Christian Festival in Debt Due to Apparent Cheating : Burbank: Many took advantage to get into Summer Praise ’94 for free, organizer says.

Last month’s Christian music festival in Burbank ended $236,000 in debt due to what an organizer Friday called a “shocking and alarming” number of people cheating to get in free.

“You wouldn’t expect that (at a Christian event), but it happened,” complained Carey Wong of Glendale, one of the festival’s two novice organizers. “It’s very heartbreaking.”

Wong said that although Summer Praise ‘94, held Aug. 11-14, won favorable comments from participants, the paid attendance totaled only 4,000 to 5,000--well below expectations.

People who paid were given plastic wristbands, which they could show to be readmitted if they left the festival or came back on another day, and were asked not to remove them, he said. But many people with cut or taped-together wristbands appeared at gates and offered various excuses for why the bands were not intact, Wong said.

Rather than question their truthfulness, the organizers admitted many who presented what were apparently unpaid wristbands, he said.

In addition, “some gates were unguarded or security was not checking people carefully,” said Paul Hammack, one of the festival’s promotion officials. Organizers also reported that food tickets and cases of meat were apparently stolen.

By late this week, Wong and his partner George Jerome, a Chatsworth businessman, had reduced the outstanding debt to $175,000. Some artists have volunteered to appear again in fund-raising events to help pay off more, said Hammack.

Wong said that as many as 8,500 people attended the final evening’s events, featuring popular Christian vocalist Carman.

One speaker, preacher Carlton Pearson of Tulsa, Okla., urged the crowd on the final night to pay the full admission price voluntarily if they had not gotten in honestly. “Instead of accepting an honorarium for his appearance, Pearson wrote a $500 check to offset debts,” Hammack said.

The 100-degree heat that weekend also apparently kept people away, Hammack said, noting that 942 pre-purchased tickets went unclaimed.

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The festival, which featured dozens of well-known contemporary Christian musicians and singers, got off to a rocky start on Aug. 11 when Jerome threw a gay and lesbian evangelical group out of its booth for refusing to remove an identification sign that Jerome called offensive to other festival participants. He acted because the gay group refused to accept his authority over what it could display at the festival, he said.

Would Wong, a financier and member of the First Chinese Baptist Church in Chinatown, organize another music festival? After a long pause, Wong said, “It’s too early to comment on that.”