American Idol
Twenty years ago he was a ditchdigger living on welfare. Today he’s one of the most powerful— and one of the richest—preachers in America. Can T.D. JAKES get an amen?
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Whence cometh this man?
Though he has experienced poverty, Jakes was not born into it and certainly never considered it as fate. His father, Ernest, expanded his job as a janitor into a thriving cleaning service with more than fifty employees and a contract to clean grocery stores and the West Virginia capitol building, in Charleston, where the family lived. His mother, Odith, taught school but earned extra money as an Avon dealer and by buying and selling real estate. She also grew vegetables and allowed Jakes to sell them. “When he was very young, he would bag up the collard greens and take them around the neighborhood and sell them for maybe a dollar a bag,” his sister, Jacqueline, recalled. As he got older, he cut grass, delivered newspapers, and sold Avon and Amway products. As if confirming the observation of a former neighbor that “those Jakeses were some selling fools,” Jacqueline said, “It seems to run in our family. He just got the spirit.”
Although Jakes doubtless observed and absorbed some of his father’s strong work ethic, it was Mama who made the difference. Odith was, by all accounts, a remarkable woman. One of fifteen children, thirteen of whom graduated from college (as did their mother, in her fifties), she entered Tuskegee Institute, in Alabama, at age fifteen and completed the four-year program in three. She taught her three children to cook and sew, but her lasting legacy ran far deeper than practical skills. As a frequent speaker for events sponsored by her sorority and educational associations, she insisted that her children memorize poetry, particularly the work of black poets. Before he entered first grade, Jakes could recite James Weldon Johnson’s “Lift Every Voice and Sing” (the black national anthem) and was soon able to quote so much Scripture that one of his nicknames was Bible Boy. Odith often took her son with her when she spoke; one day, when he was only six, he confidently announced, “Today, I travel with you and listen to you speak, but the time will come when you will travel with me and I will speak.”
The Jakes family suffered a harsh jolt when the boy was ten and his three-hundred-pound father developed kidney failure, brought on by high blood pressure. For the next six years, until his father died in 1972, he helped operate a rudimentary dialysis machine, mopping up the blood that spilled from it during frequent malfunctions. Jakes had been brought up in the Baptist Church and had led a youth choir since he was twelve, and the uncertainty and trauma of those adolescent years drove him deeper into a life of faith, leading him to visit Charleston’s Greater Emmanuel Gospel Tabernacle, where he received the spiritual gift of speaking in tongues and, at age sixteen, began his new life as a Pentecostal Christian. He also felt a strong conviction that God was calling him to the ministry. He dropped out of high school during his senior year, in part to assist his mother, who was having health problems, but he soon completed his GED and enrolled at West Virginia State College. A job at Union Carbide paid well, but he found it so difficult to keep up with his studies that he dropped out of school once again, never to return as a formal student. (In the nineties he earned a bachelor’s degree, a master’s degree, and a doctorate in ministry, all by correspondence from Friends International Christian University.) This did, however, give him the opportunity to see if he had a future in the pulpit. He preached his first sermon in 1976 at age nineteen and was shortly afterward licensed to preach by the Greater Emmanuel Churches. For the next two years, he traversed the rugged mountains and valleys of West Virginia in a silver Trans Am, preaching wherever he could get an invitation, no matter how modest the venue, and rapidly built a reputation as a powerful pulpiteer. In 1979 he established a storefront church in the tiny town of Montgomery, about thirty miles southeast of Charleston, giving it the impressive name of Greater Emmanuel Temple of Faith, despite its having only ten members, including his sister, Jacqueline. “If there were eight people in the room, he preached like there were eighty thousand,” she recalled.
One young woman who was impressed with Jakes’s talent was Serita Ann Jamison, a coal miner’s daughter who sent him secret letters of admiration until he approached her after services one day, flashed his great gap-toothed smile, and asked, “Do you know where a bachelor can get a home-cooked meal?” After dating for six months, he and Serita married, in 1981. The young couple fell on hard times, though, the following year when the Union Carbide plant closed, costing them and their new twin sons their main source of income. For the next decade the family was mired in grinding poverty, as the money Jakes made digging ditches was sometimes not enough to keep the gas and electricity connected and the only way to put food on the table was resorting to welfare, which he found humiliating.
Though the family’s financial situation was precarious, Jakes continued to lead his little flock, and the ministry began to bear modest fruit. In 1984 he moved the church to the neighboring town of Smithers, where he turned a dilapidated movie theater into a worship center, and he was ordained as a regional bishop of the Greater Emmanuel Churches in 1987. Three years later, in part because many of his members were already driving in from Charleston to hear him preach, Jakes relocated to South Charleston, where the congregation quickly grew to around three hundred.
As his church expanded, the number of women who came to Jakes for counseling also grew. After hearing repeated accounts of women who had been abused by fathers and uncles and boyfriends, he decided to teach a Sunday school class just for women. Though he had planned it as a one-shot effort, they urged him to continue, and he did for six weeks. When a pastor friend invited him to offer a concentrated version of the series in Pittsburgh, Jakes agreed. Recalling the story of a woman Jesus healed of a long-standing “spirit of infirmity” (Luke 13:10–17), he called the program “Woman, Thou Art Loosed.” When 1,300 women showed up, Jakes realized that he was on to something significant, but he could hardly have imagined how dramatically his life was about to change.
Despite his relative obscurity during this period, Jakes had been a diligent networker, attending conferences and using what contacts he had to help him build ties with the luminaries of black Pentecostalism. In 1993 they invited him to preach at their most important conference, a Tulsa gathering known as AZUSA, named for the 1906 Azusa Street revival in Los Angeles, from which modern Pentecostalism exploded across America. Jakes delivered a crystallized version of his classes for women, once again giving it the name “Woman, Thou Art Loosed.” The reaction was electrifying. As biographer Shayne Lee described it in his book T. D. Jakes: America’s New Preacher, “Thousands of women were jumping, screaming, and crying because Jakes had put his finger on their pain. Some were awestruck in catatonic stupors after being mesmerized by his message… . No other male preacher had diagnosed women’s struggles so eloquently and effectively, and no one with such precision had ever articulated women’s anguish.” According to Lee, sales of audiotapes and videos of Jakes’ sermon brought in more than $20,000.
The AZUSA triumph led to a weekly program on the Trinity Broadcasting Network and to urgent pleas from around the country asking Jakes to bring his women’s conference to other cities. Because he could not accept more than a fraction of the invitations, and also because he recognized the insistent knocking on his door as a golden opportunity, Jakes poured himself into capturing the essence of his conferences in his first book, titled—no surprise—Woman, Thou Art Loosed. Using $15,000 of his own money, Jakes paid Albany Publishing, a small Christian publisher, to produce the book. He would never have to do that again. The first printing of 5,000 copies sold out in less than a month. Before long, boosted by promotion on Jakes’s television program and personal appearances, sales topped 200,000 and continued to sell at a brisk pace, with more than 2 million sales recorded to date.
Spurred on by his success, he relocated the Temple of Faith once again, this time to the predominantly white Charleston suburb of Cross Lanes, and quickly saw his congregation triple in size, to more than a thousand. He established T. D. Jakes Ministries as a nonprofit entity to generate and handle income for his broadcast ministry and soon moved his TBN broadcast to a prime-time Sunday night slot. He also began appearing on BET and hosting a syndicated radio program. Not long afterward, he created T. D. Jakes Enterprises, owned and operated by Jakes as a for-profit way to market his books and videos. He organized regional “Woman, Thou Art Loosed” conferences around the country and initiated “ManPower” conferences to encourage African American men to assume the roles of faithful husbands, caring fathers, and dependable providers. By 1996 the energetic pastor who had endured more than a decade of anonymity and poverty had suddenly ascended to the top ranks of African American preachers. And along the way, he had become a wealthy man.
JAKES SOON DISCOVERED THAT, in West Virginia as elsewhere, something there is that does not love a rich preacher. Although his extravagances were neither unknown nor apparently resented by his parishioners, Jakes was irritated when local newspapers criticized him for driving expensive cars and purchasing a mansion that included an indoor swimming pool and a bowling alley, and he decided to relocate his church one more time. He had already felt somewhat boxed in by the limited air travel in and out of Charleston and perhaps also by the fact that only about 3 percent of West Virginians were African American, far fewer than lived in the entire city of Dallas. So when he learned that Dallas-based healing evangelist W. V. Grant had been sent to prison for failing to render unto Caesar an appropriate share of his income, Jakes swooped in and scooped up Grant’s five-thousand-seat Eagle’s Nest church, office complex, and TV facilities for $3.2 million. Accompanied by fifty families, most of whom were employed in one of his operations, Jakes established the Potter’s House in 1996. The first service attracted more than two thousand people and reportedly raised some justified concern among the shepherds of rival flocks; within a few months, attendance had swelled to more than eight thousand, making the church one of the fastest growing in the country and the only one to claim Dallas Cowboys stars Deion Sanders and Emmitt Smith as members.
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