One day megachurch Pastor John Gray was in the news for encouraging veterans, single parents and widows in his church to take money out of his collection baskets.
Two weeks later he was in the news for buying his wife a $200,000 Lamborghini for an anniversary present.
But his wife is not complaining, pointing out much of his income comes from outside the church – from producing movies and writing songs.
Defending the gift from her husband, Aventer Gray posted to her own Instagram account: “My hubby is a hard worker, he worked his whole life and he saved to bless his wife.”
She pointed to his income outside of the megachurch, including producing movies and writing songs.
Her husband, she writes, “Gives away cars, full houses of furniture, coats off his back.”
“I don’t see anyone screaming about how basketball players drive what they do while you paying $$$ to see them play in arenas and on fields,” she wrote on Instagram.
John Gray, himself is now defending the purchase, saying: “The stories that I hear, and I’ve tried to not listen to it, but one of them is, ‘pastor buys his wife, you know, this expensive car.'”
“First of all, it wasn’t a pastor that bought the car. It was a husband that bought the car. Get that in your spirit.”
“I’m a husband first. Don’t confuse what I do with who I am. What I do is, I pastor God’s people. Who I am is a husband and a father, and I’ll do anything to honor them, and I won’t ask permission from anybody to do it.”
“All my life I’ve had dreams. Everybody should have dreams, things that they fight for,” Gray added. “See, cause here’s what I know: Life is not promise. You can be here today and be gone tonight. The reason why my wife and I wanted to have an eight-year wedding celebration is because I needed a new beginning. Eight is the number of new beginnings. … it is a constant reminder of what God completed and what God will begin again.”
As WND reported, Gray was praised just two weeks ago for a video that went viral of him giving money to needy members of his congregation. “The role of the church is also to meet the needs of people in the house,” Gray said in the video.
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“Any single mothers in here?” he asked. “Any widows? Are there any single fathers, any veterans that don’t have what they need to make ends meet? Come to the altar. There’s some money in these baskets.”
Gray was one of a group of pastors who met with President Donald Trump at the White House in August.
Those who sat, spoke and prayed with the president were black pastors from across the U.S., which the White House called Trump’s “Meeting with Inner City Pastors.”
Gray previously was a pastor at Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church in Texas. He also is the star of a reality TV show on Oprah Winfrey’s OWN Network which wspa.com reports will resume shooting in Greenville.
The megachurch pastor sat in the seat next to Trump, to his right, in the Cabinet Room. After a few opening statements and greetings from the president, he asked Gray to start the conversation with a prayer.
“God, we thank you for an opportunity to speak about the hearts of those who sometimes cannot fight for themselves,” said Gray. “Thank you for this moment to be able to share our hearts with the president and his administration. Dr. King said we cannot influence a table that we are not seated at. And so we pray that this conversation will be fruitful, and productive, and honoring of the best traditions of this nation.
“We further pray that you will continue to give wisdom and insight to our president and his leadership team to be what our nation needs, to build this country from the inside out, that we will continue to be a beacon of hope and light around this world.”
