Trinity Broadcasting Network

Trinity Broadcasting Network began on May 28, 1973, when Paul and Jan Crouch, together with Jim and Tammy Bakker, who had both previously worked at Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network, rented air time on a small UHF television station in Santa Ana, California. The founders' own account of the launch describes a single borrowed camera and a shower curtain standing in for a set, airing a few hours of homemade Christian programming a day to a Los Angeles area audience.

The Bakkers left within the year to found their own ministry, PTL, in North Carolina, leaving the Crouches to build TBN as a standalone network. Paul Crouch served as president for four decades, and Jan Crouch remained a visible co-host and network figure until her death in 2016; Paul Crouch had died three years earlier, in 2013. Under their leadership TBN expanded from its single Santa Ana station into a satellite and cable network carried across the United States and, eventually, internationally.

The network's growth from a rented UHF slot to a national broadcaster illustrates a pattern repeated across several religious broadcasting ministries: a preacher or a small team securing a foothold in local broadcasting and using the audience it built to fund a permanent, independent broadcast infrastructure rather than remaining a guest on someone else's program.

Five decades after its first rented broadcast, Trinity Broadcasting Network describes itself as reaching about 5,000,000 weekly viewer households in the United States alone, a domestic audience the network states exceeds its nearest religious broadcasting competitors combined, placing it among the largest television networks of any kind operating in the country, religious or secular.

TBN's programming schedule carries a wide range of Christian content, including preaching drawn from across Pentecostal, charismatic and Word of Faith traditions, alongside its own original productions, making it one of the principal channels through which prosperity gospel and Word of Faith teaching reaches a national television audience today, in a direct institutional line from the network the Crouches and the Bakkers built from a single rented station in 1973.

Leadership of the network passed within the Crouch family following Paul Crouch's death in 2013 and Jan Crouch's death in 2016, and the network continues to operate its original Santa Ana area facilities alongside a national and international satellite and cable footprint built up over five decades of continuous broadcasting since that first rented UHF slot in 1973.