2 of 8

But Jakes does have something to say. Though detractors have claimed that, in the words of Gertrude Stein, there is no there there, Jakes insists that underneath the celebrity hype is a plain, simple gospel message.

Not too long ago, Thomas Dexter Jakes toiled in West Virginian obscurity. He preached at Pentecostal churches when he could but put bread on the table by sweating out the swing shift in Charleston's Union Carbide plant. When the plant closed in 1982, he began digging ditches, still preaching when he could find a pulpit that would have him. Soon, he took on a full-time pastorate at Greater Emanuel Temple of Faith, a storefront church in Montgomery, West Virginia, which relocated to Charles ton in 1990. It was there, in a Sunday-school class, that Jakes began to develop his trademark "Woman, Thou Art Loosed!" message.

One curiosity is this thoroughly masculine figure's ability to deliver a message that has such appeal to the intimate pains and struggles of women. His ministry niche began as a personal outreach to his wife.

"I was his first 'Woman, Thou Art Loosed!' conference," Serita says, smiling. She enjoys telling how Jakes happened upon his ministry to women. She remembers coming home one evening early in their marriage and sinking onto the apartment floor, exhausted."

I was overwhelmed with all of the roles that I was having to take on at one time," she says. "I asked my husband to step outside our relationship and minister to me. I said, 'I need you to talk to me to help me get my head on straight and give me directions as to what I am supposed to do in life, not just as your wife. Who am I? Who is God calling me to be?'"

That conversation got Jakes thinking about women's needs and problems. "So many women are abused; their self-esteem is stolen," Jakes says.

Helping those women heal became the goal of his Sunday-school class, the best-attended he ever taught. Jakes urged women to let go of their pain and find healing in Jesus. From the class came popular tapes and the third-bestselling Christian book of 1993. Jakes's popularity as a preacher and author led to other high-profile vehicles for his message: national women's and men's conferences and a nationally touring Woman, Thou Art Loosed! play. At a women's conference in Atlanta last July, Jakes attracted over 84,000 people, breaking the Georgia Dome's 78,000-person record attendance set by Billy Graham in 1994. Like Faulkner claiming never to have read Shakespeare, Jakes says he does not have time to read anything other than the Bible. But his message about women and healing bears a marked resemblance to many secular books in the self-help and pop-psychology sections of your local bookstore. Take his teachings about the effects of childhood abuse: "Many women in this country are bowed down under the weight and pressure that comes from deep, dark secrets and traumas," he writes in "Bent Babies Make Broken Ladies," a chapter from The Lady, Her Lover, and Her Lord. "Events of long ago permanently alter these women; the wounds might not be fresh, but the scars last a lifetime and never completely heal. … The mangled heart of an abused woman looks much like a torn cloth doll. The fragile tissue of a tender little girl is torn into shreds that continue to unravel into her adult life."

"Jakes has caught a pop-psychology wave, and that explains a lot of his popularity," says Deborah Kovach Caldwell, who covered the preacher's ministry when she was a religion reporter at The Dallas Morning News. "He's the perfect preacher for [today's society]. He taps into the recovery movement, he's appealing to a multiracial audience, and he's a Pentecostal pastor who preaches with intensity."

next page... |  2 of 8

share this page

February 7 2000, Vol. 44, No. 2