KANSAS CITY, Mo. _ Roe Messner mourned his beloved Tammy Faye but knew better than to draw it out too long.
His wife, the former Tammy Faye Bakker, wouldn’t have liked it. She rose from being a preacher’s wife to a symbol of televangelism excess, but even in the depths of scandal, she kept singing and laughing as her world fell apart.
She was famous for her tears, but Tammy Faye never cried the blues.
Soon after she died of cancer July 20 at the couple’s home at Loch Lloyd in Cass County, Mo., Roe Messner went back to the office.
“I cried a bucket of tears,” Messner said last week. “But I know she’d say, `Go do your work. Go do what you love to do.'”
His work is what got Messner past earlier hard times _ the collapse of his business, a bankruptcy scandal, prison, his own battle with cancer.
A quiet, reserved man, Messner also endured years of the limelight, media scrutiny and often public ridicule that followed Tammy Faye, whom he married in 1993 after her marriage to Jim Bakker ended and their PTL empire had crumbled in disgrace.
But now, Messner, perhaps America’s most prolific church builder, is determined to keep going.
From his lakeside home in Loch Lloyd, he oversees a company that is currently putting up 30 new churches across the country. He’s been at it more than 50 years and now, at age 72, his goal is to have built a church in all 50 states.
So far, he’s up to 47 states and a total of 1,738 churches he’s built or designed, including 37 in the Kansas City area. That’s one new church every 11 days for better than half a century. Every Sunday morning, an estimated 1 million people walk into a Roe Messner church.
But it wasn’t easy going back to blueprints and architect meetings after July 20.
He knows that to many, Tammy Faye was a national punch line _ a dumb blonde with tight pants, low tops, big hair and too much mascara.
“The press never did get her right,” Messner said, shaking his head. “She was smart. And Tammy was the most loving, kind and forgiving person I ever met. People loved her. When she died, she got a million Internet hits and 14 bags of regular mail.”
Messner smiled. “There are two persons who don’t need a last name _ Elvis and Tammy Faye. When she walked into the room, everybody turned and looked.”
Seventeen days after Tammy Faye’s death, Messner was leading a church construction seminar at the President Hotel in downtown Kansas City. A key in getting a plan approved, he advised the audience, was to keep the congregation’s building committee small.
“I’ve seen committees so big that I thought the Lord himself couldn’t get a plan approved by this bunch,” Messner told the group to laughter.
He has been at this a long time.
He was born an Oklahoma farm boy during the Great Depression. When he was 8, his family moved to Wichita, Kan., where his father took a job at Beech Aircraft. As a high school student, Messner began working on a construction crew.
“I knew right then what I would do with my life,” he said.
He started his own company and was building homes around Wichita when he landed a contract to do an office building for the Assemblies of God. The completed project led someone to ask if he could build a church.
Sure, he said.
“But I had never built a church,” Messner said Thursday.
He drew up the plans on a drawing board in his bedroom. He built that church and later designed and built the much larger Calvary Assembly of God Church in Wichita, a job that, according to Messner, “put me on the map.”
He was soon traveling to national church conferences and landing construction projects all over the country.
In 1961, his company, Commercial Builders of Kansas Inc., built Grace Church of the Nazarene, his entry into the Kansas City market.
He built small churches and mega-churches. In the late 1980s, his reputation brought him to the attention of television evangelist Jim Bakker, who invited Messner to appear on his PTL program. Bakker was unable to appear that day, so his wife, Tammy Faye, filled in.
“That was the first time I met her, and I remember being struck by how smart she was,” Messner said.
His company later landed the contract for PTL’s Heritage USA complex in Fort Mill, S.C. The project _ a hotel, condominiums and a 30,000-seat church _ dominated the firm’s architects and designers.
At that point, the largely private Roe Messner was about to become a very public figure.
Jim Bakker got caught in a sex scandal with church secretary Jessica Hahn, paid hush money to keep her quiet, and went to prison for defrauding thousands of his followers who bought time-shares at Heritage USA. Messner claimed that he remained unpaid for millions of dollars of work.
In 1992, Tammy Faye divorced Bakker while he was in prison. Within a year, she married Messner, who also had recently divorced and filed for bankruptcy. He won’t talk about it today, but in 1995 he was convicted of concealing $400,000 of assets during his bankruptcy case. He eventually served 27 months in federal prison.
After his release, he and Tammy Faye lived a quiet retirement until Messner decided to start building churches again. It didn’t take long for him and his new company, Commercial Builders and Architects, to reclaim his past glory.
“He’s built more churches than any man alive,” said Donnie Haulk, owner of Audio Ethics, a Charlotte, N.C., company that specializes in installing sound systems in big churches.
“And the reason for that … the thing that people like about Roe Messner … is that unlike some church builders, he will build the church the congregation wants, rather than the church the contractor wants to build.”
It’s hard to quantify for certain that Messner’s 1,738 churches make him America’s most prolific church builder. But as Toby Van Wormer, executive director of the National Association of Church Design Builders, put it recently: “A church builder is doing good business if he builds four or five a year _ do the math.”
On Thursday, Roe Messner wanted to show off “Tammy Faye’s Dream House.”
In June 2006, he and his wife, by then sick with cancer, decided they wanted to move from Charlotte to Kansas City to be closer to family. She told him to go buy her a house.
“I told her I would go buy her a lot and build any house she wanted,” Messner said.
They bought a stack of home-design books. She picked out a design and told him she wanted a white living room and a red bathroom.
“Then she handed me a pillow and said she wanted her bedroom to match this,” he said.
The pillow was rose-colored.
Messner built the house on the wooded lakeside at Loch Lloyd. It is peach-colored, with wide brick steps leading to the front door. Inside, among the dark cherry trim, are Tammy Faye’s 14-foot-by-21-foot walk-in closet and an organ that used to sit in Frank Sinatra’s home in Palm Springs, Calif.
“Tammy loved to sit there and play and sing, even when she was sick,” Messner said.
Melanie Hart, a longtime friend and personal assistant of Tammy Faye’s, said the couple was a match made in heaven.
“They were opposites, but that’s how God works _ he puts surprises in our path. Roe loved Tammy’s vibrancy, and she needed his peace. They were so comfortable with each other, and I know she loved that new house.”
When Tammy Faye died at home, the plan was to keep the death quiet until arrangements could be made. But the news leaked, and media satellite trucks were soon camped out at Loch Lloyd’s front gate.
“I knew it would be a circus, so I had a white van sneak in and pull into the garage and take her body,” Messner said.
He said her ashes were buried “next to my mom in a country cemetery in Anthony, Kan.”
His lip quivered.
The jokes about Tammy Faye always hurt him more than they did her. She would laugh them off.
But she’s gone now, and he is alone in her dream house.
“If people knew her, they wouldn’t have said those things. I hope they stop now.”
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(c) 2007, The Kansas City Star.
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PHOTO (from MCT Photo Service, 202-383-6099): MESSNER
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