Carlton Pearson, influential megachurch founder who rejected the idea of hell, dies at 70

OKLAHOMA CITY — The founder of a former megachurch in Oklahoma who was branded a heretic and lost one audience — but gained a new one — after he rejected the idea of hell and supported gay rights has died, his agent said Monday.

Bishop Carlton Pearson died Sunday night in hospice care in Tulsa due to cancer, said his agent, Will Bogle.

Pearson was 70.

Early in his ministry he was considered a rising star on the Pentecostal preaching circuit and frequently appeared on the Trinity Broadcasting Network, bringing him to an international audience.

From a ministry he started in 1977, Pearson in 1981 founded Higher Dimensions Family Church in Tulsa — later known as New Dimensions Church, whose membership numbered about 6,000 by the turn of the century.

Membership plummeted to a few hundred by 2008 after Pearson began teaching what he called “the gospel of inclusion,” a form of universalism, which does not recognize hell.

Bogle said Pearson told him that he did not believe he had made a mistake with his theological change.

“People were forced to question what they were saying” about salvation, Bogle said. “And as polarizing as Bishop Pearson has been his whole life … he was a really good guy, he didn’t take himself seriously, he cared about people.”

In 2007, Pearson helped lead hundreds of clergy members from across the nation in urging Congress to pass landmark hate crime and job discrimination measures for gay people.

Pearson was shunned by other evangelical leaders, branded a heretic and later became a United Church of Christ minister. Higher Dimensions ultimately lost its building to foreclosure and Pearson preached his final sermon there in September 2008 as the church was absorbed into All Souls Unitarian Church in Tulsa.

After the collapse of his old ministry, his story was chronicled in a lengthy episode of public radio’s “This American Life,” which became the basis for the 2018 Netflix movie, “Come Sunday,” starring Chiwetel Ejiofor.