Preaching: Thinking now about your Sunday services at The Potter's House in Dallas, how do you plan or develop what you are going to do in preaching?

Jakes: I think I spend a lot of time in prayer and a lot of time in observation of the needs of our congregation. Lord, where are we now. I don't presume to know where we are just because I am there. God's perspective is higher and wiser than mine. What do I need to minister? Our services include thousands and thousands of people — we make up 20 different nationalities. We have everybody in our congregation from judges, lawyers, attorneys, and millionaires to homeless people. There is a wide range of people. It is not just a typical inner city church where it is all inner city people. It's not a suburban church where there are all people from the suburbs. I have just an amalgamation of every type of person imaginable, so I need divine intervention to know what to do.

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What I have had to look for amidst that vast array of persons and personalities are common denominators. There are so many that I am shocked. There are common issues that concern both the person who's living in a shelter and the person who's living in a palatial mansion in north Dallas. The desire for betterment, the desire for emotional stability in a chaotic world, how do we deal with aging, how do we deal with loneliness, grief, depression, fear — those things thing have no color, they have no culture, they have no economic, sociological context.

I try to develop series that will minister as a pastor to a multiplicity of needs. Sometimes those series are born out of message where you strike a nerve — you didn't even know there was going to be a series and you create a series. You say, "come back next week, I am going to talk more about this." The crowd often teaches the preacher how to preach. Their response, their reaction, how well we have affected them. So many times we walk out of the pulpit and we think we did a great job because we said something that inspired us, but if it fails to reach them . . .

Communication is not complete until the person who hears you is receiving what you have to say. It's not how well you speak; It's how well they hear what you are trying to say. When you make contact with those persons you want to continue in that vane until there is a feeling of satiety that exists both in their hearts and yours. The Bible said that the word of the Lord would not return unto Him void but it would do that thing where unto it had been sent, so we can't stop that word until it has accomplished that thing where unto God has sent it.

Preaching: Are there some ways that you read the congregation to determine whether you've connected or not?

Jakes: I find it difficult — and it's funny, because I am leaving here to go to a stadium full of women, some 70,000 women — yet I find it difficult to connect with a crowd where I can't see in the eyes of at least a wide range of those persons. You read people's eyes and hearts. Preaching is really a conversation. It is not a monologue; it's a dialogue between you and the congregation. Even though it's not always that they verbally respond — they are talking back to you if you take the time to listen, to feel the atmosphere in the room, the anointing. As you speak on certain issues, it lets you know that now you've hit it. You've hit what God wants to say — now that you are through saying those first five minutes with all the things that you wanted to say — and finally you hit a sentence where you feel that push behind you, that surge that says now you have dropped into the vein that God really stood you up to say. And when you hit that vein, why move? Stay right in that track and allow God to guide you. The Holy Spirit was given to us to guide us. I think that even as we minister we must be guidable and allow the Holy Spirit to influence. It doesn't matter what I have in my notes to say. It doesn't matter whether I get my favorite point in or not. I matters that I am guided by the Holy Spirit to that precise area of need in the lives of my congregation.