Once both his lavish lifestyle (he had mansions in Texas, California and Florida) and his cash-raising methods had been exposed by ABC and Trinity, he was hit by serial “fraud-and-distress” lawsuits and was quickly forced off the air. He tried to hit back, counter- suing both Trinity and ABC, but his action was eventually dismissed – largely, it has to be said, because of the legal heft of the network. Alone, Trinity, which depends on tithes from its members for revenue, would have been buried by the action.Another Trinity/ABC victim was tele-preacher V W Grant. Aside from suffering the humiliation of having a full-length nude photograph of himself slapped across a double-page spread in The Door (the snap was also retrieved from a dumpster), he was soon afterwards sent to prison on a tax-evasion conviction. Grant was only recently released and is setting up shop again blocks from Trinity in Dallas.This sounds like an unholy mix indeed. A group that is committed to the exorcism of personal ambition, which pays none of its leaders more than the equivalent of pounds 50 a week, which promises to give shelter to any homeless person who knocks on its door, and which at the same time derives unabashed pleasure from the public humiliation of figures who command the devotion and the wallets of millions of TV-addicted Americans It has been labelled a cult by its critics. Its founder has been attacked as a publicity-seeker, an agent of Satan, a fornicator and, of course, an enemy of all Christians.

But spend some time with Ole Anthony and his flock and you may decide differently.IT IS Sunday afternoon when I arrive – usually a good time. All 45-odd core members of Trinity (about half of whom live in this single block on Columbia Avenue) assemble at 4pm, many with children, to recharge bodies and souls Split into three groups, they begin with a meal At my table, Ole Anthony sits at the head I am to his immediate right, as the only guest. Otherwise, chairs are taken according to age, the youngest next to me, continuing around to the oldest at Anthony’s left (it is the hierarchy that determined the seating of the disciples at the Last Supper, he explains). The meal (to me plain old Sunday lunch), is given the name the Feast of the Agape, because at Trinity they seek to emulate the life of first-century Christians.Ole – everyone calls him Ole, to rhyme with “holy” – is not eating, however. The question is what effect Prescott’s new role as a champion of site-specificity will have on patrons who now face having to leave the fruits of their corporate largesse behind them when they move. Seagram’s European president, Martin Frost, notes that the budget for art in the Ark ran to “hundreds of thousands rather than millions of pounds”: should he be forced to leave Cheeseman’s Lung inside Erskine’s ivory tower, says Frost, he would simply tack its value onto the cost of the ensuing lease This may be a touch optimistic.

Whether a prospective tenant will really find the idea of having to pay for an artwork which is not simply deeply quirky but has been masticated by the employees of his predecessor financially beguiling is open to doubt.The upshot of this may be gloomy. Whichever reading you choose, though, one fact is beyond debate. The work, like Hamilton Finlay’s Sea Flower, is site-specific, and not simply in terms of its geographical location.If this seems an obvious point, it nonetheless provides the third reason for visiting the Ark a fortnight from now. On 26 August, John Prescott ruled that the US publishing group, Time & Life, would have to return works of art – notably a reclining nude by Henry Moore – originally commissioned in the 1950s for its Bond Street offices to the premises in question. This was not entirely the triumph of Labourite rectitude over capitalist greed it seems.

Time & Life had not tried to sell the Moore: they had lent it to the National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh, where it had been seen by three- quarters of a million people. Prescott’s ruling means that the sculpture will be returned to a private office block where it will be seen by no one (or no one from the public), even on Open House weekends.Political irony is not the point of this story, however. The work’s grape-stem bronchia can be read in a number of ways: as a response to Erskine’s architectural breathing-space, or (Seagram’s traditional business being largely vinous) as an allusion to the provenance of the money that made it all possible. David Cheeseman’s installation, Lung – also the result of a specific commission – is a three-storey recreation of a pair of human lungs, made from anodised grape stems and fixed to the wall of a tower, the East Drum, which rises through the Ark’s eight galleried floors.Employee participation in the Lung’s creation extended beyond mere brow-furrowing. Cheeseman’s several hundred grape-stems were provided by Seagram’s workers, all chewing manfully in the name of art But Lung is visceral in more senses than one.