Roe Messner, a Prolific Church Builder and Husband of Tammy Faye Bakker, Dies at 89 Messner, who claimed to have been behind the building of more than 1,800 churches, served just over two years in prison for hiding assets during bankruptcy proceedings By Jon Mooallem April 30, 2025 https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/roe-messner-obituary-church-builder-a5acc674?mod=mhp Roe Messner in the mid-1980s in Andover, Kan., during construction of his Terradyne Country Club development. In the 1980s, the televangelist Jim Bakker was riding a sensational wave of fame, religious fervor and cash, bringing in more than $100 million in revenue annually as the founder and face, along with his wife Tammy Faye, of “The PTL Club” television show and PTL Satellite Network. As Bakker’s ministry grew, his dreams got more grandiose, culminating in the construction of a theme park called Heritage USA—a kind of sprawling Christian Disneyland outside Charlotte, N.C., featuring a luxury hotel, shopping district and water park. (“We’re the first Christians to ever have a wave pool!” Bakker exclaimed.) To bring that dream to life, he enlisted Roe Messner, a church builder with a sterling reputation for getting things done. Messner, who died March 24 at home in Wichita, Kan., at age 89, was inextricably linked to the rise of American evangelicalism in the second half of the 20th century, designing and building the very structures that housed it. Historian John Wigger, in his book “PTL,” writes that, when Messner first met Bakker in 1983, he had been building on average “a church every 10 days for nearly 30 years.” Though not an architect, he took an active role in the design process with the architects on staff and would claim to have overseen the construction and/or design of more than 1,800 churches, in all 50 states, by the end of his 50-plus-year-career as a contractor. In 2007, the Kansas City Star wrote, “Every Sunday morning, an estimated one million people walk into a Roe Messner church.” Jim Bakker at his Heritage USA theme park outside of Charlotte, N.C., in 1987. Working with Messner on Heritage USA quickly consumed Bakker. The project placed enormous pressure on him and Tammy to raise more money on the air, Tammy wrote in her memoir, “Telling It My Way,” and distracted Bakker from their marriage. (“Plans were constantly sprawled across our bed,” she wrote.) Eventually, Tammy recalled, she dreaded seeing Messner turn up at their offices—his presence meant yet another building was going up. “Oh no,” she’d tell herself, “here comes Roe Messner again.” By the mid-1990s, however, PTL would be bankrupt, Jim Bakker would be in prison, the utopian amusement park he and Messner built together would be largely abandoned and—perhaps most improbably of all—Messner would be married to Tammy Faye. The rise of the megachurch Ronald “Roe” Messner, born Aug. 1, 1935, grew up on a farm in rural Oklahoma before moving at age 8 to Wichita. There, Messner started working for a local home builder when he was 14 and started his own business three years later. (His mother had to sign the paperwork; he was underage.) He completed his first church at 22, the Douglas Avenue Assembly of God in Wichita and, according to Messner’s son Ron, was building nationwide by his late 20s. Messner’s rise as a church-building titan coincided with the rise of the American megachurch, a trend his company, Commercial Builders of Kansas, helped facilitate with innovations, like fan-shaped churches and new balcony designs, that preserved a sense of intimacy for those mushrooming congregations. “He would do a 4,000-seat sanctuary that would feel like a 500-seat sanctuary,” said Donnie Haulk, who worked with Messner on 30 buildings since 2003 as the CEO of AE Global Media, which engineers and installs audio, visual and lighting systems in churches. Messner’s most famous structures include the Carpenter’s Home Church in Lakeland, Fla., and the Church on the Rock in Rockwall, Texas, each of which seat more than 10,000 people. A teenage Roe Messner building a house in 1949. His success was equally rooted in his straight-shooting, charming demeanor. New church constructions are typically financed through tithe money and overseen by boards of elders, with whom Messner’s air of trustworthiness and earnestness went a long way. “He would always say building churches is my ministry,” Ron Messner explained, a calling that Roe Messner spelled out in his book, “Building for the Master: By Design.” Part of this sacrosanct duty included bringing in projects at or under budget, a challenge that Haulk said Messner embraced as a competitive sport, the same way he strove to lower his golf score. By the 1980s, Messner’s reputation soared, especially within the Assemblies of God denomination, for whom he did most of his work and which itself was experiencing a boom behind the success of the Bakkers’. Messner’s buildings were featured regularly in the church magazine Charisma. Brad Oaster, whose own career as a church builder Messner was instrumental in launching, explained, “There are pastors out there that are egomaniacs. They gotta have a church that seats more than their seminary buddies. And they’d open Charisma and see Roe Messner, Roe Messner, Roe Messner, and say, ‘Some day I’m going to get him to build me one of those.’ ” In his book about the PTL ministry, “Forgiven,” journalist Charles E. Shepard described Messner as “a frequent guest on Bakker’s show, a wooden, unadorned figure amid the PTL glitz.” Messner didn’t smoke, drink or swear and, though he claimed in 1986 to be worth $32 million, drove a modest, practical pickup—always a Ford F150—his entire life. One of his only indulgences seems to have been a scoop of ice cream after dinner every night while on the road. Douglas Avenue Assembly of God in Wichita, Kan., in 1957, the first of hundreds of churches built by Messner. In 1985, PTL official Richard Dortch asked Messner to help clean up a mess. A young woman, Jessica Hahn, was threatening to sue Jim Bakker after what she would describe as a harrowing nonconsensual sexual encounter with Bakker and another preacher, John Wesley Fletcher. Dortch needed Messner to lend the ministry $265,000 to buy Hahn’s silence. Messner objected, but ultimately made the loan, disguising it with a phony invoice for work on the amphitheater where Heritage USA’s Passion Play was performed. After the Charlotte Observer brought the Hahn story to light in 1987, the scandal allowed pastor Jerry Falwell to effectively rip away control of PTL from the Bakkers. But PTL had been secretly sputtering financially. Jim Bakker had resorted to egregiously overselling timeshares at Heritage USA’s hotel to keep their lavish income flowing. When, soon after the takeover, Falwell filed for bankruptcy, Messner was the company’s largest unsecured creditor, on the hook for $14 million. With Falwell refusing to pay him, Messner filed for both professional and personal bankruptcy in 1990. At the same time, he was going through a divorce with his wife of 38 years, Ruth Ann Messner. (She survives him, along with three of their four children.) “It was a horrible time,” Ron Messner said. “It devastated our family.” Tammy Faye Bakker Messner with husband Roe Messner backstage at ‘Hairspray’ on Broadway in 2003. An unlikely couple In the aftermath of the PTL scandal, Jim Bakker was sentenced to 45 years in federal prison for fraud. Messner was one of the few people to visit him, according to Tammy Faye’s memoir; in the visiting room, Bakker would sketch buildings on napkins, and Messner would spit back ballpark costs. Tammy divorced Jim Bakker in 1992 and she and Messner struck up a relationship. They were married the following year. People were shocked they got together—including Tammy. In her memoir, she remembered telling Messner: “What man would take a chance and get involved with Tammy Bakker? The publicity would be more than most men could take.” (Jim Bakker, meanwhile, wrote in his own memoir that he’d asked Messner to look after Tammy while he was incarcerated and called him “the man who had betrayed my trust and stolen my wife.”) Tammy was 4-foot-11, loud, plain-spoken and exuberant, with kaleidoscopic pastel makeup famously brushed all over her face. Messner was tall, lanky, uncomplicated and almost preternaturally quiet—“a mild man, the sort of person you were told would inherit the earth someday,” the Washington Post wrote. But they were “two hurt and lonely people starting over again,” Tammy wrote, and somehow it worked. Messner played golf and continued building churches, while Tammy went shopping and hosted a slightly unhinged talk show with the gay celebrity Jim J. Bullock. They respected each other’s parallel pursuits. (Messner told Larry King, “Tammy and I made an agreement right when we first got married. I said, ‘Tammy, you don’t have to go golfing with me if I don’t have to go shopping with you.’ And so that was our deal we made, and it worked good for us.”) And Messner resolutely defended Tammy, when she was the butt of jokes in the press. Vicariously persecuted? In 1996, Messner was convicted of concealing roughly $400,000 of assets during his bankruptcy proceedings and sentenced to 27 months in prison. He felt the judge was making an example of him, that he was being vicariously persecuted for Jim Bakker’s sins. “There was more said in my trial about Mr. Bakker than there was about me,” Messner said in a 2000 documentary, “The Eyes of Tammy Faye.” Roe Messner, center, and his four children. From left, Richard, Roann, Robin and Ron. But Messner seemed to serve his time with characteristic stoicism. Interviewed in prison for the documentary, he explained he didn’t want Tammy Faye to visit. “It’s hard for me to say goodbye. So I’d rather not have a visit,” he said. Haulk recalled, “Just the way he would look when he was talking about it, you knew it impacted him. He’d just say it was the worst time in his life.” The documentary crew was there filming when Messner was released in May 1999 after serving just over two years. Looking slightly shellshocked in the parking lot, Messner says “I’m still numb, really…” and gropes for the right words until Tammy finally looks straight to camera and gleefully announces, “We gotta go get to know each other again!” and whisks him into a car. After his release, Messner started a company, Roe Messner & Associates, and resumed building churches—though, this time, mostly out of public view. Among Messner’s last high-profile appearances was on “Larry King Live” in July 2007, alongside Tammy, as she was dying of cancer, down to 65 pounds. Messner sat beside his wife while she talked about the arrangements she had made—cremation, not burial; “I don’t want the bugs eating on me,” she explained—and the hospice care she was receiving at home. Messner was one of her primary caretakers. “Isn’t he cute?” Tammy asked King. “He’s very cute, yes,” King replied. Messner returned to the show two weeks later. Tammy had died about 48 hours after their previous interview, but Messner had chosen to keep it quiet, so they could have a private ceremony without interference from the press. The grief was difficult for him. “I think the loneliness has started to set in a little bit,” Messner told King. He was stunned by all the emails, cards and flowers coming in. “Our house looks like a florist shop,” he said. People kept asking him what they could do to help, explained Messner, and “I’ll say, well, quit sending me flowers.”