Addressing the Needs Within

“WOMAN, THOU ART LOOSED!”

Bishop T.D. Jakes is on the stage of the Wiltern Theatre in Los Angeles, roaring out a message of healing and hope to hundreds of wailing, screaming, cheering people. The Dallas preacher, one of the hottest evangelical leaders on the national scene today, has just staged a searing, soulful gospel play about one woman’s recovery through God from a lifetime of abuse.

These are dangerously sensitive topics: abuse, molestation, adultery, prostitution, drug use. But the honesty with which Jakes brings them to light and the compassion he shows to those who have experienced them have won him millions of fans around the world, crossing lines of both gender and race. It has also propelled a mega-marketing machine of conferences, books, tapes, CDs and a possible film built around Jakes’ patented “Women, Thou Art Loosed” theme of healing and recovery.

“The word has got to get out that for every question there’s an answer. For every deep, hidden pain, there is healing. And for every secret, there is forgiveness!” Jakes thunders.

He tells the crowd that the “real story” of abuse, secrets, victims and pain is not on the stage, but in the daily lives of those in the audience. In a deep baritone, he proclaims that the blood of Jesus will wipe the stains of self-hatred away. The crowd screams back: “Amen! Hallelujah!”

The rock-star status of Jakes may be unusual, but the towering esteem in which African American clergy are held is not. New data by the Barna Research Institute in Oxnard show that fully two-thirds of African Americans listed their pastors as the most important leaders of their community--far higher numbers than for whites.

The survey also showed that 94% of African Americans listed a close relationship with God as their most important life goal, with a majority even saying that serving God was the only reason to live--far higher proportions than those among whites and Latinos, said George Barna, the institute’s director.

“For blacks, the church is their dominant reference point, while for whites it would be work,” he said.

Ministers Seen as ‘Free Agents’

The central role of black clergy in community life has deep, historic roots. For a people first brought to America under slavery, oppressed by legalized segregation and for generations bereft of representation in the established political and economic systems, ministers emerged as the community’s most important leaders. From Frederick Douglass to Sojourner Truth to Martin Luther King Jr., virtually all major African American leaders came out of the church.

“It’s the only place African Americans had a voice,” said the Rev. Carolyn Habersham of Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.

The Rev. Cecil “Chip” Murray of First African Methodist Episcopal Church in Los Angeles recalled the five sharpened pencils his old country preacher always carried--a sign of his literacy and status. Ministers were often the most educated men in the community, “free agents” not beholden to the white establishment who helped as much with legal paperwork and finding jobs as nurturing the spirit, Murray said.

For the Rev. J. Benjamin Hardwick of Praises of Zion Baptist Church in Los Angeles, his minister was his schoolteacher. He was also a counselor who gently explained the ways of the then-segregated world. When Hardwick was 4 years old, he unknowingly knocked on a white man’s front door to take him eggnog--a Christmas tradition--rather than using the back door, as expected during those times. The white man slapped his father across the face for that transgression, a scene that remains seared in Hardwick’s mind.

“I could have become a bitter man were it not for the counseling of my minister,” Hardwick said. “This kind of thing helps explain the deep bond people in our community have with our clergy.”

With the emergence of the black professional class, clergy for a time lost their unequaled leadership position. But King and others who led the civil rights movement out of their churches regained that standing, which continues today, said Robert M. Franklin, president of the Interdenominational Theological Center, a consortium of six African American seminaries in Atlanta.

‘Buppie’ Phenomenon Reverberates

The church remains the central focus of most African American lives today. But the rise of “buppies,” or black urban professionals, has shifted some of its priorities--from the protest politics of the past to what Franklin calls “therapeutic ministry.” The inner hurts are drawing more attention than outer injustices, underscoring what Franklin calls a “growing disconnect” between the social gospel of traditional black clergy and their increasingly middle-class congregants.

The Jakes phenomenon reflects that shift. His conferences draw 80,000 people or more, while the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s recent efforts to rally the community against what he viewed as unfair treatment of black athletes in Illinois drew little response, Franklin said.

“We are fragmented people living fragmented lives who need healing and holism,” Franklin said. “T.D. Jakes names pain and self-hatred in the black community in a way we haven’t heard since Malcolm X.”

Tyler Perry, the Atlanta-based playwright who turned Jakes’ book into the play, which runs through Sunday, said the outpouring of response indicates that “pain is as universal as music.” He himself was molested by an acquaintance and verbally and physically abused by his father, he said, experiences that helped him pen his play with vivid authenticity.

Murray, an outspoken advocate of the primacy of the social gospel in the black church, said the new focus on inner healing ought not to lapse into self-indulgent “navel gazing.” But, he acknowledged, the black community “will never again have a single focus” now that most overt barriers to integration have been dismantled and the majority of African Americans see themselves as reasonably successful players in the established political and economic systems.

The Barna research supports that view. In the survey of 1,900 African American adults, teenagers and pastors, 85% described themselves as “happy,” 72% as “successful” and 50% as “financially comfortable.” Although the majority said they believed that race relations were worsening, only 34% said there was a sense of unity among African Americans today.

For clergy, the new realities mean a widening of their agendas beyond teaching the Word. Black churches today are engaged in a diverse range of programs: child care, education, economic development, political empowerment, prison ministry and supporting the growing number of single-parent families.

Jakes, too, plans to widen his focus in coming months from recovery to what he calls his three goals for the 21st century: empowerment in spirit, economics and relationships.

“What I have become is someone who understands the plight of our people and a voice that also says empowerment can be done and legally and with integrity,” Jakes said.