Equally astonishing is his assertion that the electricity burnt away the protective sheath from nerves running from his heel to his left temple. If true, it is no wonder he suffers from powerful bouts of pain like the one I witnessed. (After that attack, he related how two days before he suffered an especially vicious seizure in his doctor’s office – and lost seven pounds in weight in 10 minutes. No one questioned the assertion.)It was because of his nuclear espionage days that Ole thought of the name “Trinity”. It is a reference to the place in the New Mexico desert where Oppenheimer and the other Manhattan Project scientists exploded America’s first hydrogen bomb at the close of the Second World War. Neither that explosion nor the one Ole witnessed, he explains, matched the one that went off inside him one day in 1972 – the blast of revelation that delivered Ole to the Lord and led a little later to Trinity’s birth. It was during the period when he was helping found the new TV channel.

Quite suddenly, he was disgusted by himself and especially by the money-raising. He gave up everything and moved to live under a bridge in the company of the homeless “I had one of those experiences Boom I left time. I could have been gone 1,000 years, although my friends tell me that I sat crying for an hour and a half. When you come to the end of yourself, you find God.”MOST of Trinity’s members arrived here in some kind of despair. A few were homeless, others had drug and alcohol addictions, two or three were suffering from Aids. But some came with another affliction: they had surrendered their last dollars to television ministers who had promised them deliverance – health and wealth – if they would first pledge their money to them Ten bucks, a hundred, a thousand, several thousand.

The more a person gave, went the promises, the more God would give back to them. It is, says Ole, the theology of “name-it-claim-it, blab-it-grab- it”, and it makes him sick.The worst of it, Ole explains, is that it’s usually the most desperate in society, those with the least to spare, who get suckered in by these showmen for God. Their TV shows have the aim of gathering names and addresses of those who call in asking for prayer. After the shows, those callers then become the targets of a sophisticated direct-mail campaign, which lures the gullible into surrendering their wealth to whichever church it is that has found them.

Ole calculates that there are now 2,500 televangelists in America, carried by about 900 Christian channels. Together, they have an annual revenue in the US of about $3.5bn “They are bastards, because they’re hurting a lot of people They are using God as their errand boy,” rages Ole. “It is the oldest heresy in Christianity and someone has to got to try to stop them.”Nobody has done more than Trinity. With satellite dishes on the roof of one of the Columbia Avenue houses, it monitors the televangelists around the clock.

Ole himself is a self-confessed technophobe, so Harry Guetzlaff runs all the electronic wizardry for him. Guetzlaff came to Trinity when his marriage and his marketing business were in ruins. In a final bid for salvation, he had given his last $5,000 to Robert Tilton. Now Guetzlaff, a man with a twinkle in his eye who suffers relentless teasing from his comrades about his sartorial shortcomings and romantic frustrations, hides in a back room, surrounded by TV monitors, recording devices and a wall- to-wall library of video and audio tapes.