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The Rev. Frederick J. Eikerenkoetter II, the flamboyant, lavish-living preacher known as Reverend Ike, whose message of success and prosperity reached millions, has died. He was 74.
Rev. Ike, who had a stroke in 2006, died Tuesday in a hospital in the Los Angeles area, where he had been living for the last few years, said family spokesman Bishop E. Bernard Jordan.
Jordan told The Times on Thursday that Rev. Ike "lifted the consciousness of people globally, and he was such an inspiration as a black man, an African American doing the kinds of things he was doing in his generation."
The message of Rev. Ike, who could pack Madison Square Garden and who tooled around in a Rolls-Royce, Jordan said, was one "of empowerment and hope -- and definitely prosperity."
Rev. Ike first came to fame in the 1970s, preaching what Newsweek magazine once described as "an unabashed love of money and the good life."
The charismatic founder-minister of what is now called Christ Community United Church dispensed his message of how people can have love, health, happiness and prosperity if they believe in the "presence of God in you" from the stage of a former Loew's movie palace at 175th Street and Broadway in Manhattan.
"No one can tell me what I can't have," he preached. "If I believe, all things, every wonderful thing, every beautiful thing, is possible to me.
"If I want to be successful, I must have a successful belief in myself."
Rev. Ike's reach extended far beyond the several thousand followers who packed the seats in his movie-theater-turned-church.
By the mid-1970s, his daily messages were carried on more than 1,700 radio stations across the country, and...