Juanita Bynum skips conference after pastor allegedly enters hotel room without permission
International Prophetess Juanita Bynum broke down in tears as she explained Sunday night how she had to cancel a preaching assignment in Chesapeake, Virginia, because the pastor who was hosting her at a conference in that city entered her hotel room uninvited and saw her underwear.
“The fact that I’m getting ready to go and stand in somebody’s pulpit who’s seen my underwear, I’m sorry people, I just felt naked and I still do and just felt so violated. And what he said was he came in my room to put something in my room. But then his assistant produces drinks at the front desk for [my assistant] to take to my room,” Bynum explained in a Facebook Live broadcast shortly after midnight.
“As a male, why would you come into my room? Why didn’t you send your wife into my room? And his wife has profusely apologized to me but people of God this, some things are just distasteful. Some things you just don’t cross the lines for,” she said.
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The pastor Bynum called out was the Rev. John A. Moore, lead pastor of Experience Church who was hosting both Bynum and Pastor Jamal Bryant at a two-day conference, which ends tonight, called Breaking the Rules.
The Christian Post reached out to Experience Church regarding Bynum’s claim on Monday but they did not immediately respond.
Bynum explained that she discovered that Moore had entered her room and saw her underwear from her assistant who had traveled ahead of her to prepare her room at an unspecified Hilton hotel.
“They (assistants) always come into my hotel rooms before me. They pray before I come in. They cover furniture with white sheets. That’s just me because I don’t like to contend with a lot of stuff and people sitting on the furniture, having sex on the furniture and that’s just the sensitivity that I have. So they cover the chairs and the white sheets and they pray in the room and prepare the room for me,” Bynum explained.
“And somewhere on the bureau, this is so embarrassing, they would have on the bed, I travel with a blanket that says ‘be still and know that I am God.’ And they put that blanket on the bed, and my pajamas are laid down on the bed. And then on top of the bureau is all of my underwear,” she continued. “My panties, my stockings, my bra, whatever else I put on, is laid out on the bureau for when I get ready to minister. At that point I was told that the pastor had entered my room without me being aware that he had been in my room.”
Bynum said she was shocked by the invasion of privacy.
“I said to my assistant ‘what do you mean he’s been in my room? …you mean like been in my room and saw all my underwear?’ And she said ‘Yes ma’am.’ And I said ‘well, how do you know that?’ And she said because the secretary called upstairs,” Bynum said.
She then explained that the hotel’s manager had called her assistant to ask why she had two rooms booked in her name. Bynum said her assistant told the manager that she did not have two rooms in her name but checked in with Bynum’s credentials as she is accustomed to do which gave her permission to prepare the room.
The manager then asked if all of Bynum’s “stuff, her underwear laid out over everything like the pastor said it is?”
The assistant, Bynum said, later went down to the manager and asked why the pastor was given access to Bynum’s room and she was told that because the room was paid for by the pastor he was given access.
Bynum, however, did not think it was acceptable for the hotel to allow that to happen.
“I would not have ever known that he had a key to my room had this lady not been so rude to inform us that she knew all of my garments were spread about my room. And so at that point, that was the end of the rope for me,” she said, explaining that was the reason she was forced to not show up at the conference.
“I can tolerate a lot, so no, it wasn’t Juanita Bynum … as for the reason I did not show up at the church tonight. It’s like I’m standing up there preaching knowing that you know what I have on underneath my dress. I don’t know, maybe we’re living in this modern day of Christendom, maybe the millennials are on some kinda drugs but where I come from, and the way I was raised, that’s just too private,” she said.
She explained that she learned that the pastor told the church that he didn’t know why she wasn’t at the conference and she found that offensive and it’s part of the reason why she chose to speak out.
“I’m leaving Virginia heartbroken that I wasn’t able to deliver the word that God gave me to deliver,” she said.
“And I’m not going to not deal with the Hilton on this either. Just because a person put a credit card to pay for your room doesn’t give them right to have access to your life, into your privacy, into your personals, compromise your personal life behind your garments,” she added.
Bynum shot to fame after her 1997 "No More Sheets" sermon at Bishop T.D. Jakes’ "Woman Thou Art Loosed" Conference.
In that sermon, she discussed her battle with her sexuality and her longing for a husband. She described the bedsheets as all the empty sex she'd had with men.
"Why am I not married?" she asked the women at the conference. "But I find it very difficult to listen to anybody preach to me about being single when they got a pair of thighs in [their] bed every night ... and you keep telling me to 'Hold on, honey, stay there by yourself' ... and you goin' home to big old muscles and thighs? ... I wanna hear 'hold on' from somebody that knows my struggle!"
By about 2002, the year she got married to Rev. Thomas W. Weeks, Bynum was no longer a featured speaker at the conference, after discord strained her relationship with Bishop Jakes.
Five years later, Bynum and Weeks headed for divorce court after a very public beating in an Atlanta parking lot. She later confessed in 2012 to using drugs and engaging in same-sex relationships.
"I've been there and I've done it all. I did the drugs, I've been with men, I've been with women. All of it," she said on the "Frank & Wanda in the Morning" radio program. "I took full responsibility in every area because every choice that I made, nobody put a gun to my head. I made those choices due to a lack of wisdom."
