Scrushy Starts Ministry as Trial Nears

Ordained as a minister and acquitted in a $2.7-billion fraud, fired HealthSouth Chief Executive Richard Scrushy is done with the corporate boardroom. Now, he says, it’s all about God.

Scrushy has helped found a ministry he says is feeding starving children in Africa and is planning further missionary work. It also wants to build a Bible-based university and offer services including mortgages, insurance and healthcare, he says.

Working with a small group of Birmingham-area ministers who have relatively little business experience, Scrushy co-founded Kingdom Builders International Ministries, which was unveiled recently with the introduction of its website.

The site appeared just ahead of Scrushy’s May 1 trial on felony charges unrelated to the HealthSouth Corp. accounting scandal, but he said Kingdom Builders had been in the works for months.

“This is about building God’s kingdom and helping his children,” Scrushy said in an interview with the Associated Press. “My wife and I have been called to this.”

A federal prosecutor said it was “more than a coincidence” that Scrushy’s ministry was expanding amid the run-up to his trial in Montgomery, Ala., where a religious TV program featuring Scrushy and his wife also has started airing.

“He tries to reach out to people and manipulate them into thinking he’s spreading the Gospel,” Assistant U.S. Atty. Louis Franklin said.

Money generated by the business side of the ministry will go toward mission work and the “kingdom of God,” not any person, Scrushy told the Associated Press.

For monthly contributions of $10 to $1,000, Kingdom Builders offers individual members and churches a chance to join in international mission work. Scrushy says the group currently provides food for 2,000 children a day through affiliates in Africa.

“You can’t do much with $1,000 a month by yourself, but you can do a lot with it if you’re working with other churches,” Scrushy said.

The group’s website plans to offer members access to services including group insurance, mortgage loans, construction and a university that is scheduled to have its groundbreaking in suburban Birmingham this fall.

Carla Busbee, the executive director of Kingdom Builders, said the services were geared mainly toward independent U.S. churches and their pastors, not congregations affiliated with big denominations.

Most of the offerings mentioned on the website aren’t available yet, Busbee said.

“That’s sort of like a vision. Eventually we’ll work into all those things,” she said.

The group is negotiating with Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Alabama for group health insurance for pastors in the state, she said, and it plans to seek similar deals in other states.

The ministry doesn’t need insurance licenses to operate because it is acting as a bargaining agent rather than selling insurance itself, Busbee said.

Scrushy said the organization was set up as a nonprofit charity under Internal Revenue Service rules. He said there were plans to expand meal distribution in Africa and build churches there and in South America.

Busbee, who also works as the associate pastor of a Birmingham-area church, said she had little contact with Scrushy and was unsure whether he had a formal title with Kingdom Builders. Scrushy says “co-founder” sums up his work best.

“I’m a volunteer,” he said.

Kingdom Builders’ website touts Scrushy’s corporate and Wall Street experience but avoids mentioning his legal troubles, which include his upcoming federal trial in an alleged government bribery scheme unrelated to the debacle at HealthSouth.

“I believe that God is calling many from Wall Street, the business community and Hollywood to help build his kingdom,” Scrushy is quoted as saying on the website, which is linked to his personal Internet domain.

Scrushy said Kingdom Builders wasn’t affiliated with Scrushy Ministries, which the former CEO began with his wife, Leslie, a former HealthSouth employee. She is the daughter of a Methodist minister; he, too, was raised Methodist and began practicing his faith in a very public way as the fraud case loomed.

Scrushy and his wife began hosting a Christian-themed TV show as prosecutors built their case in the HealthSouth fraud, and he was ordained as a minister in December 2004 -- the month before his fraud trial began.

Working with his wife, Scrushy now pastors a church of his own. The congregation meets in the studio of a television station owned by one of Scrushy’s sons-in-law.

Scrushy declined to discuss numbers but said the group’s funds came from personal donations and memberships.

Kingdom Builders is scheduled to hold a kickoff “founders meeting” at a Birmingham hotel April 26. Five days later, Scrushy will be back in a federal courtroom in Montgomery.

Scrushy is set for trial May 1 on charges of giving $500,000 to former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman’s state lottery campaign in exchange for a seat on a powerful state board that regulates hospitals.

Siegelman and two former Cabinet members are to stand trial with Scrushy. All maintain their innocence.

Scrushy was acquitted in June 2005 of charges that he directed the massive fraud that nearly drove HealthSouth, a national leader in medical rehabilitation, to bankruptcy.

Fifteen former HealthSouth executives pleaded guilty in the scam, including five finance chiefs who testified that Scrushy was in on the fraud from the start. Jurors who acquitted Scrushy said they didn’t believe the testimony of the CFOs and other government evidence.