Rick Joyner

Rick Joyner (born 1949) heads MorningStar Ministries, which he co-founded in 1983 in Jackson, Mississippi with his wife, Julie Joyner.

Joyner was born in Raleigh, North Carolina in 1949 and grew up in Richmond, Virginia.

Navy and immediate aftermath

Joyner served in the Navy until 1970, and then moved back to Raleigh. He is reported to have worked part-time in a Raleigh jazz club after leaving the Navy, quitting when, as he put it, he "found out there is a God." He subsequently moved to Jackson, Mississippi and founded a charter air company.

Morningstar Ministries

Rick Joyner and his wife, Julie, founded MorningStar Ministries in Jackson in 1983.

By the mid 1990s Joyner was president of MorningStar publications, located at that time in Charlotte, North Carolina.

In that period, Joyner began working with Reggie White, who was planning to purchase Jim Bakker's defunct resort, Heritage USA.

In 1997 Joyner purchased 320 acres of land in Wilkes County, North Carolina near Moravian Falls and moved the headquarters of MorningStar there from Charlotte.

By 1999 Joyner appears in news reports regarding his participation in plans to build a biblical theme park, in particular, with Reggie White, who had been unsuccessful in his attempts to purchase the Heritage USA theme park property.

In 2004 MorningStar purchased part of the Heritage USA complex (originally established by Bakker and PTL in Fort Mill, South Carolina) for $1.6 million. The complex has been renamed Heritage International Ministries Conference Center.

In the mid 1990s Joyner was one of the all-male members of the "International Advisors-At-Large" to the evangelical Christian women's organization Aglow International.

Joyner has been accused of being an adherent of Dominion Theology, which advocates the involvement in and eventual takeover of civil government by Christians.

By 1999 Joyner had what was been referred to as a "religious empire" that was grossing $8 million a year and was denied a religious property tax exemption by the North Carolina Department of Revenue. Department director John C. Bailey said that "[w]ith MorningStar there are a lot of tracts with costly improvements that affect tax liability significantly...If we did not limit exemptions, it would increase the burden on people, like you and me, who own homes that are not affiliated with any group." MorningStar appealed the Department of Revenue's denial.

Controversy has also accompanied Joyner's support for Canadian evangelist Todd Bentley, around the visit of Bentley to Concord, North Carolina in the summer of 2008. Bentley has claimed to heal the sick, including through "mass healings", and also to raise people from the dead—at least 35, including 3 people in Pakistan—uncritical reports of which were carried by Morningstar TV—part of Joyner's Heritage International Ministries—with investigative reports (such as in ABC's Nightline) concluding that "not a single miracle could be verified."

As well, Joyner was alongside Bentley after Bentley's marital infidelity and divorce from his wife in August 2008, including serving on a committee with Jack Deere and Bill Johnson, to oversee the process of "restoring" Bentley. Bentley ultimately failed to submit to the process, and divorced and remarried, with Joyner making the announcement of the remarriage on March 9, 2009.

Joyner is the author of many books. Some of the works are as follows.

• —— (2013). Vinci, Kay, ed. The Path. Fire on the Mountain. Jun, Eunjoo (illustr). Fort Mill, SC: MorningStar Publications. ISBN 1607085240. Retrieved December 25, 2016.  [Fiction]

• Google Staff (December 24, 2016). "Rick Joyner [inauthor search]". Books.Google.com. Retrieved December 25, 2016. 

In April 2013, Joyner and his daughter, Anna, participated in the Showtime documentary Years of Living Dangerously, a 9-part series focused on climate change. In the fourth episode, celebrity Ian Somerhalder follows Joyner's activist daughter as she tries to persuade her father, a climate change skeptic, to change his mind about global warming.

Rick and his wife, Julie, have five children: Anna, Aaryn, Amber, Ben, and Sam.