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Film shows how the lost can be loosed

MICHELLE MARR

He has written two plays and 27 books, 11 of which have been

bestsellers on religious, secular and business bestseller lists.

Each play -- both produced by Touchdown Concepts, his production

company -- became the country’s top gospel play during their national

runs.

As a songwriter and vocalist, he’s cut records that have earned

him several Grammy nominations and a Dove award.

Author, playwright, songwriter, vocalist, motivational speaker,

broadcaster, recognized as a community activist and humanitarian,

Thomas Dexter Jakes, best known as Bishop T. D. Jakes, is also the

founder and pastor of the Potter’s House, a 30,000-member,

nondenominational Dallas church. In 2001, when Time magazine featured

him on the cover of its September issue, he was applauded as

“America’s best preacher.”

Now he has added actor and producer to his repertoire.

“Women Thou Art Loosed,” a movie scripted from Jakes’ 1993

best-selling novel and play of the same name, opened Oct. 1 at

theaters across the nation at the beginning of Domestic Violence

Awareness Month. It’s playing locally in several theaters in Long

Beach and at The Block in Orange.

The movie tells the story of Michelle Jordan, a former drug addict

and stripper, now a death row prisoner after fatally shooting her

mother’s boyfriend, a man who raped her when she was 12, while her

self-absorbed mother looked the another way.

The film’s title is taken from the New Testament, from Luke 13:12,

where Jesus says to a woman he is about to lay hands on and heal,

“Woman, thou art loosed from thine infirmity.”

Jakes, who says he’s not considering quitting his day job for

acting, plays himself as Jordan’s pastoral counselor amid an

otherwise accomplished cast that includes Kimberly Elise -- recently

seen alongside Denzel Washington and Meryl Streep in “The Manchurian

Candidate” -- as Jordan and Michael Boatman, who played Carter

Heywood on “Spin City,” as a lifelong friend.

The film, shot on a tight budget, in 12 often 18-hour days, won

much attention and the American Independents Jury Prize at the Santa

Barbara Film Festival last year.

It is rated R, a rating Jakes hoped to avoid, for its language,

violence and sexual content, which has drawn some criticism from the

Christian community.

At a September screening of the film in Washington D.C., for

religion writers and pastors, Jakes told the audience, “We kept it

real.” Without that, he says, the point would have been lost.

A trailer of the 99-minute film can be viewed from its companion

website, www.wtalthemovie.com.

Known for confronting issues many pastors and congregations won’t,

Jakes sends his critics to the Bible, which, he points out, also

contains stories of violence and sexual abuse.

King David, for example, committed adultery with Bathsheba then

contrived her husband’s death to keep from being discovered. David’s

son Amnon raped his sister, Tamar. Lot and his daughters had an

incestuous encounter that Jakes calls “obscene.”

Given a report from the U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of

Statistics National Crime Victimization Survey that estimates one in

three girls and one in seven boys are sexually assaulted before the

age of 18, the R rating of “Woman Thou Art Loosed” is somewhat

ironic.

Sexual assault and its aftermath are blind to age, as well as

race, gender, ethnicity, or socio-economic status. According to the

National Crime Victimization Survey, one in four women and one in six

men will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime.

Those who study the prevalence of sexual assault estimate there

are as many as 60 million survivors of childhood sexual assault alone

in the United States and the statistics, Jakes makes clear, “don’t

stop, or drop,” at the doors of our churches, synagogues, temples and

mosques.

Yet very few places of worship are prepared to minister to victims

and survivors of sexual assault.

In Huntington Beach last year, during a phone survey, seven of the

city’s 60-some places of worship told me they had trained staff or

programs in place to minister to those traumatized by the

far-reaching repercussions of sexual assault for victims of any age.

The movie’s website offers spiritual leaders and their

congregations a 16-page, free, downloadable guide, much of which has

been taken from “Child Sexual Abuse and Domestic Violence: Reasons,

Research and Resources for Recovery,” co-authored by Jakes with Tim

Clinton, Diane Langberg, and George Ohlschlager.

Jakes anticipates that the guide with the movie, which is often

angry, sometimes ugly, frequently funny and never without hope, will

prompt more congregations to develop ministries for those wounded by

violence and abuse, to offer them a haven of compassion where they

can find hope for a future and begin to heal.

* MICHELE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She

can be reached at [email protected].

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