with a mandate that they handle the business side of the ministry, an arrangement that would keep her son in place as the church’s spiritual leader, but bar him from controlling the money.
In a court battle that erupted days after Betty Peebles died of cancer in October, Joel Peebles, 42, disputed the claim, saying his mother left him in charge. Both sides entered court-ordered mediation Friday but did not reach a resolution. A hearing scheduled Tuesday for a judge to consider pending motions was postponed in lieu of the parties returning to mediation.
Longtime acquaintances of Betty Peebles, who also watched Joel Peebles grow up in the ministry and spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the mother’s absence from her son from November 2009 through January 2010 — during which they missed the entire holiday season at a critical point in her illness — illustrates the tension that sometimes existed between the two.
Mother and son clearly loved each other, the acquaintances said, but she worried that her sole surviving son was not yet ready to handle the financial reins of the ministry she’d grown to include a 10,000-seat sanctuary, senior citizens complex, business park, college, school and a lucrative deal to provide parking during Washington Redskins games.
A letter that Betty Peebles sent to the staff of the ministry’s high school in May 2009 shows that she had reservations about the financial condition of the school, then headed by Joel Peebles. In the letter, she said the school would cost the church an unanticipated $1.2 million and that she would take over as headmaster.
In a deposition taken as part of the lawsuit that the alleged trustees filed against Joel Peebles, Gloria McClam-Magruder, a former headmaster of Jericho Christian Academy who says she is one of the trustees, testified that Betty Peebles was also worried that Joel Peebles had allowed the taxes to go delinquent on the family home in Southeast Washington. “She was very much concerned about that,” McClam-Magruder recalled in the deposition. “And she even said to me, ‘I wonder should I pay for it’ . . . because she wanted to keep that house in the family.”
Records from the D.C. Office of Tax and Revenue show that tax liens were filed for the property but were later settled. Foreclosure complaints were also filed against Joel and Ylawnda Peebles for property in Lanham and Baltimore, records show. Timothy Maloney, an attorney for the couple, said they own several rental properties and have had difficulty at times with tenants failing to pay the rent.
Joel Peebles, who declined to comment on the specifics of the case, defended his role in the ministry. He says his mother named him to the church’s governing board in 1997, shortly after the deaths of his father and oldest brother, and that he remains its ranking member. He said she granted him her power of attorney in 2003, when she suffered her first bout with cancer, and tapped him to serve as school headmaster beginning in 1999, and vice president of a board that oversees the senior citizens complex.
He produced several tax and loan documents and a report the church files to D.C. government as a nonprofit operating in Maryland, showing that he signed as a trustee or director, usually directly under his mother, who headed the board until her death.
Despite the acrimony, both sides said they are optimistic that they can resolve the matter. “I absolutely love every last one of the folks involved in this situation,” Joel Peebles said. “This situation is coming to a close, and we will be extraordinarily happy to continue to work for the glory of God.”
Jericho, with about 19,000 members, is one of the region’s largest, most prosperous ministries. Betty Peebles’s husband, Bishop James Peebles Sr., founded the church in 1964, while she led the choirs. When Joey, the youngest of three boys, sang his first solo at age 7, his mother sat proudly behind the piano, accompanying him.
Betty Peebles later became a co-pastor, raising the ire of some who found it inappropriate for a woman to take a leading role in the pulpit, ultimately causing the couple to pull out of the Baptist denomination, acquaintances said.
She took over as pastor after her husband died of a heart attack at age 63 in September 1996. Four months later, her oldest son, James Jr., then 38, also suffered a fatal heart attack. Her second son, John, 44, died after a brief illness in 2004. Still, Betty Peebles carried on, becoming one of the first women to head a megachurch.
The ministry flourished — as did its political influence. When the church celebrated paying off a $36 million mortgage for its Landover location in just seven years, then-Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R) and Lt. Gov. Michael S. Steele (R) celebrated from a front pew with the members. But, like many first-generation megachurch pastors, Betty Peebles still ran her empire like a small house of worship, choosing ministry decision-makers who, regardless of qualifications, were loyal to her.
Administrators said in depositions that the church for many years had no official method to select a board of trustees, no set qualifications to serve, no annual business meetings and produced no annual report. They also testified about collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars in monthly tithes and offerings and operating with little outside oversight or communication to members about how their donations were being spent.
Dorothy Williams, the church’s chief financial officer and an alleged board member, testified that she graduated from high school at age 35 and has no college degree. She started working at Jericho 20 years ago as a volunteer, moved into organizing offering envelopes and counting money and later was named CFO.
Williams, who rents a basement room in the Upper Marlboro home of Betty Peebles’s daughter-in-law, said in the deposition that she didn’t know how she became a member of the church’s board when she was first appointed in 1997. “The apostle probably just put me there,” she said, after questioning from Maloney.
Supporters of Joel Peebles say the alleged board members’ actions against him are retaliation against his attempts to make the church’s finances more transparent with new practices, such as reporting on the church’s Web site how contributions are being used.
In his countersuit, Joel Peebles challenges the legality of the alleged board and criticizes salary increases he says that three of its members — who double as full-time employees of the church — either granted themselves or were given by Betty Peebles after she became ill.
According to their depositions, Denise Killen went from an assistant administrator making about $55,000 to an administrator drawing $70,000; Clarence Jackson, the facilities manager, went from $71,000 to $91,000; and Dorothy Williams, from $63,000 to $83,000. Cliff Boswell, who once did small tasks for Betty Peebles, continues to collect a $200 monthly stipend.
Joel Peebles also has challenged his mother’s personal will, which disperses $5,000, her interest in a property in North Carolina and other “tangible personal property” to Joel Peebles; a Mercedes-Benz sedan to Jackson, the facilities manager and alleged board member who was her driver and confidante; a Rolex watch to McClam-Magruder; and another Rolex to “my friend Asya Peebles.”
The will names Michael and Delores Freeman, friends who also are pastors of Spirit of Faith Ministries, another megachurch, as “personal representatives” of her estate.
After a disagreement erupted between Joel Peebles and the opposing side over the offering collection July 3, the alleged board sought a temporary restraining order to block Peebles from handling the money. A judge granted the request, ordered the group to hand over financial records that Joel Peebles had sought, and appointed a mediator.
Scott Thumma, a professor and researcher who has studied megachurches for more than 20 years, said the Jericho upheaval is not unusual when a church loses a high-profile leader. “Too often, tension and conflict fill the void in the struggle for control of resources, leadership and a new vision. Without prior planning, such transition times can easily result in the demise of the organization the various parties are fighting to control.”

News researcher Jennifer Jenkins contributed to this report.


Friends say Jericho founder questioned son’s readiness to head ministry in Landover - The Washington Post

If what i have just read is indeed truth .......it means that his own mother didnt thrust him with money.......and if she didnt thrust him with money ,why in god name would she leave him as the spiriual leader of the church.......I think she is more so to blame for this situation than her son.......i dont mean to speak ill of the dead ........but its obvious she treated this church and all of the builldings as her own personal belonging and not wanting anyone else to succeed her, but her son even though she had doubts (if she didnt want him in charge of the money she had doubts) as a woman of god as a leader she would have sought god and he would have provided a leader..........but no the buisness most stay in the family what a complete shame and disgrace......i hold her responsible for this.....what a sad state the body of christ is in when leaders believe that the church belongs to them and their children........

This smells right here. The renting of the room. Anyone else wondering about this.

Dorothy Williams, the church’s chief financial officer and an alleged board member, testified that she graduated from high school at age 35 and has no college degree. She started working at Jericho 20 years ago as a volunteer, moved into organizing offering envelopes and counting money and later was named CFO.
Williams, who rents a basement room in the Upper Marlboro home of Betty Peebles’s daughter-in-law,"

Momma might of felt he was a good preacher - but had no business sense.

TO run something that size, requires some business know how and some level of sense,

Plus, momma can't cut her son totally out. She wanted to make sure he was taken care of. She been doing it all along.