TBN’s Iconic Former SoCal Headquarters Demolished
A Southern California monument to the successes and excesses of televangelism was torn down last week.
The iconic former headquarters of Trinity Broadcasting Network, in Costa Mesa, Calif., was demolished after standing vacant for several years.
Construction workers with backhoes knocked down the palatial, 65,6500-square-foot building — with curving golden staircases, marble and mirror surfaces and floor-to-ceiling murals of biblical characters and angels — to make way for 142 new homes.
“My head hurts,” Paul Crouch Jr., the eldest son of the late TBN founders Jan and Paul Crouch Sr., wrote on social media last Friday. “This is not what my parents envisioned, but the last chapter has not been written.”
TBN bought the six-acre property on the 405 Freeway in Costa Mesa for $6 million in 1996, more than 20 years after the elder Paul Crouch had a vision of satellites spreading the gospel.
Crouch, the one-time director of the Assemblies of God’s motion picture and television division, started his own network in 1973. While other televangelists were focusing on content and developing innovative programs, he built an unmatched distribution system, which became the largest Christian network in the world.
By the mid 1990s, TBN had 784 broadcast, cable and satellite affiliates. The headquarters, completed in 1998, was designed to showcase that success. When it opened to visitors, a spokesman told the Los Angeles Times it was built to glorify God and delight believers. Visitors could tour seven days a week, get baptized in an outdoor fountain and join one of the studio audiences.
Televangelist Benny Hinn said at the time that pulling up to the headquarters felt like arriving at the White House. Paul Crouch Sr. called it Southern California’s version of the Sistine Chapel.
Some of TBN’s faithful viewers had even loftier descriptions.
A California woman who drove 30 miles and waited in line for two hours to view the newly opened building told the Times reporter, “I think it must be the closest thing to heaven.”
‘Appeals for money never stop’
The elaborate and ostentatious displays also attracted criticism. A Los Angeles Times investigation in 2004 reported that TBN was raising $170 million per year, much of it coming from poor, rural viewers.
One 52-year-old woman said at the time she gave $70 per month out of her $820 disability check. She considered it a deal: She watched TBN 18 hours a day and the programing “gave me purpose that God could use me,” she said.
The broadcasts went out to about 5 million homes every week and the Crouch family “parlayed their viewers’ small expressions of faith into … a life of luxury,” the paper reported. “At TBN, the appeals for money never stop.”
TBN dealt with several sexual scandals over the years. In 2004 Paul Crouch Sr. was accused of paying a former employee to keep quiet about “a homosexual encounter.” (Crouch vehemently denied the accusation, according to Christianity Today.)
In 2012, one of the Crouch’s granddaughters filed a suit claiming she was raped by a TBN employee and Jan Crouch covered it up. A jury found TBN liable.
Another granddaughter accused Jan and Paul Crouch Sr. of taking $50 million from the ministry for their personal use. The ministry said she was lying and leveled its own accusation, alleging the granddaughter was the one who was guilty of embezzlement.
“It’s kind of a sordid affair,” one of the lawyers involved in the suits told the Orange County Register.
None of that seemed to damper viewer numbers, which were in fact growing. In 2014, a year after Paul Crouch Sr. died, TBN announced it had 8,000 cable and satellite affiliates and could reach approximately 80% of all homes in the United States. The ministry also had a growing global audience.
Some observers believe that TBN ran into financial trouble in the following years, vastly overspending and struggling to maintain a high volume of donations. The Orange County Register reported “very clear signs of trouble” in 2016 and said financial distress prompted TBN to sell the headquarters the following year.
Opaque finances
But the financial state of TBN has always been difficult to assess. The ministry is not structured as a single entity, according to tax records. In 2017, TBN was made up of 11 broadcasting companies, a publisher, a trust, a museum and a church.
Today, TBN consists of nine entities classified as churches, four as broadcast companies, three production companies, one technology company, a trust and a (shuttered) museum. Trinity Broadcasting of Arizona, which is registered in Fort Worth, Texas, reported an annual deficit in 2024, the last year for which records are publicaly available.
Trinity Broadcasting of Florida, which is also registered in Fort Worth, reported a surplus of $1.3 million that same year.
But records also show the organizations are not completely financially independent. In 2019, for example, Trinity Broadcasting of Santa Ana transferred $860 million to Trinity Broadcasting of Texas, and Trinity Broadcasting of Texas gave $40 million to Trinity Broadcasting of Santa Ana.
TBN also sometimes purchases property through for-profit limited liability companies, religion journalist Steve Rabey reported.
“Lack of financial transparency is a recurring problem,” Rabey wrote in Ministry Watch. “It’s impossible to know the true financial status of TBN.”
Matthew Crouch, the founders’ second son and current TBN president, gave a non-financial explanation for the sale of the Costa Mesa headquarters in 2017. He said the building had just grown obsolete.
The LAist reported that Matthew Crouch told supporters the sale of the property would “provide the network with new options” as it sought to adapt to reach more millennials “as well as a diverse and changing culture.”
Property to be turned into housing
TBN sold the property for $18 million in 2017. The new owners had plans to gut and remodel the property, turning it into an international English language school. But money for that project ran out during the COVID-19 pandemic.
A commercial real estate company bought the building for $22 million in 2021 and renamed it The Palazzo by Khoshbin. The former TBN headquarters became an events venue, marketed on social media as a “magical European-style” space.
It was sold again in 2025 for $45.5 million. The new owner proposed to raze the former TBN headquarters and turn the site into housing.
“We continue to see robust demand for well-located real estate with redevelopment opportunities throughout Southern California,” a real estate agent involved in the sale told the Orange County Business Journal.
The builder, Meritage Homes, received city approval to construct 142 residences, a mix of four-bedroom, three-bath town houses and two-bedroom, two-bathroom homes. California, like much of the country, has been dealing with a severe housing shortage. Orange County real estate agents are thrilled at the news, though construction is expected to take several years.
TBN has moved to a new home in nearby Tustin, California, where it now occupies a nondescript office building. At the end of last week, the only remnant of the old televangelism landmark was a white pergola with a stone statue of the archangel Michael.
This article was originally published by The Roys Report.
Daniel Silliman is senior reporter/editor at The Roys Report. He began his two decades in journalism covering crime in Atlanta and has since led major investigations into abuse and misconduct in Christian contexts. Daniel and his wife live in Johnson City, Tennessee.