T.D. Jakes

D Magazine, Oct 01, 2004 by Rogers, Tim

He doesn't particularly enjoy being photographed, either. It makes him nervous. He stiffens and starts to took like a different man than the one who stands behind the pulpit. "That's because when I preach, the message is the issue," he says. "I don't worry about me. I'm distracted by what I'm saying, so I don't think, 'Are you smiling?"'

That famous gaptoothed smile. It's quite something, really. A child could almost put his finger through it. In conversation, it causes him to lisp. He'll talk about it if you ask him. "I never liked the gap, and I used to not smile because of it. But I found that sometimes it was more important to smile with it than to not smile and hide it." Now his kids-he and Serita have five-have convinced him it's his trademark.

And besides, something amazing happens when Jakes gets up to preach. In that transformation where he forgets himself and concentrates solely on the message, that lisp disappears. Curtis Wallace, the COO of T.D. Jakes Enterprises, says the same thing happens in business pitches. "He is incredible in meetings," he says. "What you see onstage can really come across in a boardroom."

It comes across in the movie, too. Woman, Thou Art Loosed is a fictional account of a woman who was raped by her mother's boyfriend as a child and who winds up, as a result, on death row. The woman is played by Kimberly Elise, whom you might recognize from her role alongside Denzel Washington in The Manchurian Candidate. Jakes plays himself, ministering to Elise's character in prison and preaching in church scenes, which were filmed during actual sermons.

It's a tough film to watch, in parts. But the first time it was shown to an audience, at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival eartier this year, it won the top prize. It brought the audience to tears. "You couldn't say Santa Barbara was the target audience for this film," says producer Reuben Cannon. "But white women stood up and said, 'Thank you for telling my story."' It so affected a gathering of black pastors at a showing that several volunteered to pay for advertising billboards in their communities. It's that sort of grassroots effort that has Jakes' people estimating-reasonably-that the film could gross $20 million (it cost about a tenth of that).

There is more to talk about. As he finishes his coffee at the Preston-Royal Borders and the manager brings over a stack of books for him to sign, T.D. Jakes has finished with the past. He's laying out his vision for the future. Jakes is involved in (though not making money on) a new 231-acre master-planned community called Capella Park, in South Dallas. Next summer, he's again going to Atlanta to stage Mega Fest, a four-day conference that last year averaged 140,000 people on each of its four days and brought something like $150 million to the city. One day, he'd like to do it here, in his hometown, if the city could just build the infrastructure he needs to pull it off.

The lisp is leaving him.

"As America is turning brown like the leaves in the fall, it's redefining itself," he says. "And Dallas needs to be part of the conversation. Because we need each other. And I'm saying to the black community: we can't just function in a vacuum." Someone get him a maroon towel. "And I'm saying to the white community: you can't ignore an Olympic-size event and millions of dollars. Because at the end of the day, Atlanta is walking away with the cheese here. Forget the moral issues. The money alone ought to be enough to drive you to do business."