Big News!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And we should be proud of his visit why???

The sanctuary rocks with gospel music as multicolored spotlights play across the packed pews where thousands in the congregation stand, swaying, singing, clapping and waving their arms.

The animated preacher, dressed in a dark suit and white shirt open at the collar, bounds onto the brightly lit stage. He takes a seat at a grand piano. Backed by a 70-member choir, he pounds the keyboard and sings, sounding at times like a Pentecostal Neil Diamond.

It is Sunday morning at FaithWorld megachurch west of Maitland, and four video cameras are trained on Clint Brown. The nationally known recording artist soon trades the piano for a lectern. From there, the pastor urges members to give “sacrificially” so that their “blessings increase,” bringing them more money, job promotions, and new houses and cars. For anyone who needs reminding, videotapes of the service are $15 in the church lobby.

In his dual roles as FaithWorld’s music director and pastor, Brown is one part rock star and one part preacher. Those two competing and contradictory lifestyles frame the portrait of 41-year-old Clint Brown. In 12 years, the man who arrived in Orlando with no job, no flock and no guarantees has gained prominence and amassed the trappings of wealth.

Brown, his wife and two children occupy two parsonages in gated Central Florida communities, one purchased for $1 million in 2000 and the other for $500,000 in December. FaithWorld is paying for both.

Of the Browns’ seven cars, the church makes payments on two — a Mercedes sedan and a Mercedes sport utility vehicle — according to legal documents. The other vehicles include a third Mercedes, a Porsche and a Hummer.

In 2002, a lucrative year for Clint Brown’s music career, he and his family charged $242,256 on two American Express cards alone. The following year, they rang up $215,701 on the same cards. Some of the credit-card charges were paid for by the church, which is reviewing the bills.

Two developments have cast a spotlight on Brown and his 6,000-member church. A former congregation member filed a lawsuit claiming $200,000 she gave Brown in 1999 for a new church was a loan, and not a gift, as the church maintains. And Brown’s 38-year-old wife, Angela, filed for divorce last year in Seminole County.

Using details from the divorce file, news accounts provided a rare glimpse into the lavish lifestyle of the minister who runs the 25-acre FaithWorld complex, all the while nurturing a music career on the side.

Clint Brown has delivered his most public comments about these disclosures during sermons at his church west of Maitland. Though he said he has not read or watched any of the recent accounts about him, he told his congregation two Sundays ago that the devil was behind all the recent controversy.

“If they crucified Jesus,” he said, “they’re going to talk about me.”

Neither Clint Brown nor Angela Brown responded to repeated requests by the Sentinel for comment.

Seven FaithWorld members spoke to the Sentinel, and all steadfastly supported Brown.

“He’s just down-to-earth and for real,” said Chester Blanton, 56, of Orlando. “A lot of people in the congregation knew the things that were going on in his personal life, but we don’t have anything to do with that.

“Who are we to judge? Because we are not here to judge; we’re here to learn the word of God, and he’ll be the judge.”

‘He preached money’

Much of Clint Brown’s ministry focuses on money: giving it to the church and receiving heaven’s blessings accordingly.

In his past three Sundays in the pulpit, Brown’s first words to his Pentecostal congregation involved giving money to the church. Giving sacrificially will be rewarded manifold because it “opens up the window of heaven that pours out a blessing that we do not have enough room to contain,” he quoted from the Bible on Jan. 23.

This message has alienated at least one of Brown’s former followers.

Linda Devine, 51, left FaithWorld in 2001 because Brown “didn’t preach salvation. He didn’t preach the Gospel. . . . He preached money.” If you didn’t tithe, Devine said, the entire congregation would suffer.

“It’s a total guilt trip,” the Altamonte Springs telemarketer said.

Brown’s style of preaching, known as prosperity gospel, mirrors that of televangelist Benny Hinn, his predecessor at the congregation. Prosperity gospel is a strain of Pentecostalism that periodically cycles through American religion and is not confined to a single denomination, according to Leo Sandon, emeritus professor of religion at Florida State University.

“The whole idea is that there’s a mechanism whereby if you give to a church or a ministry, that gift comes back to you a hundredfold,” Sandon said. “It borders on magic rather than on traditional Christian theology.”

A national figure in the Charismatic-Pentecostal community, Brown is clearly identified with prosperity gospel, said Lee Grady, editor of Lake Mary-based Charisma, an independent Christian magazine.

“Your average observer would certainly put him in that category,” Grady said. “He certainly believes in prosperity.”

For experts who study the phenomenon, the prosperity gospel appeals to Americans’ materialism.

Its message “either justifies your lifestyle and justifies your wealth, or it gives a hope for achieving that wealth,” said Margaret Poloma, a sociology professor and author of Main Street Mystics: The Toronto Blessing and Reviving American Pentecostalism.

Clint Brown gets his wealth through a mix of salary and benefits from FaithWorld as well as from his musical career.

In 2002, his income topped $650,000, according to his wife’s divorce filing. Of that total, he only earned $142,432 in salary from FaithWorld, and a nontaxable housing allowance of more than $100,000. More than half of that year’s income came from music royalties, compact-disc sales and performances.

Though his church salary remained steady from 2000 to 2002, the most recent years included in the divorce file, outside revenue from his music career jumped from $48,000 to $380,000 during the same period.

The Browns spent accordingly.

From 2001 to 2004, Clint Brown set up credit accounts at Mayors Jewelers to buy four Rolex watches ranging from $23,000 to $40,900, according to loan documents filed with the state. In June 2001, the divorce file shows, Angela Brown rang up credit-card charges of $9,175 at the Escada boutique in Bal Harbour — and spent an additional $12,000 there the next month. In June 2003, Clint Brown charged $12,057 at St. John Boutique in Bal Harbour. On two Las Vegas trips, Clint Brown spent nearly $25,000 at shops such as the Fendi boutique, Versace Jeans Couture and Hyde Park jewelers.

In the divorce filing, Angela Brown says her husband purchased $70,000 worth of women’s clothing on one of the couple’s credit cards, but none of it went to her or her teenage daughter. She says in the divorce filing that FaithWorld paid for all those clothing purchases.

FaithWorld church attorney Mark Matthew O’Mara said he is reviewing all the bills submitted by the Browns to the church. He said an unknown number of the couple’s credit-card charges were approved by the church’s governing board, composed of the church’s staff management team — all of them paid employees of the congregation.

In Pentecostal circles, expensive gifts of clothing are common, said former FaithWorld member Wayne Pugh, a missionary based in Marietta, Ga.

“People that minister for us, we don’t just give them a check at the end of the night,” Pugh said. “We buy them a gift — a brand-new suit, ties, a box of chocolates. That’s common knowledge.”

So when prominent female ministers come through Orlando, Pugh said, it would be common for ministers such as Brown to lavish them with a $2,000 or $3,000 suit.