Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker founded the PTL Club in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1974, after both had worked at Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network and helped launch Trinity Broadcasting Network the year before. The daily program adopted a talk show format built around music, interviews and the Bakkers' own personalities rather than a traditional pulpit sermon, and by 1978 it reached an estimated 13,000,000 viewers, carried nationally through the PTL Satellite Network, one of the first religious broadcasters to make full use of satellite cable distribution.
The ministry's broadcast income funded Heritage USA, a Christian theme park, hotel and residential complex built in Fort Mill, South Carolina, through the late 1970s and 1980s. Heritage USA combined explicitly religious content, a recreated upper room and passion play, with the amusements of a secular resort, water slides, a shopping promenade and hotel accommodations, and at its peak drew millions of visitors a year, ranking among the most visited theme parks in the United States, a scale achieved almost entirely on the strength of PTL's television audience rather than any single physical draw.
The organization's legal name was Heritage Village Church and Missionary Fellowship, Inc., the nonprofit parent both of the broadcast ministry and of the Heritage USA complex it funded.