A Shocking Revelation
NEW VIDEO! A SHOCKING REVELATION from the Rio Grande Valley. Jaime Loya, one the biggest pastors in South Texas, is facing allegations of fraud in his new Mission, Texas church.
A Shocking Revelation
“My conclusion, this is a bad church. They become so big that they think they can just squash anybody. They can just step on anybody,” Saul De Leon said.
A shocking revelation in the Rio Grande Valley.
“The pastor of one of the biggest churches in the Rio Grand Valley is being accused of fraud,” Wayne Dolcefino told the camera.
“We all helped you raise a million dollars. Where did that money go?” Joey Cepeda said.
Accused of ripping off an array of small businessmen.
“About 18,627 dollars from Jaime Loya, directly from Cross Church that was never paid,” Saul De Leon said.
Is a man of God turning tithes into a tangled web of deceit?
This construction company says they are out hundreds of thousands of dollars because of Pastor Jaime Loya.
“I can’t even begin to get into what we’ve been through because of it. It’s been an entire year of major hardships,” Renato Rodriguez said.
Between a 1.3 million dollar lawsuit and 8 liens, the pastor must preach to a different audience, a judge.
“If you were somebody who went to Cross Church, what would you be asking the pastor?” Dolcefino said.
“Where’s the money?” Rodriguez said.
“Where’s your God in all this? If I may ask you, where is your God in all of this? What happened to you?” De Leon said.
“Having dealt with him on a personal level, I don’t have any respect for the mam, not anymore,” Rodriguez said.
Not the words you typically hear about a religious leader.
“Jaime Loya, if you’re listening to me, this is a no-no. You don’t do this to people,” De Leon said.
Jaime Loya is the pastor of Cross Church, which has seven locations across South Texas.
“We had a record-breaking attendance, yes, for a normal regular Sunday,” Loya said.
But our story begins at a Texas Roadhouse in McAllen.
Joey Cepeda, a surveyor in the Valley, says he sits down at the bar, striking up conversation with construction workers on lunch break.
“And they’re like, we almost had a great year, but man, we lost a lot of time and money a few months back on that Cross project,” Cepeda said.
They vent to Joey, saying De La Garza Construction was never paid for the work they did on Cross Church’s biggest location here in Mission, right off the highway.
“From what they were telling me is that Jaime Loya was making it sound like RDZ Group had abandoned the job. He’d taken the money, never paid the subs. They were pretty much slandering RDZ Group,” Cepeda said.
So Joey says he does some digging of his own, finding out these aren’t just rumors, it’s public record.
“I started looking up on the county website, all the liens. I was like, man, the AC company, the concrete company, 57 Concrete, another friend of mine,” Cepeda said.
He sees a lawsuit filed by Frost Bank, stating Cross Church collectively owed over 1.3 million dollars to subcontractors.
“And then that’s when they started telling me, like, if you’re into construction, warn all your friends,” Cepeda said.
That is exactly what Joey did, making this Facebook post.
And it went viral.
“Strangers leaving comments about their experiences,” Cepeda said.
“You do shady stuff, it’s going to come out!”
“The church members, people sliding into my inbox, hey, here’s some information,” Cepeda said.
“It makes us look like idiots because we trusted them, and then this is what they’re doing.”
Joey gets in contact with the companies who got screwed over, starting with the original construction company, RDZ Group.
The owner, Renato Rodriguez, says at first he had the utmost respect for Jaime Loya.
“You want to trust that the decisions they’re making are being led by God and not themselves,” Rodriguez said.
Renato signed this contract, agreeing to be finished with the building by the end of June.
But all of a sudden, plans changed.
“They wanted us to be finished by January. Our contract date wasn’t until June. We never amended the contract, and so when we designed a project schedule to be finished by January, we did the best that we could, and we were at 90 percent completion minus all the details,” Rodriguez said.
During a walk-through at the end of January, Renato says Jaime Loya asked to speak to him privately. That’s when things went south.
“He says pretty much I’m taking over. I want you out. I’m gonna pay the subcontractors directly, and we can take over from here,” Rodriguez said.
Having been in the construction business for 10 years, Renato is no stranger to how these contracts work.
“These contracts are stipulated to walk us to the finish line. You need substantial completion, the bank is involved, there’s too many factors in here that you can’t just push us out,” Rodriguez said.
And he believes it wasn’t about the project timeline for Jaime. He just wanted them out.
“I think he wanted to push this out because he wanted to keep the rest of the money, bottom line,” Rodriguez said.
While Renato and his crew were busy at work, Jaime was busy raising money for the new church.
How much money? The pastor won’t tell us, but he needs to give a full accounting to his congregation. The church had also taken out a multimillion-dollar bank loan.
“Week after week, as we’re on the job site, people kept coming to us and saying, hey, well, we just raised more money and we just raised more. What for?,” Rodriguez said.
And with the project nearly completed, Loya hires this guy, Saul De La Garza, as the new general contractor.
“I was brought in to look at the interior of this new building that supposedly Renato with RDZ as the general contractor was building for them,” De Leon said.
It made sense. Saul had also been a member of Cross Church for sixteen years.
“They painted Renato with RDZ to be the contractor that did the, you know, he did a horrible job on that building, okay, and they painted him to be uncooperative and a really bad general contractor,” De Leon said.
Saul says he signed a 10-day contract to help.
“I came in with an estimate at $45,000,” De Leon said.
Immediately, Saul claims he began to notice Jaime cutting corners.
“There was a lot of bad stuff in there that was poorly done, and the texture finish on the walls was really bad. All that mattered to them is that they wanted to meet the deadline, basically for the grand opening, according to them,” De Leon said.
He says tensions grew when he and his crew were later accused of causing the damage themselves.
“But when I started finding out how Cross Church was treating Renato, then I started putting two and two together, okay? And what Cross was doing is hiring people that were coming in with lower numbers,” De Leon said.
But the most serious allegation against the church is that they cheated their own church member.
“They only paid like the first $10,200. And then the second payment was $2,005, I believe. And then the last payment was about $1,300. So tally all that up, it’s about maybe under, what, $13,000 out of the $45,000,” De Leon said.
Saul says Jaime had even tried to pay members of his crew directly, without his knowledge. That’s a no no.
“Why did they do that to me? I don’t understand until this day,” De Leon said.
When Saul tried to confront the pastor, Jaime says he ghosted him.
“No contact, no money, even his own wife didn’t even contact us, me or my wife. And gradually, we had been going to that church for years,” De Leon said.
“You’re not living what you preach. And you need to come down and put your feet right back on the ground where they belong. That’s what I would tell you, Jaime Loya. I hope you’re listening to this,” De Leon said.
In the meantime, the pastor was raking in the dough.
“Oh, he lives a very well life. He’s always traveling, drives a beautiful vehicle,” Rodriguez said.
Telling church members their money is going toward the new Mission church.
“I’ve heard $600,000, I heard a million, I’ve heard $1.5 million that they raised,” Rodriguez said.
But church members were starting to ask questions, saying they’re constantly bombarded with texts asking to donate money.
“Like you’re over here with your Louis Vuitton and your Range Rover, like come on.”
News was quickly spreading online. If the church had a construction loan, where was all the other money going?
Joey Cepeda’s Facebook post has since garnered a lot of attention from this guy, John Rigney, Cross Church’s lawyer.
“I guess it pissed them off to the point where I got sued,” Cepeda said.
According to Hidalgo County court records, Cross Church is suing Joey for upwards of one million dollars for defamation for his social media campaign.
“They wanted me to take it down. They want me to delete everybody’s posts, meaning I will be erasing the energy and time that people took to put their voice out there, and I wasn’t gonna do it,” Cepeda said.
A judge told him to take it down.
The next hearing is set for March 30.
We met with that church lawyer, but he never agreed to do an on-camera interview.
And the pastor, well, he won’t even call us back, hiding from legitimate questions.
“That’s not a sermon that Pastor Loya should be delivering to the faithful all around Texas,” Dolcefino told the camera.
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