Bishop T.D. Jakes, the senior pastor of the Potter’s House in Dallas, Texas, has given his daughter and son-in-law leadership of the congregation.
Jakes made the announcement on Sunday morning, April 27, 2025, weeks after having a severe heart attack while preaching at the congregation, according to Naija News.
The choice was influenced, the clergy acknowledged, by their hospitalization following a severe heart attack on stage.
In July, pastors Sarah Jakes Roberts and Toure Roberts, T.D. Jakes’ daughter and son-in-law, will assume leadership of The Potter’s House, which he founded in 1996.
Both to God and to me, you have shown faithfulness, he declared. And I’m really appreciative.
“I can’t afford to risk something happening to me and you being sheep without a shepherd, especially after November.”
“As your daughter, I am honored and grateful,” Sarah Jakes Roberts remarked.
“I’m so glad you’ll be able to sleep.”
Jakes, meanwhile, described the severe heart attack in an interview with American reporter Craig Melvin on the TODAY show.
Jakes said he did not feel any symptoms of a cardiac arrest, but doctors later told him he was preaching with only half of his heart working.
He said, “I didn’t really realize what was happening to me onstage until I got to the hospital in an ambulance and fussing that it happened onstage, by the way, because I didn’t want it to happen, and the doctor leaned over my ear and said, ‘You had a massive heart attack.’
“The reason I didn’t realize it was because I had none of the symptoms that they say.
“No numbness, no sharp pain, no anything. I just kind of drifted off to sleep. I didn’t know what it was, but I almost died.
“(The doctor) said five minutes later, I’d have been dead on arrival.
“The right side of my heart had completely stopped getting blood at all.”
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