Televangelist seeks donations for $54 million private jet

A Louisiana-based televangelist is seeking donations for a private jet that costs $54 million so that his ministry “can go anywhere in the world in one stop.”

Jesse Duplantis called on his disciples to contribute to the cause in a weekly video on the Jesse Duplantis Ministries website, The Times-Picayune reported.

“I really believe that if the Lord Jesus Christ was physically on the Earth today, he wouldn’t be riding a donkey,” Duplantis says in the video. “He’d be in an airplane flying all over the world.”

He called aviation “an amazing tool for evangelizing the world” in a tweet promoting the campaign.

Jesse Duplantis Ministries has purchased three private jets and has been “burning them up for the Lord Jesus Christ,” Duplantis says.

He currently travels on a Dassault Falcon 50.

He’s now eying a Dassault Falcon 7X, billed as “the benchmark for the 21st century business jet.”

It accommodates eight passengers and three crew members, and is designed to fly 5,950 nautical miles, enabling trips between Paris and Tokyo, or Johannesburg and London. The new plane costs $54 million, according to SherpaReport.com, a website dedicated to private aviation.

It can cost more than $1 million to operate annually, according to the site.

Duplantis said that God is behind the initiative.

He claims God told him: “I want you to believe in me for a Falcon 7X.”

He defended the prospective purchase, saying: “I really believe that preachers ought to go on every available voice, every available outlet, to get this gospel preached to the world.”

Texas-based televangelist Kenneth Copeland recently announced he’d acquired a Gulfstream V jet for “the Lord’s work,” according to The Christian Post.