Dr. Terry Wayne Millender, until recently was the senior pastor at Victorious Life Church in Alexandria, Virginia. In his role people loved and trusted him. Pastor will become a prison preacher after swindling members of his flock!
Unfortunately, he has just been sentenced to eight years in prison for swindling the same members of his flock who loved and trusted him, fellow clergymen and good-hearted investors out of more than $2 million. His imprisonment was the eventual outcome of his arrest in 2016 after the government had caught up with him.
The Pastor as “Businessman”
Millender was a founder of an organization he named the Micro-Enterprise Management Group (MEMG). The mission of MEMG certainly sounded noble enough. The organization intended to help poor entrepreneurs with big dreams in Third World countries. MEMG was going to work with a network of micro-finance institutions.
Micro-finance is the concept of giving small businesses a boost-up, where those small businesses can’t approach traditional lending institutions. In the U.S., the amount might be $5,000 rather than $100,000, in a Third World country, it might be $500 or less. Used properly, it is a noble cause that has yielded excellent results.
The make the pastor’s mission more appealing, he stressed that MEMG was a Christian organization, loaning funds in a Christian way. Millender was, forgive me, as unethical as hell. He had parishioners take money out of their retirement accounts and place it in a shell company that he called Equity Trust. It had nothing to do with MEMG, micro-loans or ethical/religious behavior. The investors believed that Equity Trust was an intermediary of some kind, that it was a portal to MEMG. In truth, it was a plaything.
The pastor pulled money out of Equity Trust to trade in foreign exchange markets and stock options, perhaps two of the riskiest investments imaginable. The pastor seemed to know what he was doing, as he used all of the profits for personal expenses, including rent, golf outings, birthday parties and other luxuries, including a $1.75 million home filled with expensive furniture.
MEMG Fails
Not surprising, given the kind of investing he was doing, MEMG failed. Not content to attempt to pay back what he had literally stolen, Millender formed a new company called Kingdom Commodities Unlimited. Talk about shady investments, he told investors they would be brokering deals with Nigerian oil interests in the name of Christian values. He convinced people to place more than $450,000 in that venture. It failed as well, and that is when suspicions really began to run high.
The news out of Alexandria is that those who lost their money to this swindler were devastated on many levels. It was more than a loss of faith, it was also a loss of their precious retirement funds. As with many inspirational pastors, Millender wrote books to raise his platform. The title of his last book, “It’s Time to Produce!” is ironic. What this man has produced are pain, sadness, and broken dreams.
This scandal was ripe for fraud from the outset, starting with the shell company. However, and the disgraced pastor knew this, those taken into the scam were naïve, good-hearted and loving people whose greatest flaw was to trust him. I am sure, knowing this from my own experiences, that several parishioners gave money to Millender simply because in their eyes he was a minor celebrity – they wanted to curry favor with him.
How would the average parishioner in this, know or even be able to trace, where their hard-earned money was going? There was no oversight. The pastor knew he had a golden opportunity, and as despicable as it was, he saw the opportunity as a stepping stone to fulfill a need for more money and a bigger lifestyle. There was nothing godly in his intentions.
How could he rationalize his behavior? Perhaps he felt that at some he would make enough money on the options market to pay back what he had stolen or to possibly, legitimately invest in lenders in Third World countries who would put the money to good use. However, the level of sophistication needed to invest in options and currency exchanges and to throw off a profit stream is tough for the most sophisticated investors, let alone a pastor who was really the consummate scam artist.
Rationalization aside, the man was the opposite of what he claimed to be. I doubt he will find many sympathizers save for his fellow crooks in jail.
