Bishop T.D. Jakes is silent for a moment, struck by the memory. “It hurt me a lot. I even got to a point of wanting-to-die painful.
“But if you took that away from me, I wouldn’t be sitting here.”
When Thomas Dexter Jakes was 10 years old, his father got sick with kidney disease. He was the youngest of three kids, living in South Charleston, West Virginia. Until this point, Jakes’ life had looked much like the lives of other kids in the neighborhood. His mother was a home economics teacher, and his father owned a janitorial business. He went to school. He sold vegetables from his mother’s garden to earn extra money.
But when Jakes’ father got sick, the world tilted on its axis, and childhood all but disappeared. The family traveled back and forth to Cleveland, Ohio—a five-hour trek so his father could receive treatment—twice a week for years while his mother struggled to hold down a job.
“I had to be self-sustaining,” Jakes says. As a child, Jakes learned to take care of himself. He was the one who got himself up in the morning, went to school, cooked and watched over the house. He even had to help his father with some of his business affairs. “So I wasn’t like a normal kid. I really never had a childhood.”
Over the next six years, Jakes learned to help as much as he could. He cleaned up after his father, shaved him and ran his dialysis machine.
Watching his father suffer and weaken had a life-altering impact on the boy who would grow into one of the world’s most impactful faith leaders as a man.
One of the common threads Jakes weaves through his sermons is the idea that, as he says, “The blessing is in the breaking.” He believes that the trials of life—the struggle, trauma, disappointment and pain—become the tools we need to build greatness. He believes the most successful people are often the ones who have been the most broken.
When Jakes was 16, his father died of renal failure.
“Had he not gotten sick, I might not be responsible,” he says. “I might be sitting under a bridge, smoking a joint…. Had my father lived, I might not have been me.”
More Than a Preacher
Today Jakes is the bishop of The Potter’s House, a 30,000-plus-member church headquartered in Dallas, and another large congregation in Denver.
Sitting at a shiny conference table in his office, a plush and colorful room with no windows, he tells me that when they designed the new church, they gave everything else a place in the building before they picked the remaining spot for his office. With no outside view in the leftover room, he did his best to brighten it up by raising the ceiling, bringing in his favorite artwork, and creating a space that’s welcoming while uniquely his own. It’s a symbol of his approach to just about everything: Serve first, then make some space for yourself.
In the heart of the building, the office feels like a home-away-from-home, although the barber’s chair off the main room is a reminder of his constantly in-demand public persona. His real oasis is the home he shares with wife, Serita, where his five grown children and their families visit. His success extends far beyond his ministry and into film, music, books, and other entrepreneurial ventures that have afforded him the income to live in a house, he says, his father would have bragged about cleaning.
Jakes started TDJ Enterprises in 1995 and has written more than 40 books, several New York Times best-sellers among them. His next book, Soar! Taking Your Entrepreneurial Passion to the Next Level, is due Oct. 10. He has produced films as well as written and produced musicals. Through his recording label, Dexterity Sounds, he has released nearly 20 records.
His projects have earned him a Grammy, a Quill Award, multiple NAACP Image Awards, Dove Award nominations and independent film festival awards. He has been honored by an Essence magazine All Star Gospel Tribute and is in the International Gospel Music Hall of Fame and Museum.
Jakes has received the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Leadership Award by the Congress of Racial Equality and the NAACP President’s Award, given to “an individual or group to recognize special achievement in furthering the cause of civil rights and public service.” For his leadership and educational reach, he’s received the BET Honors Award, and he’s received 13 honorary degrees and doctorates. He’s been named by Time magazine as America’s Best Preacher.
In an age when scandal leads the news—and preachers aren’t exempt—that kind of recognition is a public stamp of approval on what his parishioners and loved ones already know: T.D. Jakes is the real deal.
Despite his high-profile success, Jakes has an often surprising approach to what are usually taboo topics such as sex, drugs and abuse. He originally gained public recognition for his first book, Woman, Thou Art Loosed: Healing the Wounds of the Past, addressing trauma in women’s lives. Today his willingness to speak about the most difficult aspects of life—to people at their lowest point—continues to inspire loyalty among followers. His conferences and events draw hundreds of thousands of people in need of help and hope all over the world.
But it all started because he himself needed help and hope.
Bible Boy
As a child, Jakes loved music. He says his mother and grandmother were always singing. Music was a part of everyday life. So was faith.
“I almost cannot remember ever not having faith,” he says. “It was like a given in our house.” He says his family wasn’t about religion as much as about relying on God on a daily basis. He says his fondest memory of his mother’s mother, a sharecropper in Alabama who had 15 children, is “her sitting in a rocking chair with her quilt over her legs and her Bible in her lap…. It was how our culture survived the atrocities of our history. We couldn’t afford not to have faith. We didn’t have anything else.”
Related: Bishop T.D. Jakes’ Powerful Advice for Leaders: ‘Learn From the Lows How to Handle the Highs’
By the time Jakes was in high school, he turned regularly to his faith to deal with the emotional turmoil at home around his father’s illness. “I used to sneak my Bible over the top of my science book and read it because I was just enamored by it in a weird, uncanny, unnatural way that was a clue for where I was going.” His fascination for reading the Bible so often earned him the school nickname Bible Boy. Jakes says he wasn’t a “goody-two-shoes” but he was always enthralled by Scripture, history, theology and “the way the world turns somehow.”
“The really emerging, powerful, life-changing, intimate moment that kept me on the course to destiny, that went beyond, happened after my father died,” Jakes says. “I think it happened out of the groping and clutching of an adolescent boy trying to find my daddy. And all that was left of him was embodied in saying ‘Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.’ I was looking for Daddy. And that never goes away.”
Rather than an opening for corruption or decline, as it might have been, Jakes’ teenage loss was a driving force in his life for good.
“I think that the throttle of what drove me into ministry, what started the passion for me was trying to find healing for my own wounds,” Jakes says. “And then growing up in the tumultuous environment that I grew up in—being suspended between life and death—made me take life much more seriously than most teenagers would. And I think that thirst created a cavern inside of me through which an artesian well erupted, from which I continue to talk to my generation to this day.”
All of this sounds heady and serious, but as soon as Jakes recalls his first sermon, he bursts out laughing. At 19, he delivered a trial sermon on Ezekiel 37 to a church about the size of the office we’re sitting in now.
“I can’t remember much of what I said because I was blinded with terror. Blinded, I mean absolutely blinded,” he says. “They were not that impressed. Nor was I.”
He was so terrified, in fact, that in the first few years of preaching he couldn’t hold a microphone because of his trembling. He used a mic stand and held his hands behind his back until he could calm down enough to move around. But he was determined, as he says, “not to let the fear paralyze the purpose.”
“I think that’s a good thing, not to be too impressed with yourself. Because I never approached ministry from the perspective of thinking I was good at it. So I threw everything at it because I didn’t think I was very good. I still preach hard today, not so much because of insecurity but because it’s about a level of excellence for me and being fully engaged in whatever you do.”
Jakes wouldn’t become a full-time preacher for nearly decade. In fact, he went to the same church for seven years and was asked to preach only two or three times. He enrolled in West Virginia State University but dropped out and went to work full time at Union Carbide (now a subsidiary of Dow Chemical). He began to travel and preach at other churches, becoming an itinerant minister when he wasn’t working a shift at the factory.
“To a degree I’ve always been bi-vocational,” he says. “I don’t know that I ever fully became one-dimensional, even to this day.”
At 24, Jakes married Serita Jamison. Later the same year, he became pastor of Greater Emmanuel Temple of Faith in Montgomery, West Virginia. The church had all of 10 members, but under Jakes’ nascent leadership, it slowly grew.
Then he lost his job at Union Carbide. They didn’t know it then, but he and his family were headed for the real dark times.
Always Hustling
Jakes’ mother was financially creative. She sold Avon, peddled her homegrown produce, and saved her money to buy property and collect rents.
“She was hustling. It was the way we survived,” Jakes says. “My father started a business with a mop and a bucket and ended up with 42 employees.”
Jakes remembers watching his father fill out payroll or pick out business cards, and hopping in his dad’s red truck to go negotiate contracts to scrub floors in grocery stores.
“I never once heard the word entrepreneurship, but that’s all I ever knew,” he says. “Entrepreneurship is not an opportunity. It’s a mentality. It’s a mentality that does not accept the limitations of a salary. It says you don’t get to determine how much I make. You can determine how much you’re going to pay me, but you can’t determine how much I’m going to make. Because how much I’m going to make is only determined by the tenacity of my own creativity.” Jakes says his understanding of entrepreneurship didn’t become real until he lost his job at Union Carbide.