Walk in the Word was seized by HBC to plunder its $6.6 million in assets.
In lawless disregard for historic covenants and signed contracts, HBC leaders (Jeff Smith, Greg Bradshaw, Carl Barkow, Steve Stewart, Jeff Sharda, Sam Booras, then the Laird Elders since May 2019) seized Walk in the Word for its $6,600,000 ($4.1M of which they knew was in dispute).
1) Walk in the Word came under the HBC “umbrella” in 2010, under the recommendation of auditor Capin Crouse. In hindsight, a benefit sought by HBC but never explained to me was WITW’s financial strength, which was used to bolster the church’s balance sheet in the eyes of their lender, Evangelical Christian Credit Union (ECCU).
2) Walk in the Word’s 2010 “merger” with Harvest was conditional upon the ability to separate at will, and never stated nor intended to be permanent. Ample documentation existed in files for the original 2019 Staff and Elders, and subsequent leadership iterations, to acknowledge that WITW was a ministry I started, led, supplied with content, and was fully under my stewardship – just as with all other evangelical broadcast ministries, from Tony Evans to Chuck Swindoll.
Yet HBC Elders seized WITW and destroyed the ministry to access the money, publicly declaring “Walk in the Word is a ministry of Harvest Bible Chapel,” with the Elders communicating directly to the WITW donors – unprecedented in the history of HBC prior to 2019. To those who knew the truth, these assertions of WITW ownership by HBC were immediately recognized as false. As former Elders remained silent, numerous knowledgeable men warned HBC leaders their actions would bring ruin to the church, but these leaders did not relent. Maybe selecting Elders who didn’t know me or HBC history and had never been Elders before (Greg Bradshaw and Harvest 2020’s idea) was unwise? It made them prone to being misled.
3) At the time of the 2010 ‘merger,’ the outgoing Walk in the Word board required the documents to specify two things:
These were not questioned by HBC in the initial April 2019 draft settlement agreements. WITW’s cash was already being seized by Smith and company, but the remainder was offered in all settlement offers. In an effort to cement their unlawful seizure of Walk in the Word, HBC Leaders unlawfully removed me and others from the original Illinois 501c3 retroactively redacting to 2018, abruptly canceled all the monthly donors, and wrote to the WITW mailing list after I would not bow to their threats. The idea that I would never get Walk in the Word was a Wagenmaker invention in cooperation with the Laird Elders. Fact is, Walk in the Word merged with HBC while maintaining an independent status – accountable inside HBC, with the freedom to separate at will with its net assets.
4) Sally Wagenmaker knew the impact of the seminal documents “The Secretary’s Certificates of Directors’ Action,” which governed the Capin Crouse advised merging (with both a Walk in the Word portion signed by the Executive Director, and a Harvest Bible Chapel Portion Signed by HBC’s CFO), Wagenmaker in her professional capacity makes several terrible arguments that were damaging to HBC and all concerned.
5) WITW never relinquished its autonomy, and all parties believed Walk in the Word was a major blessing to HBC. Elders and Staff were grateful for WITW’s proximity to and positive impact on the church (more than 50% of first time visitors to HBC mentioned WITW as the primary reason for their visit). For example, in the fall of 2017, HBC financial leaders requested a documented loan from WITW for $1,500,000, which I agreed to lend. After they repaid an initial $500,000, I forgave the remainder, as it was equivalent to their support of WITW that year, and we had promised to return some of HBC’s Walk in the Word support from surplus WITW revenue when the Aurora Studio was sold to TBN.
6) WITW maintained separate budgets, separate bank accounts, separate audits, and their own CFO, while working cooperatively within HBC for the betterment of both ministries. As I openly discussed succession from my role as Senior Pastor of HBC, all understood I would continue to lead and build Walk in the Word in or outside HBC facilities in the future, but there was never consideration that I would leave HBC and Walk in the Word would remain – that could only happen unlawfully.
7) My intellectual property did not belong to HBC or WITW. From the time Kathy and I began Walk in the Word in 1996, I had an Intellectual Property (IP) agreement with HBC. Intellectual property law covers ownership issues related to an employer and their employee’s ideas, inventions, or other creative work. Typically, if there is demand for those ideas, there will be an IP agreement governing who owns the work product, what the employee is being compensated for, and where the employer/employee relationship ends. My original IP agreement derived its precise wording from established radio ministries we researched in 1995. I do not know of a single Christian broadcast ministry where the preacher does not own his sermons.
8) The IP agreements between myself and HBC Elders were clear, frequently reiterated for newcomers, and never in dispute prior to 2019. Regarding my sermons, Harvest paid me to prepare and deliver them; the residual content and audio/video recordings belonged to me. For 22 years WITW paid an annual license fee to utilize my IP. Per the National Religious Broadcasters, of which Walk in the Word was a member, my IP arrangement was not unusual or remotely improper; nor was it secret among leaders of HBC. My IP income was publicly disclosed on IRS 990 forms when independent from HBC, and it did not increase when Walk in the Word came under Harvest January 1, 2011.
All documentation for the above was in HBC leaders’ hands by mid-February 2019.
Yet their communications reveal their conspiring to coerce my submission to their seizures of Walk in the Word and its donor funds. The men named above confiscated and attempted to keep my intellectual property (sermon audios, videos, digital/print materials, etc.). More remarkably, they stated publicly that my pension was fully and legally vested and signed a document committing to the same, while both chastising me behind the scenes for trying to access it and actually working with ECCU to steal it. Yet, Brian Laird told me at least three times in the fall of 2020 – once in front of the entire board – the exact opposite. These are boldfaced lies, not misunderstandings, and I thank the Lord my attorney wrote to Fidelity to seal my pension or it would be gone too. To say nothing of also holding extensive amounts of personal property; canceling $2,400,000 in annual revenue in February 2019 from monthly Change Partners without even a thank you; then writing disparagingly to my Walk in the Word mailing list in April – all to force my acceptance of the many millions being seized from the WITW coffers.
On January 31, 2019, Walk in the Word had approximately $2.5 million in its bank accounts and efforts to confiscate those assets had already begun. Three months earlier, I had informed the Executive Elders that I wanted to remove WITW from HBC per the contracts; I had no idea efforts were already underway to eliminate me and keep the cash. Additionally, WITW owned the TBN TV time as its Elder-approved portion of the Aurora Studio sale in 2014, which generated $4 million for HBC.
HBC Treasurer Jeff Smith was reprimanded by the Elders’ Executive Committee (EC) Chairman Steve Huston for trying to prevent my selling the airtime, which I had already stipulated could be divided between HBC and WITW. Trinity Broadcast Network (TBN) was so conflicted about HBC’s pressure to receive the airtime money, they specified in the closing documents that HBC must indemnify them against any legal action from me or WITW in seeking the return of those proceeds. In laymen terms, that means if we filed a lawsuit against TBN for selling WITW TV time to HBC (who had no right to those funds), HBC must cover the cost of TBN’s defense and any award that WITW would win. But HBC appears to have burned through the funds they unlawfully seized, and we wouldn’t do that to our friends at TBN.
Keep in mind none of this would have happened had they simply honored instead of conniving to cancel the April 2019 settlement agreement between me and Harvest, which would have ended it all.
All committed for $6.6 million reasons – and it worked. HBC paid WITW a $250K reimbursement (covering only 25% of legal fees) and a Crystal Lake property they falsely claimed appraised in 2018 for $1.2 million, to match their insurance company’s demand of equivalent contribution toward settlement. In reality, the property is worth maybe half that, and now the ICC panel must rule on yet another HBC overpromise/underdeliver.
HBC Elders took $6.6 million from WITW ($2.5M of which is indisputable) and paid WITW back approximately $850K (when the property sells), while I spent more than $1M just for the return of my IP and WITW’s physical/digital assets. Much of the equipment, which I had been promised was sequestered until an arbitration ruling or settlement, turned out to be in usage on multiple HBC campuses. My pension was finally returned, as was most of our personal property; but regarding WITW’s financial assets, HBC netted more than $5 million.
“There is one who scatters yet increases all the more and there is one who withholds but it only results in poverty, the generous man will prosper and he who waters will himself be watered” (Proverbs 11:24-25).
