PRAY AND GROW RICH.

If you had wandered into the World Changers Church International World Dome on a Sunday morning not long ago, you might have thought you'd stumbled into a shareholders' meeting, and in some ways you had. The dome, in southwest Atlanta, seats eighty-five hundred and was about two-thirds full--there are two Sunday-morning services, at eight and eleven, to accommodate the demand. A team of ushers directed latecomers to their seats. The minister of the church, Dr. Creflo A. Dollar, is a leading exponent of what's called "prosperity theology," which holds that faith and wealth are "inevitably intertwined." Dollar runs his church like a corporation, and before the service began a big, bespectacled, anxious-looking man in charge of "ministry systems" stepped up to the lectern to deliver an informal quarterly report, by way of a PowerPoint presentation. According to the latest figures, World Changers had some twenty-five thousand members, but only thirty per cent of them were regular tithers.

When the presentation was finished, Dollar appeared. He's a stocky, powerful-looking man of forty-two, with broad shoulders and a broader smile, accentuated by a wide mustache and slightly splayed teeth; he smiles easily and often, to convey satisfaction and dissatisfaction in roughly equal measure. Providing a Biblical gloss on the theme of giving, he asked the worshippers to open their Bibles to Malachi 3:8-11, at the end of the Old Testament. It was a passage that many of the congregants knew by heart: "Will a man rob God? Yet ye have robbed me. But ye say, Wherein have we robbed thee? In tithes and offerings." Tithing, Dollar explained, means giving the church ten per cent of your income, before taxes, which, he noted, was good news, in a sense, because it meant that when you got your tax refund you could keep the whole thing. He warned the congregation that there were no discounts available, and added that people who were thinking of giving less than ten per cent might as well save their money. "Go buy a Happy Meal," he said, chuckling. And then the buckets were passed. Dollar's ministry is firmly committed to making its followers richer, although, of course, they'll have to return the favor.

If his last name seems suspiciously well chosen, he was born with it, and he sometimes says that he wishes he hadn't been. "Then the Lord called me to the ministry, with a name like Dollar," he'll say, and shake his head, as if he can't believe his bad luck. On other occasions, he'll mention his name as proof of his destiny. "I don't reckon my last name is Dollar for no reason at all," he told me. One of his ministry's biggest selling points is his glamorous life style. His followers see the hand of Providence in his custom-tailored suits and alligator shoes, his Rolls-Royces, his private airplanes. Dollar has also become something of a hip-hop icon. He appears in the music video "Welcome to Atlanta," by Jermaine Dupri and Ludacris, and 50 Cent recently rhymed "Creflo Dollar" with "pop my collar." When the rapper Ma$e decided to devote himself to God, Dollar became his spiritual father.

World Changers Church has nearly three hundred and forty employees and an annual budget of about eighty million dollars. In addition to the two Sunday-morning services, the church offers services on Wednesday and Friday nights, which are led by Dollar or by one of about a dozen other ministers in the church. The dome draws worshippers, largely African-American and largely middle-class, from all over the Southeast, and Dollar's broadcasts are available to just about any English-speaking person who owns a television or a radio. (He is particularly popular in Australia and South Africa; later this month, he will be leading a four-day conference in a vast arena in Johannesburg.) On October 30th, he will launch World Changers New York; he plans to commute from Atlanta each week to lead Saturday-night services at the Theatre at Madison Square Garden.

Dollar is a slick TV preacher who sometimes impersonates a down-home Holy Roller, a Bible-thumping evangelist who moonlights as a motivational speaker, a hard-nosed entrepreneur who sometimes talks like a black activist--and he might be the only person on the planet who can count both Evander Holyfield and Oral Roberts as friends. Dollar's commitment to the combined power of faith and finance puts him firmly in the American mainstream, alongside P. Diddy, President Bush, and a lot of other people in between. But while Dollar's loyal followers love his outsized personality, unsuspecting viewers who chance upon his paid programs on BET are just as likely to be appalled. For many people, there's something about a preacher in a Rolls-Royce that just doesn't seem right.

The World Changers headquarters occupy a vast, L-shaped array of buildings that used to be a strip mall, next to the World Dome; the hallways are long and spotless, lined with indistinguishable locked doors, and everyone wears a nametag. Dollar's office is marked by two huge polished wooden pillars, and a sign that says "Executive Suite"; it's an ersatz living room that feels more like a television studio. (He occasionally tapes segments there; the main studio is down the hall.) As at the pulpit, he is in person both casual and careful, amiable without ever seeming chatty; he doesn't move around much or raise his voice, perhaps because he has grown ...