Author: Tara Dooley
Publication: Houston Chronicle
Date: January 29, 2005
URL: http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/front/3014249
K.A. Paul isn't well-known here,
but his mission has global reach
Christian evangelist K.A. Paul has
moved a ruthless dictator to his knees.
He couldn't get Mattress Mack to
budge.
"I didn't like his bull's rush approach,"
said Jim "Mattress Mack" McIngvale, Gallery Furniture owner and local philanthropist.
"Everything has to happen in the next 24 hours and you have to come up
with the money."
Paul wanted McIngvale to help finance
the liftoff of a 747 full of medical supplies and professionals to help
survivors of the tsunami in southeast Asia. McIngvale said he was put off
by Paul's aggressive sales pitch.
In the end, McIngvale wouldn't donate
to Paul's Global Peace Initiative, though he is spearheading other efforts
to help tsunami-destroyed regions.
Paul's trip to the tsunami region
was delayed for more than a week by funding woes and then a fuel system
problem on Global Peace Initiative's 747. The jumbo jet, loaded with medicine
and other relief supplies, finally took off from Ellington Field shortly
after 8 p.m. Friday.
For many Houstonians, the hardball
fund raising served as an introduction to Paul and his approach to Christian
evangelism and humanitarian relief that has made him well-known worldwide.
"You know the old saying about the
prophet without honor in his own hometown?" said Nelson Bunker Hunt, the
Dallas businessman who has served on the board of Global Peace Initiative
and Paul's Gospel to the Unreached Millions. "Frankly, until you attend
one of his overseas missions, you can't conceive of what it is like. The
average person in Houston wouldn't believe it."
It stretches the imagination as
Paul, 41, relates tales of ministry and meetings with some of the monsters
of recent world history.
Told in a one-story office decorated
with a sprinkling of fake flowers and florescent light, Paul's stories
are set in Hyderabad, India; Monrovia, Liberia; and Port-au-Prince, Haiti
- cities far away from the northeast Harris County town of Huffman, the
"Home of the Fighting Falcons."
'A hyper-type person'
Wielding his cell phone, Paul speaks
with frenetic urgency. He measures crowds in the hundreds of thousands,
counts money in millions and drops names such as oil heir Hunt and the
late Mother Teresa.
His supporters say his approach
to personal relationships is fueled by energy and a sense of mission. It
is an approach, they say, that cuts through bureaucracy and efficiently
gets help to people in troubled countries.
But it can rub people the wrong
way. Supporter Evander Holyfield was put off - at first.
Paul first came to Holyfield days
before the former heavyweight champion was scheduled to fight Mike Tyson
in 1997.
"I didn't know of him and he is
a hyper-type person and I was concentrating on what I wanted to do - fight
- and he was concerned about his ministry," Holyfield said.
"It was kind of aggravating."
Three years later, Paul again contacted
Holyfield. This time the boxer had time to travel to the orphanage that
Paul's organization runs near Hyderabad.
"I went to India and got an opportunity
to see that he was healing people and his heart was right for people,"
said Holyfield, who donates his time to Paul's causes.
McIngvale said he did not question
that Paul's heart was in the right place, but wondered about security and
whether the relief mission was well-planned.
Accountability questions
The Evangelical Council for Financial
Accountability, an accreditation agency for Christian nonprofits, revoked
the group's membership earlier this month, said council president Paul
Nelson.
The council was concerned that Gospel
to the Unreached Millions did not have a functioning board of directors,
that it did not have proper financial controls in place, and that it had
not responded to the council's demand last fall for documentation. The
organization had been a member of the council since July 1998, Nelson said.
"We are not representing that (money)
was going someplace bad," Nelson said. "We were not comfortable with the
environment."
Global Peace Initiative never registered
with the council, which has a voluntary membership of about 1,150 evangelical
Christian groups that comply with its standards, Nelson said.
Paul said Gospel to the Unreached
Millions' dismissal from the council occurred while he and the other full-time
staff member, Tim Murray, were busy with humanitarian work and not able
to file the paperwork on time. But Murray, the chief financial officer,
said he was working to register the group with the local Better Business
Bureau.
Carl Lindner III, co-CEO and co-president
of American Financial Group in Cincinnati, is one of Paul's supporters.
They met at a 1997 Promise Keeper's
event where Paul spoke. Lindner donated about $250,000 for a mission trip
to Sri Lanka after the tsunami and is also contributing to the current
trip.
Lindner also has donated to Charity
City, the orphanage near Hyderabad, which now serves more than 1,000 children
and can accommodate an additional 2,000.
"Whatever (Paul) has promised me
over the years, he has come through 100 percent and a lot of times 120
percent," Lindner said.
Known as 'spiritual healer'
Born Sept. 25, 1963, in Andhra
Pradesh in southeast India, Paul considers himself a "Hindu-born follower
of Jesus."
His parents were Christian converts,
Paul said. Though a believer from a young age, Paul's commitment to Jesus
was inspired by a vision of hell when he was 19. Complete with anguished,
tortured souls crying for help, the vision served as his call to become
an evangelist, Paul said.
"Hell became real to me," he said.
"Jesus became real to me."
Paul does not have any formal theology
training and said he was given an honorary doctorate by a college in Canada.
"The reason I'm known as Dr. Paul
is that in these Third World countries I'm known as a spiritual healer,"
Paul said.
In 1993, Paul formed the evangelical
U.S. organization, Gospel to the Unreached Millions, which organizes rallies,
primarily in India and Africa.
In 1999, he added the humanitarian
relief arm, Global Peace Initiative.
The main physical presence of his
work in the United States is the sparse Huffman office staffed by Paul
and Murray and three recently hired contract workers. The organizations
also rent offices in Baltimore and Harrisburg, Pa., and own the donated
747.
Paul, his wife, Mary, and three
children - Grace, Peace and John Paul - live near his Huffman office.
Last year, Global Peace Initiative
received about $2 million in cash donations and $14 million in supplies
such as medicines, Murray said. Gospel to the Unreached Millions received
more than $5 million, he said.
Overseas powerhouse
In the United States, Paul has no
congregation, holds no religious services and hosts no television show.
Yet overseas, he has maneuvered
onto the edges of decades of world history, claiming that he has met with
the likes of Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein and Haitian rebel leader
Guy Philippe.
In 2003, Paul placed himself in
the middle of escalating civil conflict and the negotiations to rid Liberia
of its president, Charles Taylor.
At the time, Taylor told the New
York Times that Paul was his "religious leader," and later gave Paul credit
for persuading him to leave Liberia in August 2003.
California entertainment executive
David McQuade accompanied Paul on one of his trips to Monrovia that summer.
While there, he attended a gathering in a stadium with Taylor and Paul.
"I saw him transform this president,
this rather maniacal guy, have him on his knees," said McQuade, who now
serves as interim executive director of Global Peace Initiative.
"I've seen him do things that you
just don't do," he added. "Normal people don't do things and bring peace
to a situation."
Saving the soulless
Paul said he considers saving the
souls of people that some consider soulless as a calling from God.
"God called us to be peacemakers,"
Paul said. "Blessed are the peacemakers, not peace-wanters, not peace-lovers."
Paul also has used these situations
to nose into the news, hiring a New York City public relations company
in 2003 to promote his work. Though he no longer pays for the company's
help, a former employee of the company, Juda Engelmayer, donates his time
to help Paul get his message heard.
"He is just doing what he thinks
he has to - yelling and screaming his message," Engelmayer said. "I've
been training him, telling him how to scale back."
As an evangelist, Paul has traveled
throughout Asia and Africa, preaching to hundreds of thousands at peace
rallies.
"It is essentially people as far
as you can see," McQuade said of the rallies he has witnessed, starting
with one in Paul's home state, Andhra Pradesh, in 2002.
"He is a bit of a rock star when
you fly into these situations," he said.
At the rallies, Paul lines up government
officials on the platform and "rails against the caste system in India,"
McQuade said. He also covers the Christian standards: truth, sin and forgiveness.
"He preaches the straight Christian
Gospel and he gets tremendous response," Hunt said.
Chronicle reporter Anne Marie Kilday
contributed to this report.
tara.dooley@chron.com
