After his release, Keller returned to Chicago and became an itinerant evangelist, traveling around the country telling his story and saving souls in Christian churches of every stripe, from 5,000-member Pentecostal flocks to a small black church in Pensacola, with a congregation of one the night he was there. After a while, though, his job became frustrating. "As an evangelist I was supposed to reach the lost," he says. "Church was the last place I needed to be preaching. The people are already Christians. I was not reaching the audience God had called me to reach."
When Richard Dortch, former president of Jim Bakker's PTL Ministries, called and asked Keller to work on a program for Christian station WLCF-Ch. 22 in Clearwater, he accepted. Soon he started producing Christian TV shows for stations around the country. But the same frustrations began to vex him. "The Christian TV marketplace is very confined," he says. "Ninety-eight percent of viewers are already Christians. I had to look for an audience outside of this."
So he bailed and went out on his own, displaying his knack for prescience again by picking the Internet, even though he didn't know a gigabyte from a dog bite when he launched liveprayer.com. The salesman-turned-preacher intuitively knew it needed a hook. That's where the live video streaming came in. ("The sizzle that sells the steak," he says in sales-speak.) He knew he needed to regularly infuse the site with fresh content, so he included the Daily Devotionals. Unwittingly, he had launched what Internet experts call a "viral marketing" campaign. People began asking to receive his sermons via e-mail. It began with a few thousand, then started to spread exponentially.
People constantly refer their friends and family. During a 20-minute span one morning in early November, Keller received 99 e-mails, many of which included several addresses to be added to the list. In as long as a football half-time, he had gathered, without solicitation, 120 new names.
Not long after Keller started e-mailing his sermons, some folks began shooting him prayer requests. He did the only thing he knew: He answered them. At first it was just a few hundred, but responses multiplied to the current daily average of about 40,000.
In order to handle the volume, Keller has recruited some 600 volunteers, mostly retired clergy, to answer about 70 e-mailed prayer requests per day. He says they use templated responses that address particular problems — health, finances, divorce, etc. — and then add brief, personalized postscripts.
Keller still runs a lean operation with a lot of volunteer help. That's mostly because, so far, he has refused to cash in.
Keller reckons he could quickly turn his ministry into a $15-million annual concern by selling content ($5 a month to receive the devotionals, for instance), by selling ads that would be attached to his e-mails, and by renting his list to other marketers.
Although he's fielded inquiries about such opportunities, the evangelist says he's not biting. "The Bible said the gospel is free," Keller explains. "You can't sell the gospel. As for advertising, one-third of the people who get the devotionals are not saved. The second I make it a billboard, I just become another commercial religious venture. I lose my edge to impact their lives. If I start selling people's names, they'll know soon enough and all the trust I've built up over 50 months goes down the toilet over a few million bucks. This is a ministry. If I wanted to make money I could easily go into another business."
Further, Keller does not hammer his flock for bucks. Liveprayer.com includes a couple of inconspicuous links for donations. There are no solicitations attached to his e-mail missives. Twice a month, he asks for money in his Daily Devotional.
At this point, liveprayer.com, which costs about $30,000 a month to maintain, more or less breaks even, Keller says, sustaining itself on donations.
Keller is acutely aware that the public distrusts telepreachers and fears Internet scams. So he readily agreed to provide the nonprofit tax returns for Bill Keller Ministries as well as his personal income tax statements. From 1999, the first year of liveprayer.com, to 2002, his personal income rose from $19,200 to $36,486. He also received an $8,700 housing allowance from the ministry. Keller lives in mid Pinellas County with his wife Nan. They have no children.
Keller declined, however, to disclose any information about the financial backers who have loaned him more than $560,000 over the past several years. He said they wish to remain anonymous. "Most of them have been reading the Daily Devotionals for years," he explains. "These people not only have the resources, but they've caught the vision of what we're doing."