Pastor Terry Jones, Creation House, and Maranatha
Richard Bartholomew printable version print page     Bookmark and Share
Thu Aug 05, 2010 at 11:35:07 AM EST

According to Amazon, Tuesday was the launch date of Islam is of the Devil, a book published by Creation House and written by the now-notorious Pastor Terry D. Jones of the Dove World Outreach Center in Florida. As with Fred Phelps, Jones has a particular obsession with one subject which he has distilled into a slogan, and he uses stunts such as his planned "Burn a Koran Day" to attract media interest. However, while Phelps is confined to the fringes of fundamentalism, Jones is better-connected: Creation House is one of the biggest conservative Christian publishing houses in the USA, and it is an imprint of Strang Communications, which publishes Charisma magazine. In 2005 Stephen Strang, who heads the company, was named by Time as one of the "25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America". Further, Jones was involved with the controversial "Maranatha Ministries" in the 1980s, along with a number of figures who are today influential in the neo-Pentecostal "Third Wave".