Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker had been in the ministry with the Assemblies of God denomination since the early 1960s prior to joining Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), then based in Portsmouth, Virginia, in 1965.
The 700 Club would become the flagship program of CBN, which expanded from its original Hampton Roads station to include outlets in Atlanta and Dallas–Fort Worth by 1973.
Beginning in 1972, the Bakker-hosted 700 Club was launched in a dozen test markets, including then-independent station WRET-TV in Charlotte, North Carolina.
However, the Bakkers departed CBN in 1973 and relocated to Southern California for a brief period, where they assisted Paul and Jan Crouch in launching Trinity Broadcasting Network before eventually starting their own television ministry in North Carolina.
The PTL Club continued being produced at WRET and in November 1974, the show expanded to a few other stations such as WGGS-TV in Greenville, South Carolina; WHMB-TV in Indianapolis; WHCT in Hartford, Connecticut; and KHOF-TV in the Los Angeles area, among a few others.
Bakker's conspicuous consumption and prosperity gospel preaching led critics to claim that PTL stood for "Pass The Loot".
One commentator noted that "Bakker arranged for Falwell to take over PTL in March in an effort to avoid what he called a 'hostile takeover' of the television ministry by people threatening to expose a sexual encounter he admitted to having seven years earlier with church secretary Jessica Hahn.
"[3] According to Hahn, on the afternoon of December 6, 1980, when she was a 21-year-old church secretary, Bakker and another preacher, John Wesley Fletcher drugged and raped her for "about 15 minutes".
In February 2009, Atlanta, Georgia investment-banker Ben Dyer announced his intention to auction off over 15,000 hours of videotaped episodes of The PTL Club on March 27, 2009.