Preaching: How has your preaching changed over the years? How have you changed?

Jakes: I don't think the preaching has changed much at all. I think the environment has changed. I think that the preaching is what it is. God fashions us in obscurity and then brings us to some visibility, and I think that it is very important that you resist the temptation to change who you are as God brings you into the light. I think God wants who He called. Sometimes when God calls us we start trying to become something that we think we ought to be, but God called who He wanted. I've tried to remain very close to what I was before. They told me that if you get on television that you need to polish up, you're too country, you're too loud, you're too wild, you're too passionate. I am going to do my thing. Either love me or hate me America. I am who I am. I've tried to hold to that.

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A lot of things have changed around us. The environment, the requirement, the demands of leadership, how we pastor has changed drastically because there is a great deal of difference between pastoring 28 people and pastoring 28,000. There's a huge difference in how we do what we do. But the core gospel message shouldn't change.

I am afraid that the church is becoming worldly in its need to come up with something new and different. Anytime something is new we either have to improve it or it deteriorates from what it was before. How can the gospel be improved? How dare we deteriorate what is already perfect? I have tried to hold it pretty close to the way God gave it to me. Everything else about it has changed — staff, needs, requirements, obstacles, enemies, adversities. All of that has changed but the core message. I could show you some tapes of me preaching in the store front and — aside from being a whole lot smaller and a lot more hair — I was pretty much the same guy, a little younger.

Preaching: One of the things I have read is that Mrs. Jakes has played such a key role in your ministry. I read a quote from one of your members that said that "part of the attraction that women have to your ministry is the way you treat your wife." Does she play a role in your preaching? Do you discuss ideas or sermons?

Jakes: Rarely, rarely do I talk a lot about a text. Sometimes I do. My wife is an encourager. It amazes me that after all of these years she still gets excited when I preach. I think that is a great compliment for somebody who lives with you to still like you — to still have an appreciation for what you do is the greatest affirmation that I have ever experienced in my life. For me to walk off the stage and for her to rant and rave about something I preached is invaluable to me.

Really our greatest strength to me in our relationship is not so much what she does on stage but how she grounds me off stage and gifts me. Something I think can easily be taken away with notoriety. She gives me normalcy, she gives me tranquility, she gives me a sense of being a person and not just a personality and let's me not be sucked up into some gospel television machine. She grounds me and that's very important.