Preacher offers solace to shattered souls

(CNN) -- Pentecostal preaching meets self-help psychology at T.D. Jakes' church in Dallas, Texas. Known as the Potter's House, the church has a congregation of 25,000 and is still growing, its popularity fueled by his frank sermonizing on family problems such as sexual abuse and domestic violence.

"Some of the issues, the divorce, the abuse, the traumas, the various types of pain that women are facing today are not new," Jakes said. "They have been facing them for years. But it has previously been taboo to discuss these subjects."

Jakes' candor on personal trauma and healing has roots in his own family experience.

Thomas Dexter Jakes was born 44 years ago near Charleston, West Virginia. His father ran a janitorial company. It was a churchgoing family, and Jakes embraced faith at an early age.

"I preached the Bible in school, and they called me the Bible Boy or the Boy Preacher," Jakes recalled. "My father had gotten sick when I was 10 and died when I was 16. And healing became imperative to me, to respond to a childhood I didn't have and a life I didn't get to live, growing up in hospitals and emergency rooms and a kidney machine in my basement. And then burying my father led to some serious questions."

Those questions still hovered in his adulthood. Jakes briefly studied psychology, then became a part-time minister. His day job was at the Union Carbide plant in Charleston.

After he married Serita Jamison and the couple had twin boys, the plant shut down.

"We were laid off and found ourselves going from what I thought was an adequate income to no income at all and entered into a very depressed economic desert," he said.

"The unemployment (money) ran out," Serita Jakes recalled. "And he was digging ditches with his brother to lay gas lines and preaching to revivals to subsidize their income. I worked as a DJ at a Christian radio station at night, but little did I realize that it was deflating his masculine instinct to want to take care of his family."

"That was one of the richest moments of my life, though it was one of the poorest moments of my life," Jakes said. "It helped to balance me."

He said that his own painful experiences helped him to reach out to others who were hurting. And what he heard, especially from women, helped to invigorate his ministry.

In 1993, he wrote about women facing the issues of divorce, molestation, depression and discrimination. He called the book "Woman, Thou Art Loosed," after a Bible verse about Jesus helping a troubled woman.

The book "was an investment, and a very frightening one, because it took every penny that I had to get it out there," Jakes said. "I got out about 5,000 copies, emptied out our bank account, and it sold out in about two weeks."

The book went on to sell 1.25 million copies, making Jakes a wealthy man and establishing him as an author. Television programs and conferences that spun out of the success of the book helped Jakes reach thousands more.

Jakes moved to Dallas in 1995 and bought a 28-acre compound in the Oak Cliff section, where he relocated his ministry. He called the church the Potter's House, figuratively linking the repair of shattered souls to the process of mending broken pots. His first service attracted 2,000 people.

His Sunday services are now beamed around the world, thanks to a state-of- the-art, $40 million television studio in the church. He also runs ministries for the homeless -- providing them with regular haircuts, meals and showers -- and special programs for people with AIDS, drug addicts and prisoners.

A prolific author, he has written 28 books and a stage play, "Behind Closed Doors."

His net worth has grown phenomenally, along with the number of his devotees. Jakes makes no apologies for his success.

"I am grateful that God has allowed me to discover some talents and resources," Jakes said. "Aside from ministry and aside from preaching, I have been able to explore creativity, open up businesses and still be true to my calling. I am willing to use every platform I have -- from the pulpit to the pen to the play -- to inform our people about the choices they have, to empower them."

His nondenominational services attract a mix of races and ages with their fusion of the Bible, pop psychology and civil rights messages. He has been compared to both the Revs. Martin Luther King and Billy Graham. But he sees himself through a different prism.

"I don't think God is in the business of duplicating people," Jakes said. "I think he makes one designer original, and then he breaks every mold. My goal is not to be Dr. Graham or Dr. King or anyone else. My goal is to be the best T.D. Jakes I can possibly be. And it is to that end that I work every day."