Spirit Raiser

By DAVID VAN BIEMA

He takes his sweet time. Bishop T.D. Jakes is in the 10th minute of a marathon sermon to 22,500 men in the Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg, Fla. Today's text is Genesis 1, in which God, famously, talks to himself. Jakes, a large man dressed in an eye-catching beige leisure ensemble, appears to be doing the same. He is strolling meditatively across the stage, his baritone voice set at low rumble, and his thoughts at first seem so loose and free-associative that he cannot make it through a seven-word divine utterance. "And God said, 'Let us. Let usssssss...'" says Jakes, and then digresses: "...One God, but manifest in...three different ways, Father in creation, Son in redemption, Holy Spirit in regeneration. And God said, 'Let usssssss...' One God, not bound by time, not created in time, the master of eternity, the one that Isaiah said 'sits on the circle of the earth and rules.' It's the God that stood there, before there was There, or When, or This, or That. And God said, 'Let usssssss...' It's the omniscient God..." Jakes proceeds like this for some little while, until at last he relents and finishes the citation: "'...make man in our likeness.'" Whew.

Pentecostal preaching is mannered. Jakes' eccentric pauses, coy glances at his audience and the occasional odd, Holy Spirit-inspired stutter that sounds like a skipping CD might normally mystify or annoy the nonanointed. And yet, somehow, they do not. Like Brando's mumbling or Michael Jordan's outstretched tongue, they are pendants to an overwhelming gift.

He purrs like Isaac Hayes and screams like Jay Hawkins. He slips from quoting a standard hymn--"Just as I am, without one plea/but that Thy blood was shed for me"--almost straight into hip-hop: "Transform me/Translate me/I release you to rearrange me/Are you willing to be changed?" He does this without warning or acknowledgement. (If you miss one riff, don't worry, there will be another one along in moments.) And however leisurely Jakes' presentation may seem, each sermon eventually reveals itself as perfectly calibrated and balanced, cohering into an often exquisite extended metaphor.

At Tropicana Field, Jakes' subject turns out to be every man's value as created in God's image, and the necessity of allowing God to develop that image as a photographer develops a piece of film. "Is there anybody here who's been in a darkroom?" he asks, alluding both to film processing and the dark places of the soul. The men, including hundreds watching via satellite hookup from prisons, roar in recognition. An hour later, lakes of sweat spreading across his formidable frame, Jakes has abandoned form and logic and is chanting, "Develop it, man, develop it. Develop it. Develop it. Develop it. Whatever it takes, develop it."

Vincent Synan, dean of religion at Regent University, contends that Jakes and Billy Graham are the only two evangelists who could pack Atlanta's 79,000-capacity Georgia Dome (both have), "but Graham has 50 years of fame and a great organization." Says Lee Grady, editor of the religious magazine Charisma: "We talk about someone being anointed. Jakes knows he's got a special trust."

Jakes is one of religion's most prodigious polymaths. His books, starting with his breakthrough inspirational volume Woman, Thou Art Loosed!, have sold in the millions. His 26,000-member Potter's House megachurch in South Dallas drew George W. Bush and Al Gore prior to the 2000 election. Jakes is a Grammy-nominated gospel singer and has a deal with Hallmark for a line of "Loose Your Spirit" inspirational greeting cards. He preaches regularly to millions on both Black Entertainment Television and the Trinity Broadcasting Network. Yet millions more have never heard of him. When they do, new enthusiasts can adopt an awed tone not unlike acolytes of bebop jazz in the '50s or grunge in the early 1990s. Hubert Morken, an independent political-science scholar who had not heard of Jakes until two years ago, ended up profiling him for a book on influential religious leaders. "I was shocked by the guy," he says. "His gifts are colossal."

Part of what stokes Jakes enthusiasts is the extravagant celebratory bounty of black Pentecostal preaching. "When it comes to rhetoric," says Paige Patterson, a leader in the predominantly white Southern Baptist Convention, "the best Anglo preachers on their best days don't preach as well as a good black preacher on his worst day." Regarding Holy Spirit-soaked Pentecostalism, one might add, More so. With its improvisatory electricity, ornate call-and-response cues and dramatic eruptions of prophesying or speaking in tongues, it is an unrivaled preacher's toolbox. The style is increasingly popular in non-Pentecostal black denominations and beyond: Kirbyjon Caldwell, a tongues-talking black Methodist, calls Bush "Brother President" and prays with him on the phone. Globally, Pentecostalism is the fastest-growing Christian faith.

Yet Jakes outstrips the movement's parameters. All Pentecostals know their Bible; fewer have the theological chops to casually drop a quick exegesis of Romans 1-8, perhaps Scripture's thorniest patch, into a sermon in order to explain how its author, the Apostle Paul, fostered cultural diversity in the early church. Jakes does, and has.

And he extends the tradition's emotional and psychological reach. Jakes was 10 when his father, a West Virginian who owned a janitorial business, developed a kidney ailment and died slowly over the next five years. The son comforted his mother and mopped blood from around the dialysis machine. The experience, which he terms "living between life and death," seems to have engendered a kind of fearless openness. As a preacher, Jakes takes on still-taboo topics like physical and sexual abuse and the shame of incarceration with a cathartic and psychologically acute explicitness. (Speaking to 64,000 women in New Orleans recently, he flatly broached a mother's nightmare: "You got a problem with your child. It's been 10 years since you've seen the child you wanted to see. Just some monster in his clothes.") It's Oprah-in-a-pulpit. But for Winfrey's generic spirituality, Jakes substitutes God. Says Charisma's Grady: "He taps into the core of human weakness and need and then proclaims Christ as an answer to that, in a way that causes people to stand up and shout."

Would everybody shout? There is a huge difference between being America's best preacher and America's Preacher, Graham's unofficial title for decades. In fact, that category may have evaporated, given today's cultural landscape and absent Graham's singular attributes. He is a white man in a country that understood itself, myopically, as white. He is a Protestant in a nation that was more aware of its Protestant roots than its growing diversity. A Baptist, he preaches a Gospel message so pure as to elude denominational criticism. He is expert at minimizing personal or philosophical particularities that would have reduced his constituency. A friend of Presidents, he lives in comfort but has nonetheless avoided ostentation and escaped the "rich preacher" label.

Jakes, by contrast, is a man of vivid particulars living in an age suspicious of the phrase "common ground." Some Americans might find him too black. Some Christians would consider him too Pentecostal, and even some Pentecostals question aspects of his theology. Jakes has called homosexuality a "brokenness" and says he would not hire a sexually active gay person. It is a common position among conservative religious leaders (Graham, for instance, called homosexuality a sin), but gay Americans would have no reason at all to consider Jakes their preacher.

Another case in point is his lifestyle. Jakes and his wife Serita, who is known as "the first lady," (they have five children) live in a $1.7 million pillared mansion on Dallas' scenic White Rock Lake next to an edifice once owned by oil magnate H.L. Hunt. He baptized former bad-boy athlete Deion (Neon) Sanders and befriended him, along with a host of luminaries like Natalie Cole. He flies on charter planes or in first-class seats, sups with a coterie in a room known as "the king's table," sports a large diamond ring and dresses like the multimillionaire he is.

Evangelical watchdogs find no hint of financial impropriety in all this. Jakes' income flows from book and record royalties and speaking fees, not from church tithes or his preaching videos. He has helped poor people both materially and spiritually, and is building a 231-acre rehabilitation and jobs complex in impoverished South Dallas. He feels that the poor need a fiscal model rather than an icon of self-denial. He claims Jesus must have been rich to support his disciples. But many other Christians believe that Jesus was a poor man and that wealth corrupts. Jakes is not their preacher.

America is constantly changing, as is Jakes. The two may yet come into consonance. Or not. That should not keep Americans, even those who don't claim Jakes as their preacher, from experiencing him just once. There may not be another like him soon.