Provocative Pentacostal

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Sept 14, 1998 | by Julia Duin

The `country-boy' minister now lives in a mansion, but he still preaches to the masses.

When T.D. Jakes shows up for book signings, the line of excited women often snakes out the store and into the street. The genial 41-year-old bishop signed 500 books in just one hour during a stop in Washington.

Jakes is the Oprah Winfrey of popular preachers. A black man who speaks to women of all races, his "Woman, Thou Art Loosed" conference drew 52,000 women to the Georgia Dome in Atlanta this summer. He was mobbed at a recent Christian booksellers' convention in Dallas, where he is pastor of the 16,000-member Potter's Church. He is on a first-name basis with Gov. George W. Bush.

Jakes burst into prominence two years ago after relocating his 400-member Pentecostal church from West Virginia to Texas -- buying the Eagle's Nest Family Church of former television evangelist W.V. Grant for $3.2 million and renaming it the Potter's Church. It attracted 10,000 people in its first year. His show, Get Ready With T.D. Jakes, started airing in 1993 on Black Entertainment Television and Trinity Broadcasting Network. That same year, he produced the first of 18 books, including Woman, Thou Art Loosed, which has sold 1.5 million copies. He has released a song by the same name.

The pastor attributes his success to his ability to reach across racial, political and class lines to speak to women's pain. "Have you ever seen a broken woman?" he asks in his latest book, The Lady, Her Lover and Her Lord. "You cannot tell her by her clothes or hair. Nor can you describe her by her race or the number of degrees she has obtained from a university. Look for the slight traces of scars beneath her makeup, a blank, dead stare that neither eye liner nor shadow can give life to. Look for a smile that fades too quickly or a pained glance .... She often hides her helplessness in anger. She wraps herself in bitterness. It seems the only protection she can muster on her own."

He credits his wife, Serita, and their two daughters for his uncanny ability to understand women, as well as his extensive counseling experience. As he puts it, 25 percent of women in America have been sexually assaulted in some way before the age of 15; the phenomenon, hardly mentioned in most churches, creates a huge reservoir of pain.

"I plead with pastors around this nation to minister to women" he says, "because under those choir robes, those usher uniforms, those pretty hats, those nice dresses, that makeup and eye shadow, there is a nation of bleeding, hurting, wounded women, who harbor in their hearts a secret they won't talk about."

When he showed a film clip during the Atlanta crusade of a girl who was abused by her mother's boyfriend, "a deafening wail went through the place." Says Jakes, "I hadn't expected that, although I wasn't surprised. There's a lot going on behind closed doors that women repress. Pain is pain. It transcends all barriers. I am not sure churches allow people to be transparent about their pain."

Jakes' mission is to help women rise above their suffering. "I found out the things that hurt us the most can become the fuel and catalyst to propel us toward our destiny" he says. "Pain can make us bitter or better. I wanted to be made better.

"But a lot of women have to provide their own motivation. They're not taught God cares for broken people. Churches say they're open, but not for sick people."

Jakes had his own brush with pain, starting in his teen years. He lost his father, Ernest Jakes, in 1972, after six years of caring for him as an invalid. The boy started preaching a year later. "Until you've been through what I've been through, you've had all the facts and figures but you have no compassion" he says. "You can't relate."

He's come a long way from being the son of a janitor and self-described "country boy." Once reduced to living without electricity or running water, he now owns a $1.7 million, eight-bedroom lakefront home next to the H.L. Hunt mansion. He drives a Mercedes.

Still, he was pigeonholed in the Christian book market until the secular publisher G.P. Putnam approached him. "My message attracts a lot of `unchurched' people" he says. "We have a generation of people who've not been in a church since vacation Bible school and they haven't gotten an update in 25 years."

His crusades attract 70 percent black, 20 percent white and 10 percent Hispanic attendees. Fifty percent of his membership is male, a high percentage in most churches. Recently, Jakes baptized Dallas Cowboy football star Deion Sanders, whose autobiography, coauthored with Jakes, is due for release in the fall.

"The men are out there" he says. "It's important we dispel the myth that they are not there .... They feel frustrated because they're invisible. When men feel invisible, they destruct. The masculine voice has been hushed out of our homes. So many families are fatherless."

Jakes is a tough individual to peg. His ruminations on satin sheets, to cite one example, are not the typical fare one gets from a Christian minister: "I bet whoever created the first set of satin sheets could not have been a man" he writes in The Lady, Her Love and Her Lord. "Although I'd be hard pressed to find a guy who didn't like the feel of satin against his skin, most men would agree that satin is the worst possible material for love ... from a male perspective, it makes you slide as a skater in an ice rink ....