Church Girl
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In front of nearly 20,000 Christian women, Serita Jakes, faces her husband, Bishop T.D. Jakes, onstage at the final Woman Thou Art Loosed conference (WTAL) in Atlanta.
Since its inception, the conference has garnered more than 347,000 attendees, including public figures like Maya Angelou and Oprah Winfrey. While it’s given way to a novel, a bible edition, two movies, several albums, and more that cemented Bishop Jakes as a global faith voice, WTAL started as a Sunday School lesson.
In 1992, Bishop toiled over a six-week lesson that addressed the traumatic struggles of the women in his small storefront church. Against the backdrop of a largely patriarchal Christian world, word spread about his message for women. Soon, he preached it to more than 10 states, titling it after Jesus’s command to a woman who was bent over and could in no way raise herself up, “Woman, thou art loosed of your infirmity.”
“Not a man alive back then could stand to see a woman in his pulpit,” Ma says when I purchase our tickets to WTAL. “And if he could, she had to be the choir director or the dance leader. Never a preacher. So we ain’t really have nobody telling our stories the way they was in the church. Now on TV? Maybe. On the porch? Sometimes. But in the pulpit? Forget it. Nobody was talking about [sexual violence], abuse, abortion, incest, infertility. That’s why when Bishop Jakes did what he did, it was game changer.”
But we still aren’t talking, I want to interject. Our family’s matriarchs, my grandmother and two great-aunts, haven’t spoken about the alleyway abortion that left one of them unable to conceive, or the husband who snuck off to his sister’s on Sunday evenings to bend in ways even the Spirit couldn’t sway, nor have they shared the death omens that marked their mother’s passing.
“You just didn’t talk about those kinds of things,” Nana once said. Not even with your sisters.
But the residue of the past is not easily dismissed. My younger sisters and I, the daughters of those matriarchs, have often been damned to live and die, alone, in their past lives.
“We needed somebody,” Ma continues, referencing Bishop Jakes.
I try to empathize, but the more Ma speaks, the angrier I get.
“He was before his time,” she says.
“Well, while y’all was waiting on him, we was waiting on y’all,” I burst.
Silence.
A few weeks later, Ma informs me she can no longer come with me to the final WTAL conference due to another church commitment. Though I’m sad, I’m not deterred. I go determined to be the somebody I’ve longed for my Mothers to be.
Onstage, Mrs. Jakes thanks Bishop Jakes for nearly 30 years of service to women, and as she prays over him, I, the daughter of Pentecostal Black preachers, instinctively do what I know to do: bow my head and stretch forth my hand.
“Thank you, Father,” I whisper, “for how you’ve used this conference to free us.”
Heal us from the ways it’s kept us bound, I think, recalling the oppressive gender roles sometimes preached from the WTAL stage and my Mothers’ dining room tables.
“Bless the Jakes and their teams as they’ve blessed others,” I say.
I can’t help but wonder if “blessings” inherently cost something. If they do, given the trauma and money Black women have laid at the altar, I wonder if we’ve paid the price yet.
“Love on all of us.”
For you correct those you love.
I roll my eyes in protest. While having experienced the Western Black Church’s long history with misogyny and capitalism, I hope the interpersonal dilemmas of my family will overshadow my larger religiopolitical dilemma surrounding WTAL.
But having arrived, I can’t silence or flatten one without risking the other. The complex legacies of my Mothers’ and WTAL are in boisterous conversation, and I’m overwhelmed.
“You are a mighty deliverer!” Mrs. Jakes declares to Bishop.
My brows jump. I pull them down.
In 1996, Bishop Jakes hosted the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta, GA. Women preachers took their place behind that sacred desk. Women worldwide accredited Bishop for helping them heal from intergenerational trauma.
Though my family had never attended WTAL, its brand reached us. I was 13 when my parents rushed us to the theaters to see the first WTAL movie featuring the story of a young woman convicted of murdering the man who sexually abused her as a child. We sobbed during the film, tried to close our eyes, but Daddy said it was important that we see.
He never asked us what we saw.
A women’s conference with a man at its helm. Dissonance. Coca-Cola sponsoring a faith conference. Money. Escalators, conveyor belts of trauma.
You gotta learn how not to let those things grieve you, Daddy’s voice interrupts.
Annoyed, I lift my eyes to the women. Somewhere in the multitude stands Ms. Meredith who came looking for clarity after losing both her parents in the same year, but she sure is grateful to be here. And Ms. Sharon who just retired and prays the Lord will finally bring her a husband because she’s a good woman. And Ms. Geneva who’s anticipating a boost in spirit because she always leaves these things feeling better than when she came. The room is full.
I imagine the cold concrete cracking beneath our soles. We’re heavy. Women in plenty and in want, a raging tide that pressed through the doors carrying bill money and bodies, wreckage and salt; hoping to pull--no, haul something out.
I don’t know if we’ll receive what we need. I hope it’s, at the very least, comparable to what we brought. Perhaps the millions of dollars surrounding this event is the only quantifiable, but least valuable, thing.
“God,” I sigh, lifting my head above, “tell me you see us.”
But I know He does. I’m just afraid to ask Him what He sees.
“Mother, don’t get up,” a red-lipped woman says to an elderly woman with a bedazzled cane seated behind me. “We family. Imma scoot on by you.”
She shuffles into the row and trips.
“Hey, if I fall out, you got me, right?” she chuckles. “By the Spirit or by my own two feet.”
Mother nods.
We squeeze ourselves between ourselves¾our thighs and arms spill onto one another in our chairs. Women on either side of me, whose names I don’t know, keep me warm against the chill in the air.
Before the second service starts, we dance the Electric Slide and the Wobble in the aisles. Our hands lifted to the piping above. Hips dipping to the concrete below. The sister in front of me misses a step or two and sits down.
“Nah, girl, c’mon,” I encourage.
She rolls her eyes and gets back in line. Step by step, she remembers.
“See? You got it!”
“Woman! Thou! Art! Loosed!” Pastor Sarah Jakes Roberts roars over the sea.
A woman shimmies out of her girdle. I take off my heels. Others throw up their hands. Some run. Some leap. I bow. Arms fanning, sweeping. Howls from the deep. Our makeup runs down our cheeks.
We chant, “Woman. Thou. Art. Loosed,” hand in hand.
I’m holding Ms. Meredith, Ms. Sharon, Ms. Geneva, myself, my mama, her mama, my sisters, and my great-aunts.
“You are the voice for this time,” Bishop Jakes tells Pastor Sarah. “Not all people will like you, not all people will follow you, but you preach the gospel … ”
“Preach, girl!” I shout.
“ … And hear your father tell you that you are enough.”
He announces that Pastor Sarah’s emerging Christian women’s conference, Woman Evolve, will replace his historic WTAL conference.
We cheer. Finally, I think. Somebody like us.
The crowd files out. I rush in front of the women I danced and cried with for three days to get to the escalators. I don’t know the exact moment my sisters-in-Christ turn into bodies blocking my way, I just know I’m tired and dehydrated, and I want to get to my hotel room to watch Law and Order: SVU. I’m not alone. An elderly woman who’s hunched over on a cane stands beside me. No one makes a path for her.
On the plane, she stays with me. Looking out the window above the clouds, I wonder if any of us have it in us to be the somebodies we so desperately need. While my Mothers thought Bishop Jakes would be enough, and I hope Pastor Sarah will be enough, and I want to be enough, perhaps the burden of enough is far too heavy for any created thing.
“Forgive me,” I whisper as I squint at the sun.
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