30 - Reading Race and American Televangelism

Summary

Father, touch in this place. Heal in this place…. Don’t anoint our masks…. Touch who we are, where we live. Touch the places in our lives that people don’t even know exist…. Release an anointing in this place because somebody in this room is in trouble. Somebody’s mama is in trouble. Somebody’s wife is in trouble. Some mother of the church, some first lady is in trouble – encumbered with duties and responsibilities, functioning like a robot, but bleeding like a wounded dog. I pray in the name of the Lord Jesus … that the spirit of the Lord God would permeate this place and resurrect our evangelists and our missionaries and our ministers. And, raise up mamas and raise up wives and raise up our sisters that have been slain by circumstances.

Bishop T. D. Jakes, Azusa Conference 1993, Tulsa, Oklahoma

Commanding women to be “loosed” from their burdens and circumstances of affliction in his nearly canonical sermon, “Woman Thou Art Loosed,” Bishop T. D. Jakes momentarily evoked for the listener in his opening prayer splintered images of women’s despair and possibilities for their redemption. In 1993 this sermon catapulted him to international fame. Ministering in an obscure auditorium on the campus of Oral Roberts University, Jakes would eventually package and redistribute this message, through the power of satellite broadcasting, to national and international audiences. What began as a small Pentecostal movement turned into a worldwide phenomenon.