Archibishop Earl Paulk, Whose Leadership of One Time Atlanta-Megachurch Ended Due to Sex Scandal, Dies Early Sunday

Bishop Earl Paulk Jr., dies in disgrace after building a megachurch in Atlanta and mentoring pastors like Eddie L. Long & Clarence McClendon.

Archbishop Earl Paulk has died. You will recall that the evangelical pastor's leadership of one-time megachurch the Cathedral at Chapel Hill ended in a sex scandal when Mona Brewer filed a lawsuit alleging that the two had engage in an adulterous relationship spanning 14 years.

Atlanta Medical Center said Archbishop Earl Paulk, who was in his 80s, died early Sunday. The hospital could not release a cause of death, but he had been in bad health for the past couple of years after a battle with cancer.

Paulk co-founded the Cathedral at Chapel Hill in Decatur and helped grow it to a peak membership of about 10,000 in the early 1990s, until all the sex scandals started driving people away.

A lawsuit by Mona and Bobby Brewer (who are separated, maybe divorced by now), sparked a chain of events that ended in Paulk pleading guilty in January 2008 to lying under oath by denying affairs with other women. A paternity test revealed Paulk was the father of his nephew, Donnie Earl Paulk, who is now leader of the church. That was a whole lot of drama in and of itself. I hope Archbishop Paulk found peace in his final hours and confessed his sins. He misled way too many people for too long. Personally the man was a lecherous scumbag who betrayed even his own wife and cheated on her repeatedly. He was a good preacher, but he was truly a wolf in sheep's clothing. I hope it is well with his soul.

UPDATE#1: Don Paulk, the brother of Earl Paulk, and the man's whose wife bore his brother a son, D.E. Paulk, has written a novel. Don Paulk's newly released novel "A Night in Gaza," focuses on the mind of a morally-conflicted pastor named Dan Hayden, who like most high-profile men succumbs to temptation and has an affair with a secretary. A tale as old as time, except that A Night in Gaza delivers a bone-chilling cautionary tale to men and reasons to avoid the same fate. I guess this he had an epiphany. 

For more on Bishop Earl Paulk Jr., read a more in-depth discussion of the Cathedral at Chapel Hill and the countless scandals that rocked its very foundation, CLICK HERE.