Bible College Founder’s Guilty Pleas Illustrate Dramatic Fall from Grace

By David Wren
The State
September 3, 2014

http://www.thestate.com/2014/09/03/3657180_bible-college-founders-guilty.html?sp=%2F99%2F205%2F&rh=1

Cathedral Bible College founder Reginald Wayne Miller — whose ambition as a young adult put him briefly in the national spotlight before allegations of sexual improprieties chased his ministry from Florence to Myrtle Beach — pleaded guilty in federal court Wednesday to four felony charges and two misdemeanors related to labor fraud, visa fraud and failing to pay minimum wages.

The charges stem from Miller’s treatment of international students who came to the college, which re-located its main campus from Myrtle Beach to Marion in 2012, hoping to earn degrees in theology, ministry and other Christian studies.

Students told investigators earlier this year that their classes were a sham, they lived in substandard conditions and Miller forced them to work at the college or his home for little pay, according to court documents. If they refused to work, the students said, Miller threatened to deport them.

The charges carry a combined maximum of 41 years in prison and more than $1 million in fines. Miller, who had been in jail — first at the Florence County Detention Center and later at J. Reuben Long Detention Center in Conway — since his arrest on March 21, was released Wednesday on a $50,000 unsecured bond.

The terms of Miller’s bond forbid him from visiting the college’s campus or communicating with any past or current international students. He also is not allowed to access the college’s Student and Exchange Visitor Information System, or SEVIS, which is used to update the federal government about the status of foreigners here on student visas.

Miller, who has made frequent trips to Israel, Bermuda and other foreign countries, also was ordered to surrender his passport and cannot travel outside of South Carolina without prior authorization.

No sentencing date has been set for Miller, who lives in Marion.

Wednesday’s guilty pleas represent a stunning downfall for a man who once led one of South Carolina’s largest charismatic churches and was a leading spokesman for the movement, which emphasizes speaking in tongues, prophecy and faith healing.

At the height of his early career, Miller was featured in an April 1987 Los Angeles Times article as one of the leading charismatics seeking to keep former television evangelist and Moral Majority leader Jerry Falwell from taking over the PTL ministry in the wake of Jim Bakker’s infidelity scandal.

“I would rather see PTL close down than to see it used by Jerry Falwell,” Miller told the newspaper at the time.

Miller’s climb through the preaching ranks started in 1970 when he became pastor of Tabernacle United Methodist Church near Pamplico. Two years later, Miller founded his own church — Florence Tabernacle. By the mid-1970s, Miller had established Gloryland Bible College — the forerunner of Cathedral Bible College — in Florence, where he also broadcast a daily television show called “Good Morning Jesus” that eventually reached five states and Canada.

An Associated Press reporter in 1979, noting Miller’s rising star, said of the then 30-year-old Hemingway native: “He’s got the looks, he’s got the charm and, heaven knows, he’s got the ambition.”

That ambition took a toll on Miller’s personal life, according to an affidavit his ex-wife, Susan, filed in their 2007 divorce proceedings.

“It was literally a 24-hour, every day process,” Susan Miller stated in the affidavit, explaining how she and her husband drifted apart in the years since their 1994 wedding. “Our entire life seemed to be always working for the parishioners.”

Susan Miller said in the affidavit that her “world began slowly crumbling” when the wives of two female Bible college students accused Wayne Miller of making sexual advances toward their husbands. Then, in the late 1980s, a Florence television station broadcast a five-part news report in which students with blurred faces and disguised voices recounted inappropriate advances they said Miller made toward them, the affidavit states.

Wayne Miller and his wife were forced to sell their Florence home, Susan Miller said in the affidavit, and move to Myrtle Beach, where he conducted sermons in an empty storefront.

When the Myrtle Beach Air Force Base closed in 1993, Miller seized on the opportunity to get some of the property through a federal program called a public benefit conveyance — meant to help spur economic development at closed military bases. Miller’s brashness — and the loud, sometimes angry, demonstrations of his followers — at meetings irritated some members of the Myrtle Beach Air Base Redevelopment Authority, who Miller once threatened in writing that they might contract a deadly disease if they did not meet his demands.

The authority eventually relented and Miller was allowed to purchase the base chapel and some surrounding land in 1995 at below-market value through the federal program. It’s where Cathedral Bible College — and, at one time, a private, unaccredited school for kindergarten through high school — operated for years.

Then, in 2006, the Horry County Police Department charged Miller with lewdness and prostitution, saying he exposed himself to an undercover male police officer in a bath house at Myrtle Beach State Park, according to a police report. Miller entered into a pre-trial intervention program and the charge ultimately was expunged. He moved to Marion shortly afterward, and the main Cathedral Bible College campus followed a few years later.

Miller’s fortunes appeared to improve in Marion, where Mayor Bobby Davis awarded him the key to the city and the town’s Swamp Fox Award in 2013 for his efforts at redeveloping an old health care facility into the new college campus.

It’s not clear how Homeland Security learned about Miller’s illegal work program for foreign students. The agency’s investigators said in court documents that they interviewed eight students in the spring who “described a pervasive climate of fear in which their legal status as non-immigrant students was in constant jeopardy, at the sole discretion of Miller.”

A criminal complaint filed earlier this year states Miller forced students to work at the college and his home sometimes for more than 40 hours a week and for as little as $25 per week.

The official charges against Miller are two felony counts of visa fraud, which carries a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison for each charge, and two felony counts of fraud in labor contracting, which carries maximum prison terms of five years for each charge.

Prosecutors say Miller included false statements on documents — known as F-1 forms — that are submitted to the federal government and include information about a foreign student’s eligibility to study here. Miller stated that the students would not work more than 20 hours a week when he knew their work hours would exceed that maximum and he stated that students would receive educational instruction when, in fact, they did not.

Miller also pleaded guilty to a pair of misdemeanor charges of willful failure to pay minimum wage, which carries a maximum sentence of six months in prison for each charge

Contact: dwren@thesunnews.com