Sarah Jakes Roberts, a pastor at ONE church in Los Angeles, has a way of connecting with women of faith, according to the Los Angeles Times. As her husband and fellow pastor Touré Roberts sees it, she is giving modern women something that they need.
Roberts, a preacher and author, is also daughter of Bishop T.D. Jakes. The church she and her husband lead, ONE, is affiliated with the bishop’s Potter’s House megachurch in Dallas, Texas. Despite being a high-profile preacher’s kid, Roberts holds her own. She has publicly shared her story of once being a teen mother and a divorcée with her online audience of nearly six million — most notably in her 2016 book, Lost and Found.
What makes Roberts, especially in her sermons, so compelling?
As L.A. artist Jaraé Holieway put it: “Her flow, the rhythm at which she speaks, the cadence in her delivery … it’s very warm, very welcoming. It feels very motherly. It feels like a sister, like a friend. It’s very real; it’s very raw. Then she hits you with a word.”
Holieway first heard Roberts speak in a YouTube video in 2020, she told the L.A. Times. The artist felt like the messages coming from Jakes were authentic.
“I could tell it’s coming from the heart. It’s coming from the spirit. It’s very real. It’s very vulnerable. It’s genuine and it doesn’t feel manicured. It doesn’t feel too polished. It feels very raw. And she’s not afraid to shake the room,” Holieway said. “Sis is not afraid to shake the room.”
Holieway apparently isn’t alone in feeling a connection to Jakes, a 34-year-old who juggles being a married mother with maintaining a vibrant ministry.
However, his wife being labeled as a “modern Christian woman” can be controversial, Touré Roberts told the publication.
“I think that she is satisfying a hunger, in culture, for authenticity, for spirituality,” he said. “Some of the old mentalities about what it means to be a woman, or a Christian woman, needed to die. And so when she says she’s a modern woman of faith, she’s saying, ‘I am the authentic current expression of what a woman of faith could look like.’ So I think it’s about really shattering stereotypes and walls that have been put up there. And quite frankly, it’s a redefining of what you think a Christian should look like.”
