more fire

Two years ago, in the thralls of my renewed zeal for God, I stepped into a subway car on the G train in Brooklyn and cried:

“O, sick and perverse city of idolaters and blasphemers, repent and ask God for forgiveness. Woman, you let a man touch you and deceive you and you aren’t married. Man, you lust after a woman and she is not yours.

Some riders were startled, many averted their eyes and others gave me a who-are-you-to-judge-me glare. Some eventually softened their stares and a couple even looked up to see who might be so brazen as to call them to repentance. I continued:

Repent! You are proud and want more and when you get it you still are not satisfied. You measure yourself according to the world’s standards. You fashion god in your own image to justify your lifestyle. Repent and allow the real and living God to impress his image in you. Repent and confess Christ as Lord and be made new.”

At each stop I went to the next car until I had evangelized the length of the train. I exited the subway at the Carrol Street stop and wandered the neighborhood praying. I wrote down the message I had shared on the train (I’m a writer and can’t help but journal) and as I walked passed a storefront window I saw a Bible propped in the display case and read the page of Isaiah it was opened to. The verse strengthened my conviction to proclaim the truth of the Kingdom.

“For a long time I have held my peace; I have been still and restrained myself: now I cry out like a woman in labor; I will gasp and pant.” Isaiah 42:14.

Some might consider the terms “idolater” and “blasphemer” to be archaic, but they are as apt today as they ever were. People have always made idols in their own image. Even today people attempt to make God in their image because they do not want to make the effort to live according to the holy standard established by God. Idolaters prefer to live according to their own standards. They adamantly rebel against the holiness and righteousness of God in order to continue to eat the bitter herbs of iniquity and self-righteousness.

And still, in a merciful and just way, God continues to redeem a corrupted cosmos. His Son’s blood still flows so that broken, hurting people might drink his wine and eat his bread and be made whole. The crucified Messiah delivers true to his Word in this and every age. Exchange the bitterness for sweetness. Repent and be redeemed. Have faith in the Deliverer and be holy.

Related posts on evangelism:

• Rastafarians
• Jehovah’s Witnesses
• Lubavitch Jews

“The Church used to be a lifeboat rescuing the perishing. Now she is a cruise ship recruiting the promising.”

“God pity us that after years of writing, using mountains of paper and rivers of ink, exhausting flashy terminology about the biggest revival meetings in history, we are still faced with gross corruption in every nation, as well as with the most prayerless church age since Pentecost.”

“A man may study because his brain is hungry for knowledge, even Bible knowledge. But he prays because his soul is hungry for God.”

These are a few quotes from that great hell-wrecking evangelist Leonard Ravenhill. If you have never read his work, I highly recommend Why Revival Tarries.

Today marks the one-year anniversary of the blog dedicated to More Fire! Thanks to those who either casually or regularly stop by and give encouragement to this lowly blogger. And a special thanks to those who give glory to The Most High and to those who are seeking to know him. I pray Jesus’ holy name is glorified on this site. And that those who desire the intimacy and immediacy of God’s presence remain in the refiner’s fire until they are sanctified and made holy unto God. More fire!

In the late Spring of 2007 I interviewed Bishop T.D. Jakes for Forbes Magazine. You can read the Forbes interview here or you can read the raw, uncut version below. In part 1, we discuss his newest book, Reposition Yourself, his work with Texas prisoners as well as his work in Africa. Due to the length of the interview I’ve broken it up into three parts. Parts 2 and 3 are located further below.

On another note, I will be posting less frequently (about once a week) as I have left the freelance world and now work as the staff writer for an organization committed to ending family homelessness in New York City. It is a regular 9-to-5 so I’ll have less time to post. Please pray for me in this new position and continue checking back to read weekly posts. More fire!

Bishop T.D. Jakes: Hello

Storbakken: Good morning, Bishop.

Bishop: Good morning. How are you?

Storbakken: I’m well. Thanks for taking the time to talk with me.

Bishop: I’m glad to do it.

Storbakken: In the introduction to your new book, Reposition Yourself, you mention that you have a half-dozen businesses. What first got you interested in business.

Bishop: I was raised in a family that emphasized hard work. My parents were very entrepreneurial back in the ’60s. My father started a janitorial service with a mop and a bucket and he ended up with fifty-two employees. My mother dabbled in real estate. I grew up in a house where they were talking about business, and taxes and state taxes and employee taxes all of my life. So it has always been a side interest for me.

Storbakken: What is the advantage of being a Christian and a good financial steward?

Bishop: Any time you mix ethics with economics you come out with a positive end. I think that the combination of the two are vitally important. If you have economics without ethics you end up with Enron. In order to be ultimately effective, the customer or consumer, no matter who you serve, needs to know that there is some ethical basis that controls the ultimate decision that you make about economics. For me, my faith has been a catalyst in controlling the fine line between progress and obsession. While we want to be progressive we don’t want to be obsessed to the point that we want to get to the destination by any means necessary. So I think it is very important to mix the two: ethics and economics.

Storbakken: Chapter 7 is called “Launching Yourself Toward Your Highest Goals,” what is the highest goal a person can hope to achieve in this life?

Bishop: I think that one of the highest goals a person can hope to achieve in this life is balance. And that begins with having a sure foundation. For me, as a Christian my belief system becomes a balance to me. It doesn’t stop there. I have to work every day to balance myself. I have so many things pulling at me that I have to be very focused that I don’t allow one need to cannibalize the other. Our highest goal is to find our purpose and to fulfill our purpose.

Storbakken: Besides writing books, how does your ministry serve to empower the poor, the prisoners and the disenfranchised?

Bishop: When it comes to the book thing, my books are published through Simon & Schuster. That’s under the mantle of my for-profit business, which is a separate entity altogether. When it comes to helping the poor, which is something I talk about in the book, our church our not-for-profit, does a lot of work both in Kenya in terms of digging wells for indigenous people that are denied not just water but are denied clean water because they don’t have the water treatment system or often the access to water due to droughts and what have you. That is one of the projects that we deal with. We’re also working with offenders, the Texas offenders reentry initiative for inmates, trying to reduce the rate of recidivism by training them when they get out of prison, by helping them to find a place to stay, helping them to find a job, helping them to get back up on their feet again. Another very important thing that we do we are incubating businesses through our economic development corporation where young African-Americans and other minorities who are struggling to establish businesses can meet every two weeks and be exposed to accounting and marketing principles so they can pull themselves up and become effective. We work with home ownership because only 44% of African Americans own their own homes compared to 75% of Caucasians. So we’re working very hard to promote home ownership so that people who are vulnerable, like what we saw in Katrina many of whom did not own their homes or barely owned them, can begin to have home ownership and have the assurances they need to face a crisis and the unexpected traumas that come in life.

Storbakken: You said that you have to teach drug dealers, prostitutes, etc. how to operate on a business level that is moral and Christian-based. Can you give me a practical example of how you teach (or what you teach) them?

Bishop: I have ministered extensively to and through our prison ministry. However, one of the programs that I am most excited about is the Potter’s House TORI program (Texas Offenders Reentry Initiative). It is through this program and others that we utilize at the Potter’s House that we try to translate business principles to men and women who have been converted through our ministry but lack the skills for properly escaping the quagmire of poor education, or past mistakes that now make them less desirable to hire. In spite of their past, I teach them that if they once sold drugs wholesale, paid a staff and pocketed the profit, these basic ideals could be translated into a legal profession with many of the same dynamics. Many of these men and women are not at all lazy or without skills, they are often gifted but misguided and I feel that the millions spent to incarcerate could be better used to rehabilitate them, allowing that individual the opportunity to be repositioned and restored to becoming a productive part of our society.

Related posts:

• Part 2: TD Jakes at the movies
• Part 3: TD Jakes and the prosperity gospel

In part 2, the Bishop and I discuss the movies and his recent trip to the West Indies.

Storbakken: You have a music label, a production company and many businesses, correct Bishop?

Bishop: Yes, I have a music label called Dexterity Sounds.

Storbakken: I recently watched your film “Woman, Thou Art Loosed.”

Bishop: Let’s touch on that just a little bit. We did Woman, Thou Art Loosed, a Reuben Cannon production, and we had various investors like Cedric the Entertainer, myself, Johnny Cochrane, Oprah and others. We put our resources together. And to be a low budget film that was originally meant to go direct-to-video we won the film festival in Santa Barbara and started getting offers to go on screen. So it came out on limited screens, but it did well for the amount of screens it came to. It was in the top ten for a week. It sold a million DVDs through Fox distribution. And we pitched it to Sony and Michael Lynton, who is the president of Sony Pictures, called me and we’ve now engaged into a deal to do nine more movies and we begin filming in June. One of those movies, which is called “Not Easily Broken,” is based on a novel that I wrote with Warner Books and we’re pretty close to signing Jada Pinkett to playing a role in that movie. It’s just an exciting time on the entrepreneurial side of my life to be able to have these opportunities.

Storbakken: For some, Hollywood is a den of sin. What’s it like to deal with Hollywood?

Bishop: I have found the Sony family to be receptive to dealing with faith films. So far it has not been difficult to get them to be open to our tutelage about faith and how that message can best be translated to the big screen. It is true that Hollywood, by and large, has been one of the ways that sordid messages have been conveyed through some of its properties. Still, we must be careful not to think that the medium is bad just because the previous messages have sometimes been perverse. Theaters, like many things, are nebulous and could be used for good or evil depending on the message that is conveyed through it. It is my hope that we can utilize it for a positive message that is practical and yet spiritually relevant.

Storbakken: Recently you took a trip to the West Indies?

Bishop: Last week I was in the British Virgin Islands and it was just fascinating to me. I was invited down there to speak to an entity called the Investment Club. These people are called Belongers and that means that they are descendants of slaves who landed in the Virgin Islands and originally had no power at all. They got together fifteen years ago. They had no power as slaves and their descendants also had very little economic power. They got together and started investing their resources and set up an investment club and now they own at least 50% of the technology, like cell phone technology, in the area. They have also taken over the ports where the yachts come in. They control a major part of tourism and have bought up a lot of beachfront property and it’s just a sign, most of them are people of faith, of what people of faith can do when they are exposed to business principles. And often people who have been oppressed economically when they know better they can do better and they have made such incredible strides. I was there just last week and was able to be there celebrating there 15th anniversary. And I think that they’ve modeled something that can be repeated in some of the urban areas and in Africa where I’m passionate about seeing economic as well as spiritual empowerment for people in third world countries and some of the ghetto areas in our own country.

In part 3, the Bishop discusses the prosperity gospel and responds to his critics.

Storbakken: As a man who understands business and who is deeply involved in business, how do you keep the gospel message from getting lost in the business?

Bishop: You know that has not been a problem. I think it is very very important particularly when you work in urban areas. You cannot share the gospel with somebody who was an inmate or convict or a drug dealer or a prostitute because when you share the gospel you actually put them out of business. You have to teach them how to operate on a business level that is moral and that is Christian-based. So to lead them to the Lord and to leave them grumbling in the street without any economic empowerment they ultimately digress back into the hole that they came from. So it’s very very important for us to be able to impact people effectively.

Storbakken: Do you believe Jesus was rich financially?

Bishop: The overarching issue is not for us to guess about Jesus’s economics as much as it is for us to understand that Christ came and died for us on the cross. You know, I’ve grown in this area. I haven’t always thought this way. I’ve listened to both camps and respect both camps, but really when it comes to the Gospel I think that these are issues we need to put on separate tracks. Economic empowerment is one thing and the Gospel is another.

Storbakken: You teach economic empowerment, but some critics say you put too much
emphasis on wealth. How do you respond to them?

Bishop: It is difficult for those who evaluate your message in sound bytes to get an objective panoramic view of what is really being conveyed. As I shared in the opening chapters of my book, my goal is not to teach people to be rich as much as it is to promote a climate to close the gap that exists between African Americans and other minorities who have a far lower income rate per household than others and also are far behind in home ownership and other basic needs that are important to our community. The catastrophe of Katrina showed America something that many of us have known for years.

Those of us who work on the front lines with people who feel trapped know that economics is a part of the problem. To not speak about it would be like sticking your head in the sand until the next tragedy comes along and then pretending to be surprised that poor people have few options and cannot escape their plights without aid though others can. Because we use scriptures to encourage our audience to improve themselves it is easy to confuse economic empowerment with a prosperity message, but faith has always been the catalyst that motivated our people to make changes in their lives. Often using the Bible helps the faith community to believe in spite of historical and contemporary odds that it is yet possible for success to come in all colors and reach all people, even those who have had little experience with such.

In the 1960s, we challenged the system and rightfully so. Today, we have to at least in part challenged ourselves to make necessary changes. Personal responsibility and social justice need not be diametrically opposed. They are the partnership of possibility to those who can understand the need to hold both the system and the individual accountable. This is not a message about how to get rich but more aptly how to become homeowners, send your children off to college or afford appropriate legal representation when needed.

Storbakken: Most people in the world, or at least in America, want to be rich. Should people want to get rich?

Bishop: Riches do not bring happiness, whether you have it or not. It is important not to buy into the myth that wealth guarantees or even secures joy and inner peace. We tend to want it because it is marketed to us through television, movies, books and magazines. While I don’t try to tell others what they should and should not want, I do think that the goal has to be about more than dollars and cents. Finding your God-given purpose gives fulfillment, giving to others helps as well. Investing in our community and beyond it is a sign of being a global thinker without loosing a sense of connectivity with one’s own roots. Those who look at finances through a myopic perspective do so to the detriment of the greater good of all people. I find it to be important that we encourage people to be all that they can be and to understand that true riches, peace, joy, love, health and happiness, go further than financial success and on into a life of service to others.

A perfect example of our need to avoid narrowly defining progress to a purely capitalist perspective would be the difference between a house and a home. For many the purchase of a home is the realization of the American dream. While that can be a sound investment that can surely work as the catalyst to the accumulation of wealth for you and your family, the money will only buy the house, but without the intangibles of love and compassion, giving and sharing, the house will never become what we really need to have peace and that is to make the house a home.

Should a Christian be entrenched in the politics of this world? If so, how involved should a believer be? I’ve been mulling over such questions since I returned to my faith almost two years ago and since then my beliefs regarding faith and politics have somewhat crystallized.

I’m convinced that we are called to wisely exercise the authority we are granted and, although we are first and foremost citizens of the Kingdom of God, we who are citizens in Western nations have been afforded undeniable rights. We definitely need to consider our brothers and sisters in Christ who are persecuted for their faith if we are to gain perspective of our privileged situation. We also need to regularly lift them up in prayer and call on God to make breakthroughs in oppressive nations.

Before I digress further, let’s look to the Word to see examples of servants of The Most High exercising certain political powers in various nations. When the Israelites sojourned abroad or were taken into exile there were often people among them who attained high political office. For example, Joseph was the chief adviser to Pharaoh in Egypt and Daniel was the chief of the governors in Nebuchadnezzar’s court while the Hebrews were exiled in Babylon. Thus, they were actively engaged in the politics of the culture in which they lived. It’s a blessing to the citizenry when genuine servants of The Most High take office, but it’s nothing less than blasphemy when politicians invoke the name of God to further their own political agenda.

Jeremiah prophesied to his people not to resist Babylon. He even encouraged them to engage with the culture of the world power which dominated them, but he told them it was of utmost importance to remain faithful to God. Thus, I believe, that we are to identify with the exile more than the empire. Every nation, flag and political system will fail, but God reigns forever. Our hope must be in the Lord and not in culture, the world or politics.

When Paul and Silas were imprisoned, the fellowship of believers could have petitioned the Roman ruler, staged protests, and advocated that one more “god” would do no harm to the pantheon of Roman deities. Instead, they chose to pray and sing hymns. Doors flew open, the earth quaked, and a family was saved. The first, next and last step in seeking change, whether it be political, social or intellectual, is to petition the Lord with prayer.

Our citizenship in the Kingdom of God supersedes every other form of citizenship. The Kingdom emphasizes uplifting the poor and oppressed, turning the other cheek, seeking peace, and living a life holy unto God. This world emphasizes the individual pursuit of happiness, often regardless of how that happiness is obtained. Holiness is a completeness of being. It is a wholeness in which the person is consecrated unto God. Happiness is surely found in holiness, but holiness is not always found in what the world considers happiness. Thus, be holy because God is holy.