What started out as one class — being long winded, I didn't finish and decided to carry on for a second week and twice as many women came. By then I just added some more to it. I could have finished but I added more. By the fourth week we had women standing outside of the door to hear me talk about this subject for which I had no name. I later called a friend of mine — the now deceased Reverend Archie Dennis — and said to him "I am teaching this class for women and it is growing in leaps and bounds." He said, "Why don't you come to Pittsburgh?" I was then living in Charleston, West Virginia. He said "why don't you come to Pittsburgh and do it in my church". I said OK. He said, "What do you call it?" I said, "I don't know." I was teaching out of Luke 13 and I said, "Well, I guess we'll just call it 'Woman, thou art loosed!' That is what the scripture said." And he said, "OK."

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I think I touched a nerve where there was a need in the pews that evidently we had not touched in that way before. Now we've gone from that to our largest crowd. We had 86,000 women at the Georgia Dome. I didn't plan it. It just kind of happened.

Preaching: Do you think that the response you've had perhaps reflects that much of the church is not connecting or engaging in the lives of women?

Jakes: I think that we are doing a better job now than we used to but we have not always been as sensitive as we should have been. Partially because there are so many men manning the helm of the church that we are preoccupied with men's issues, leadership issues, theological issues and we approach ministry from our own perspective. In order for ministry to really be effective, I think it needs to be approached by what does the congregation need more than what does the pastor need to talk about.

God, when He gets ready to minister to us, does it by coming where we are. He came in the person of Jesus Christ to embrace the human experience and then offered the solution, and I think it is critical for Christian leaders that we don't lose touch with the people we serve. We have to do what Christ did. Sit where they sit, feel what they feel and then speak out in a deep sense of compassion because we are one with the people that we seek to minister to.

Preaching: In your messages, how do you connect both with the needs of women and the needs of men?

Jakes: I think it is a challenge when you try to do it in the same message but one of the great things about having a woman's conference, or a women's book, a men's book or a men's conference is that you can focus. I think it's the difference between a general practitioner in medicine and a specialist. That specialist can be more precise in his evaluation of your condition because he's localized all of his attention to one particular area and thereby he can do a better job. Any time ministers are afforded an opportunity to amass leaders or support groups or women's ministry or men's ministry, then we can fine tune our texts and adapt it to the concerns of the crowd that we seek to serve.