The church has resisted demands by the IRS to open its books for an audit, and the agency filed a petition in United States District Court ordering the church to comply. Earlier this month, a magistrate ordered Living Word representatives to appear and explain their refusal to comply with the IRS. In response to a summons in March, a church attorney told the IRS they would not comply until “an appropriate high-level IRS official” using “reasonable belief” requested information.

At issue are financial dealings detailed in documents obtained by the Minnesota Independent in early 2007.

According to the documents, which involved a loan application in 2003 and contained more than 100 pages of pictures and detailed descriptions of the church’s real estate assets, financial transactions and administrative history, Hammond owned two airplanes, one bought from Living Word for $1.06 million on credit supplied by Living Word. He leased the planes back to the church at a total annual rate of more than $893,000. The church asserted that “the aircraft are important to the efficient management of its ministry at the present time.” Living Word also rented a hangar to store the planes, and it paid for the expenses of the planes as well.

In addition, Living Word made several loans to Hammond since 2000 totaling at least $1.9 million: Two were for the planes, three were unsecured, and one enabled Hammond to purchase a house in Florida.

Reporting by the Minnesota Independent also triggered an IRS investigation of Hammond and Living Word in 2006 after being the first to report that Hammond endorsed then-State Sen. Michele Bachmann for Congress from the pulpit.

The event contained several calls to action regarding the political process.  Both Hagee and Hammond referred to CUFI’s grassroots efforts to rally American Christianity to support Israel through rapid response alerts, focusing e-mails and phone calls on elected officials across the country. 

Hagee proclaimed that Jews and Christians worship the same God, while leaving out the detail that Muslims, while they refer to that God as Allah, believe in the same God of Abraham as Christians and Jews.  He also joked with his audience,  saying “if you know anything about the Jewish community, you know they have lots of committee meetings.”  Later, he related a story of a similar event in 1981 at his church where a bomb threat was called in.  When he informed the attendees of the threat, the Christians in the audience left the building quickly, but the Jews in attendance stayed put “as if I had said there would be kosher hot dogs available afterward.”

Speakers also included Billye Brim, who said in September 2005 that she believed Hurricane Katrina was sent as punishment for U.S. support of Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.  Brim said last night that biblical prophecy showed that Russia will unite with Arab nations against Israel, and that Israel should not give up land to the Palestinians because so many of the sites named in the Bible are in Judea and Samaria, in the modern-day West Bank.  Rani Levy, who operates a tour company in Israel and has worked with Brim and the Hammonds for several years, said that Palestinian statehood represents an existential threat to Israel, and that the United States should relocate its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in recognition of that city’s importance and as a symbolic statement.

CUFI began in February 2006 as a network of megachurch pastors seeking to rally grass-roots support in America for Israel.  According to the group’s website,

Within a few short months, CUFI emerged as one of the most important Christian grassroots organizations in America. In four short months we rallied over 3500 constituents to Washington D.C. for the first Summit in July 2006. Thousands more are expected this July and tens of thousands have signed up to participate in CUFI’s e-mail network. CUFI has only just begun.

CUFI’s board of directors includes such notables in the evangelical movement as the Rev. Jerry Falwell and former presidential candidate Gary Bauer.  Critics of the group have noted its vilifications of Islam, including an apparent case of photo-scrubbing on their website involving the Dome of the Rock, a Mosque located atop the ruins of the Second Temple in Jerusalem.  According to Sarah Posner, who wrote  in August of last year,

Hagee wields “a very large megaphone” that reaches “a very large group of people,” said Rabbi James Rudin of the American Jewish Committee, who has studied the Christian right for 30 years. With CUFI, the pastor has exponentially expanded the reach of his megaphone beyond his television audience. Thanks to the viral marketing made possible by the hundreds of evangelical leaders who have signed on to his new organization, his warmongering has rippled through megachurches across America for months. Hagee calls pastors “the spiritual generals of America,” an appropriate phrase given his reliance on them to rally their troops behind his message.

Congresswoman Betty McCollum, D-Minn., declined an invitation to attend, calling Hagee’s views on Islam “repugnant”.  Former U.S. senator and Republican Rudy Boschwitz and state Sens. Warren Limmer, R-Maple Grove, and Sandy Pappas, DFL-St. Paul, were in attendance.