OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — The founder of a former megachurch in Oklahoma who was branded a heretic and lost one audience — but gained a new one — after he rejected the idea of hell and supported gay rights has died, his agent said Monday.
Bishop Carlton Pearson died Sunday night in hospice care in Tulsa due to cancer, said his agent, Will Bogle. Pearson was 70.
Early in his ministry he was considered a rising star on the Pentecostal preaching circuit and frequently appeared on the Trinity Broadcasting Network, bringing him to an international audience.
From a ministry he started in 1977, Pearson in 1981 founded Higher Dimensions Family Church in Tulsa — later known as New Dimensions Church, whose membership numbered about 6,000 by the turn of the century.
Membership plummeted to a few hundred by 2008 after Pearson began teaching what he called “the…
