Trinity Foundation (Dallas)

American religious ministry and watchdog group

The Trinity Foundation is an American watchdog ministry founded by Ole Anthony in 1972. Its main mission is to expose abuse of public trust by televangelism and religious organisations. It has provided information to news outlets as well as state and federal agencies. As of 2020, the president of the organisation is Peter Evans. It launched the Dallas Project in the 1980s as a challenge to religious organizations to help the homeless in the United States, which was in 2010 taken over by Community on Columbia (The Block), a church attended by many members of Trinity Foundation.

The foundation was directly involved in Sen. Charles Grassley's Senate Finance Committee investigation of abuses by a number of televangelist ministries. Beginning in 2005, after being asked to help by the committee’s general counsel, the foundation submitted over the next six years 38 separate reports on abuses by religious not for profit organizations, which were incorporated into the committee’s final report. The foundation criticized Grassley for turning to the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability (ECFA) for suggested solutions instead of acting on tough legislative proposals from his staff for policing abuses by religious organizations. It said that the ECFA's recommendations were too lax and were compromised by close ties to the very ministries they were proposing to oversee. An investigative report on the Australian ABC TV's 19:30 programme on 6 April 2022 revealed that Hillsong, the global megachurch headquartered in Sydney, had acquired a lot of property that had been hidden behind a web of entities across the world. It had done this in part by assuming financial control over other churches, starting with Garden City Church in Brisbane in 2009. The Trinity investigator, Barry Bowen, found that Hillsong owned at least three condominiums in New York City, a US$3.5 million home in California and 31 properties in Arizona, expected to be worth a total of US$40 million by 2023. Its corporate and financial structures mean that the church is protected against litigation which demands large payouts to plaintiffs.

The foundation published The Wittenburg Door, a magazine of Christian satire that was established in 1971, from 1995 to 2008. It launched the Dallas Project in the 1980s as a challenge to religious organizations to help the homeless in the United States, which was in 2010 taken over by Community on Columbia (The Block), a church attended by many members of Trinity Foundation.

Some former members of the group have been critical of the foundation and Anthony, accusing it of abuse and cultism.