One of the most popular figures in the world Church today is Bishop T D JAKES. Tony Cummings reports.

"Many women in this country are bowed down under the weight and pressure that comes from deep, dark secrets and traumas," he writes in Bent Babies Make Broken Ladies, a chapter from The Lady, Her Lover And Her Lord. "Events of long ago permanently alter these women; the wounds might not be fresh, but the scars last a lifetime and never completely heal... The mangled heart of an abused woman looks much like a torn cloth doll. The fragile tissue of a tender little girl is torn into shreds that continue to unravel into her adult life."

Jakes' huge popularity has not been without considerable controversy. Comments Deborah Kovach Caldwell, of The Dallas Morning News, "Jakes has caught a pop psychology wave and that explains a lot of his popularity. He's the perfect preacher for [today's society]. He taps into the recovery movement, he's appealing to a multiracial audience and he's a Pentecostal pastor who preaches with intensity."

More critical of Jakes has been the theological publication Christian Research Journal which argues that Jakes' church background - he is a bishop with Higher Ground Always Abounding Assemblies, a black Oneness Pentecostal denomination - means that he has a flawed understanding of the Trinity.

The Jakeses' emphasis on nice clothes and fine restaurants has also made the gospel entrepreneur a target for criticism. Pointing to his flashy wardrobe, Mercedes-Benz and £1.7 million house, critics charge that Jakes is in it for the money. Worse, they say he is peddling a prosperity gospel, teaching his parishioners that they can get rich too, as long as they're on God's good side. Evangelist John Perkins, for example, says he is "hesitant about the prosperity theology" that he senses in Jakes. "That type of thinking can be very dangerous to black people at a very critical time. I question whether this will be healthy for our community in the long run, or whether it's just a fad."

"Ministry is completely different in the African-American community," says Jakes. "The Church is everything. We've never had a president, we've only had preachers. So when we look to the preacher, he's the daddy we didn't have. We take pride in him in a way white folks don't understand."

Perhaps it's not so surprising, then, that black women have found their pop psychology guru in the Church. As Jakes puts it, "We don't go to counselling, we don't go to therapy, we go to church." Church, he says, has got to be a place of healing. "We don't need to be in some bourgeois church where we are being asked to hide our pain in what God intended to be a hospital."

That's why people at Potter's House are up front about the mistakes they have made and the hardships they have endured, he says. "We need to know that it can be done -economically, spiritually, martially...by flawed and broken people. Churches that pretend to be full of perfect people will turn [African-Americans] off. That kind of stuff estranges our people because they cannot relate to it. They think, 'Oh, I'm ineligible for this, I can't do this,' and they go to something else," be it drugs or the Nation Of Islam or a soap opera or a string of lovers.

"They need to know that people who've been abused, who've been molested, who've been in jail, who've been ostracised, criticised and have had a baby by Mary and one by Isabel over here, can come to Christ, not hide who they were, be rehabilitated, become productive and that God has grace to receive them."