Bishop Jakes services are now beamed into over 375 prisons across the United States, allowing you to reach about 400,000 inmates every single week.
"We have to go where the need is, and in our country there is a tremendous need in the penal institution. In other countries, we downlink by satellite into South Africa as well to work with the
inmates there. The inmates are often forgotten. Jesus said, "When I was in prison, you didn't come and visit me."
They said, "Oh Lord, You were never in prison." He said, "Whatever you've done unto the least of Mine, you've done it unto Me. "
We have parishioners whose sons and daughters are in penal institutions, and we can minister to them. When I go into the prison I tell them, "You're a captive audience."
"You're not going no where, you have to hear me preach, okay. You've got nothing else to do, you've got no where to go, you got no kids to pick up, you can hear me preach. The Gospel reaches behind prison walls and it really can reduce the rate of recidivism in any country. Where ever there are inmates getting off the bus, coming back into the city, there needs to be a church bus waiting there
when they get off the bus."
The church was designed to be a transformational agent in society because "God is not one-dimensional, He is multifaceted. Paul calls it the manifold wisdoms of God, many folds, like a curtain that has many folds. I think we make a mistake when we hang a curtain, called the Gospel,
up to the window and we don't have anything else in it, because the Gospel has healing, it has deliverance, it has family life, it has business in it."
The Bible said, "Occupy 'till I come," and in the NIV it's translated "Do business 'till I come." I think that it's very, very important, if God sends a man to a city or to a community or to a country of any kind, that they understand the needs of that community and respond to those needs.
If we say be warmed and filled, and a person is hungry, Jesus criticizes us. We need a practical Gospel, a relevant Gospel, a socially adept Gospel that really challenges. I challenge pastors, particularly in other countries, that they are for many people, the only hope that they have of restoration."
As a pastor, an evangelist, an author, a playwright, a moviemaker, a record label owner, a businessman, a father; Bishop Jakes has only 24 hours in a day, like everybody else, how does he do it?
He says, " have 350 people on staff here at this ministry, and if I do their jobs then I have not done them a fair service. They should do what God called them to do. I only do what God called me to do, write the vision, make it plain, and let him that read it run thereby. I'm a visionary, I can see things that have not materialized. And once I see that and describe it, they can make it happen. And that's how we get it done."
If there was a phrase, a sentence, that could describe Bishop Jakes, his mission and purpose, what would that be?
"One of the things that's -- that I have always tried to live by is not to be one-dimensional. So many times people will say, "Well, you're a preacher," or whatever they met you doing, that is what they think you are as if, if you are this you can't be that. But the reality is never allow people to put a period where God has put a comma. It could be possible that what you are doing is not the only thing that God created you to do. Do it all. Do all that's in your heart."
