Post by MsKayLander on Sept 25, 2007 17:13:35 GMT -5
''Don't Give Up on Love,'' says Bishop T. D. Jakes, His Wife and Clergy Around the Nation Respond to Bynum Beating
by Hazel Trice Edney
NNPA Editor-in-Chief
WASHINGTON (NNPA) – Bishop T. D. Jakes, preparing for yet another women’s conference – “For Ladies Only” - next month, says he is hoping recent separation and divorce announcements of Christian power couples, including the hotel parking lot beating of Prophetess Juanita Bynum-Weeks by her minister husband, won’t deter marriages.
“I don’t want to comment on their specific cases because I am counseling them and that would not be professional. But to make a general statement about women who are going through divorce, divorce does not have to be the end of your life,” says Jakes in an interview with the NNPA News Service. “It is a tragedy. The Bible says that God hates divorce and I believe that it is God’s will that we walk together and keep our vows.
But your life doesn’t have to end because your marriage did. And to those women who are dealing with domestic violence, I think the first thing to do is to put you and your children in a safe environment and then begin to work out a resolution.”
As for those who may be intimidated after hearing about or witnessing violence between lovers, there is no need to lose heart, he says.
“When they see a neighbor or a cousin or a friend or even a leader going through those problems, then they start giving up on marriage,” says Jakes, who has been married to his wife, Serita, for 25 years.
“They fail to look at those thousands and thousands of couples who have been married for years and years and years and have enjoyed their marriages and have enjoyed their lives together. Things may not have been perfect, but they still have enjoyed a prolonged loving relationship with another person. Don’t give up on Love. Love works.”
Bynum, a televangelist with a national following, pressed charges against her estranged husband, Bishop Thomas Weeks, after she was badly bruised in a confrontation with him during an Aug. 22 meeting to reconcile at an Atlanta hotel, police said. Bishop Thomas W. Weeks III, founder of Global Destiny churches, was charged with aggravated assault and terroristic threats. He was set to appear in court Sept. 6.
News of the Bynum-Weeks charges was compounded by the subsequent announcement by Paula White of Paula White Ministries and her husband Randy that they too are planning to divorce. Their separation appears to be amicable.
Both women could be considered daughters of the Jakes ministry, having largely gotten their fame after preaching and teaching at numerous Jakes conferences.
Jakes wife, First Lady Serita Jakes, also on the telephone interview, says high-profiled people in ministry should not be judged more harshly just because their frailties are more public.
“These people are having a human experience with a divine mantel on their lives. And so, I pray and our prayers go toward Lady Bynum and Lady Paula as well that God would help heal the brokenness that’s in them,” says Serita Jakes, who has authored several books, including “Beside Every Man: Loving Myself While Standing by Him”.
Both Bishop Jakes and First Lady Serita will be teaching at the upcoming “FLO” conference at the Gaylord Texan Resort in Grapevine, Texas, Oct. 18-20. With focuses on creating life strategies, recovering from setbacks, improving relationships and spiritual revival, she stresses hope that participants will look for the divinity in the messages rather than in the messengers. “We preach Jesus; not ourselves.”
Not all clergy agree.
The Washington-based National Black Church Initiative, which represents 16,000 churches across the U. S. has called for Weeks to step down as head of the Global Destiny Ministries, founded by him and his wife. NBCI president, Rev. Anthony Evans, has issued a press release calling Weeks' actions ''morally wrong and reprehensible.''
Women and men with high expectations – especially those hoping for marriage or remarriage - are sorely disappointed at the news of the stomping, kicking and choking of Bynum by her husband with whom she’d shared a million dollar “wedding of the century” only five years ago.
“I’m just disgusted. I don’t know what to do. So, I’m drowning myself in my work,” says Tisha Lewis, a single 35-year-old doctoral student. “So, any man who comes up to me swinging the Bible and talking churchy, churchy, I’m just going to question his integrity anyway. It’s really what you do, not what you say…I just want to know what’s going on?”
Los Angeles Bishop Noel Jones, who recently announced FaithMate.com - a website to facilitate dating relationships between Christian singles – says one problem is that people are too often enthralled in preparing the ceremony instead of developing the relationship: “A wedding does not a marriage make,” he says.
Also, couples are too often impressed with each other’s professional demeanors and exteriors, Jones says.
“They don’t make distinctions between what is professional and what is personal. Because the two get confused sometimes, people believe that you are actually presenting how you are and the way your relationship goes,” says Jones. “But, indeed and in fact, you can have a very strong and a very influential professional presentation and can be upside down personally. To put it short, you can be a public success, but a private failure.”
The kind of love that binds the relationship has a lot to do with it, says Jones.
Instead of getting married based on eros, a sensual love that does not always last, the love called agape - the God kind of love - is what must be present for a marriage to last, says Jones. “Sex does not have enough strength to keep a marriage together.”
He describes, “Agape is rational, reasonable and strong. It overcomes all the situations and circumstances. If you look at 1st Corinthians 13, it’s the thing that stands when everything else has fallen and that’s what’s not happening,” says Jones.
Jones also says professional partnerships should never be viewed as a reason for marriage. “A spouse cannot be a professional partner. We have done that in the church and we’ve made monsters out of people.”
But, there are ways to avoid failure in a marriage in which the couple is destined to share ministry responsibilities, says Bishop J. Charles Carrington and his wife, Pastor Althea Carrington. But, it takes much work.
Bishop Carrington is senior pastor of Life Builders Church in Baltimore, where his wife is also a pastor. He is also presiding Bishop over Full Gospel Christian Fellowship.
“I think the biggest pressure that we’ve had is maintaining balance, knowing when to say, ‘That’s enough engagements for this month’, knowing when to say, ‘I can’t go to that meeting’, knowing when to say, ‘I can’t necessarily be away from home tomorrow. It’s just being able to say no,” says Bishop Carrington.
Establishing priorities is also a key, says the Carringtons who have been married 23 years and have two sons, 18 and 13.
“A lot of women in ministry, they are so either pressured or focused on being something great or someone great. And then the home is lacking,” says Pastor Carrington, who also has her own catering business. “For me personally, I found that my home front or my home is the center of my ministry. Everything stems from that. And for me to succeed in my home with my family, with my children, with my husband is so paramount.”
In seeking a wife, Carrington says he was specific in his focus.
“I wanted the understanding that our goals are the same in life, that our desires are the same, our drive is the same, and that our passion for one another and for God is the same. That’s what I was looking for,” he says. “Does this woman love the Lord like I do? Does this woman love life and want to be in life what she should be like I do? And number three, does this woman love me?”
When conflict comes, there should be guards for the relationship says Pastor Althea.
“It’s very important to have a circle of friends, someone who sows into your life on a regular basis, someone you can confide in who will pray, who you know will pray and offer wise counsel,” she says. “You have to put down your crown for a while and your scepter,'' she chuckles, ''and really listen and hear what they have to say.”
Couples must do everything possible to avoid stresses in the marriage, says Dr. R. Dandridge Collins, a Christian psychologist and author of The Trauma Zone: Trusting God for Emotional Healing.
“When a relationship is marinated in stress, you tend to overreact,” he says. “One of the characteristics of stress is that you can’t cope with your emotions.”
Expounding on what he calls, “trauma drama” Collins says even negative childhood events as well as events that happened in adulthood can cause reactions later in life as if they had just occurred.
“Most people think trauma means you’ve been sexually abused. That’s one definition. That’s one experience that traumatized people may have had. But, then, there’s verbal abuse, there’s emotional abuse, and there’s physical abuse. So by the time you get finished with all of these different kinds of abuses, there’s something with each of our names on it. It’s so hard to grow up without being wounded in some way,” he says.
Trauma that leads to domestic violence – either physical or emotional abuse - often has four key symptoms that can be recognized before the marriage, he says. They are: A need to control, a feeling of entitlement (an insistence on getting what is deserved), a comfort in expressing rage and an obsession with roles.
For healing, couples or individuals could turn to self-help methods by receiving instruction about their problems from credible books, tapes or by getting counseling or therapy if the problems persist, Collins says.
He says relationships between church leaders who are married may be in danger before they know it.
“We, with the right attitude, empty ourselves in doing the work of the Lord; yet, we leave it all in the church and don’t have enough energy to ransom our own marriages,” he says. “And so, while we are ransoming the loss, we don’t rescue ourselves.
And so, the calm to all of this is not judgment of our brothers who are prominent or our sister who is prominent. We just need to understand that 'except for the grace of God, there go I.'
''So, we need to approach this with some humility and realize that just because a person is prominent doesn’t mean that they’re not going to be in pain. They might even be in more pain because if something goes wrong, everybody in the country is talking about it.”
by Hazel Trice Edney
NNPA Editor-in-Chief
WASHINGTON (NNPA) – Bishop T. D. Jakes, preparing for yet another women’s conference – “For Ladies Only” - next month, says he is hoping recent separation and divorce announcements of Christian power couples, including the hotel parking lot beating of Prophetess Juanita Bynum-Weeks by her minister husband, won’t deter marriages.
“I don’t want to comment on their specific cases because I am counseling them and that would not be professional. But to make a general statement about women who are going through divorce, divorce does not have to be the end of your life,” says Jakes in an interview with the NNPA News Service. “It is a tragedy. The Bible says that God hates divorce and I believe that it is God’s will that we walk together and keep our vows.
But your life doesn’t have to end because your marriage did. And to those women who are dealing with domestic violence, I think the first thing to do is to put you and your children in a safe environment and then begin to work out a resolution.”
As for those who may be intimidated after hearing about or witnessing violence between lovers, there is no need to lose heart, he says.
“When they see a neighbor or a cousin or a friend or even a leader going through those problems, then they start giving up on marriage,” says Jakes, who has been married to his wife, Serita, for 25 years.
“They fail to look at those thousands and thousands of couples who have been married for years and years and years and have enjoyed their marriages and have enjoyed their lives together. Things may not have been perfect, but they still have enjoyed a prolonged loving relationship with another person. Don’t give up on Love. Love works.”
Bynum, a televangelist with a national following, pressed charges against her estranged husband, Bishop Thomas Weeks, after she was badly bruised in a confrontation with him during an Aug. 22 meeting to reconcile at an Atlanta hotel, police said. Bishop Thomas W. Weeks III, founder of Global Destiny churches, was charged with aggravated assault and terroristic threats. He was set to appear in court Sept. 6.
News of the Bynum-Weeks charges was compounded by the subsequent announcement by Paula White of Paula White Ministries and her husband Randy that they too are planning to divorce. Their separation appears to be amicable.
Both women could be considered daughters of the Jakes ministry, having largely gotten their fame after preaching and teaching at numerous Jakes conferences.
Jakes wife, First Lady Serita Jakes, also on the telephone interview, says high-profiled people in ministry should not be judged more harshly just because their frailties are more public.
“These people are having a human experience with a divine mantel on their lives. And so, I pray and our prayers go toward Lady Bynum and Lady Paula as well that God would help heal the brokenness that’s in them,” says Serita Jakes, who has authored several books, including “Beside Every Man: Loving Myself While Standing by Him”.
Both Bishop Jakes and First Lady Serita will be teaching at the upcoming “FLO” conference at the Gaylord Texan Resort in Grapevine, Texas, Oct. 18-20. With focuses on creating life strategies, recovering from setbacks, improving relationships and spiritual revival, she stresses hope that participants will look for the divinity in the messages rather than in the messengers. “We preach Jesus; not ourselves.”
Not all clergy agree.
The Washington-based National Black Church Initiative, which represents 16,000 churches across the U. S. has called for Weeks to step down as head of the Global Destiny Ministries, founded by him and his wife. NBCI president, Rev. Anthony Evans, has issued a press release calling Weeks' actions ''morally wrong and reprehensible.''
Women and men with high expectations – especially those hoping for marriage or remarriage - are sorely disappointed at the news of the stomping, kicking and choking of Bynum by her husband with whom she’d shared a million dollar “wedding of the century” only five years ago.
“I’m just disgusted. I don’t know what to do. So, I’m drowning myself in my work,” says Tisha Lewis, a single 35-year-old doctoral student. “So, any man who comes up to me swinging the Bible and talking churchy, churchy, I’m just going to question his integrity anyway. It’s really what you do, not what you say…I just want to know what’s going on?”
Los Angeles Bishop Noel Jones, who recently announced FaithMate.com - a website to facilitate dating relationships between Christian singles – says one problem is that people are too often enthralled in preparing the ceremony instead of developing the relationship: “A wedding does not a marriage make,” he says.
Also, couples are too often impressed with each other’s professional demeanors and exteriors, Jones says.
“They don’t make distinctions between what is professional and what is personal. Because the two get confused sometimes, people believe that you are actually presenting how you are and the way your relationship goes,” says Jones. “But, indeed and in fact, you can have a very strong and a very influential professional presentation and can be upside down personally. To put it short, you can be a public success, but a private failure.”
The kind of love that binds the relationship has a lot to do with it, says Jones.
Instead of getting married based on eros, a sensual love that does not always last, the love called agape - the God kind of love - is what must be present for a marriage to last, says Jones. “Sex does not have enough strength to keep a marriage together.”
He describes, “Agape is rational, reasonable and strong. It overcomes all the situations and circumstances. If you look at 1st Corinthians 13, it’s the thing that stands when everything else has fallen and that’s what’s not happening,” says Jones.
Jones also says professional partnerships should never be viewed as a reason for marriage. “A spouse cannot be a professional partner. We have done that in the church and we’ve made monsters out of people.”
But, there are ways to avoid failure in a marriage in which the couple is destined to share ministry responsibilities, says Bishop J. Charles Carrington and his wife, Pastor Althea Carrington. But, it takes much work.
Bishop Carrington is senior pastor of Life Builders Church in Baltimore, where his wife is also a pastor. He is also presiding Bishop over Full Gospel Christian Fellowship.
“I think the biggest pressure that we’ve had is maintaining balance, knowing when to say, ‘That’s enough engagements for this month’, knowing when to say, ‘I can’t go to that meeting’, knowing when to say, ‘I can’t necessarily be away from home tomorrow. It’s just being able to say no,” says Bishop Carrington.
Establishing priorities is also a key, says the Carringtons who have been married 23 years and have two sons, 18 and 13.
“A lot of women in ministry, they are so either pressured or focused on being something great or someone great. And then the home is lacking,” says Pastor Carrington, who also has her own catering business. “For me personally, I found that my home front or my home is the center of my ministry. Everything stems from that. And for me to succeed in my home with my family, with my children, with my husband is so paramount.”
In seeking a wife, Carrington says he was specific in his focus.
“I wanted the understanding that our goals are the same in life, that our desires are the same, our drive is the same, and that our passion for one another and for God is the same. That’s what I was looking for,” he says. “Does this woman love the Lord like I do? Does this woman love life and want to be in life what she should be like I do? And number three, does this woman love me?”
When conflict comes, there should be guards for the relationship says Pastor Althea.
“It’s very important to have a circle of friends, someone who sows into your life on a regular basis, someone you can confide in who will pray, who you know will pray and offer wise counsel,” she says. “You have to put down your crown for a while and your scepter,'' she chuckles, ''and really listen and hear what they have to say.”
Couples must do everything possible to avoid stresses in the marriage, says Dr. R. Dandridge Collins, a Christian psychologist and author of The Trauma Zone: Trusting God for Emotional Healing.
“When a relationship is marinated in stress, you tend to overreact,” he says. “One of the characteristics of stress is that you can’t cope with your emotions.”
Expounding on what he calls, “trauma drama” Collins says even negative childhood events as well as events that happened in adulthood can cause reactions later in life as if they had just occurred.
“Most people think trauma means you’ve been sexually abused. That’s one definition. That’s one experience that traumatized people may have had. But, then, there’s verbal abuse, there’s emotional abuse, and there’s physical abuse. So by the time you get finished with all of these different kinds of abuses, there’s something with each of our names on it. It’s so hard to grow up without being wounded in some way,” he says.
Trauma that leads to domestic violence – either physical or emotional abuse - often has four key symptoms that can be recognized before the marriage, he says. They are: A need to control, a feeling of entitlement (an insistence on getting what is deserved), a comfort in expressing rage and an obsession with roles.
For healing, couples or individuals could turn to self-help methods by receiving instruction about their problems from credible books, tapes or by getting counseling or therapy if the problems persist, Collins says.
He says relationships between church leaders who are married may be in danger before they know it.
“We, with the right attitude, empty ourselves in doing the work of the Lord; yet, we leave it all in the church and don’t have enough energy to ransom our own marriages,” he says. “And so, while we are ransoming the loss, we don’t rescue ourselves.
And so, the calm to all of this is not judgment of our brothers who are prominent or our sister who is prominent. We just need to understand that 'except for the grace of God, there go I.'
''So, we need to approach this with some humility and realize that just because a person is prominent doesn’t mean that they’re not going to be in pain. They might even be in more pain because if something goes wrong, everybody in the country is talking about it.”