Ronald Roe Messner is an American building contractor who has built more than 1,700 churches, including several megachurches. Having divorced his first wife, he married televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker in 1993 after her divorce from husband and PTL Club founder Jim Bakker.
Early life
Messner grew up in Waldron, Kansas, on the Kansas-Oklahoma border. He founded Messner Construction in Andover, Kansas, and began building churches.
Roe Messner gained fame with the construction of Heritage USA in 1978 at the behest of Jim Bakker. In 1987, he and his first wife, Ruth Ann, wrote a book titled Building for the Master. He reportedly played a behind-the-scenes role in the downfall of the PTL Club. He was reportedly the person who produced the money for the $265,000 payment to Jessica Hahn to cover up a brief sexual affair. Messner later billed PTL for work never completed on the Jerusalem Amphitheater at Heritage USA. Revelations of the payoff invited scrutiny of Bakker's finances, prompting him to be charged with fraud. In the Bakkers' fraud trial, Messner testified for Bakker's defense, saying that Jerry Falwell had attempted to take over PTL and its associated cable television network by dispatching Messner to the Bakker home in Palm Springs, California, to make an offer to "keep quiet". According to Messner's testimony, Tammy wrote the offer on her stationery, listing a $300,000-a-year lifetime salary for Jim, $100,000 a year for Tammy, a house, and a year's worth of free phone calls and health insurance. However, Messner said Bakker wrote on it: "I'm not making any demands on PTL. I'm not asking for anything." Falwell has denied making any offer. In the messy bankruptcy of PTL, Messner was listed as the single biggest creditor of PTL with an outstanding claim of $14 million. In court papers, the new operators accused Messner of $5.3 million in inflated or phony billings to PTL.
Messner divorced his first wife in 1993. At about the same time, Tammy Faye divorced Bakker. Messner and Tammy Faye were married in and lived in Rancho Mirage, California. In 1996, Roe Messner was sentenced to 27 months in federal prison for bankruptcy fraud charges and served his time from 1996 to 1999. In 2003 he published another book on church building entitled Church Growth by Design.
Tammy Faye Messner's death
In 2007, Messner and Tammy Faye moved to the gated community of Loch Lloyd, Missouri, a suburb of Kansas City. Tammy Faye died from cancer on July 20 that year; her last public appearance was a taped interview on CNN from their home the day before. Her ashes were interred in the Messner family plot in Waldron, immediately next to Messner's mother. Roe Messner himself is known to have received a diagnosis of prostate cancer in the past, though he told Larry King that his doctors had told him that he would not die from the disease.
Notable churches
Messner is reported to have been the biggest church builder in the United States. On August 7, 2007, he told Larry King that he had built 1,784 churches in 47 states. Messner supervised construction of the churches but was not the architect. To date he has designed and/or built over 1,800 churches in all 50 states.
