(Photo: screengrab)
Holly Furtick, the co-pastor of Elevation Church, hosts a segment called Lunchtime Live where she’s joined by other leaders and they discuss their personal lives and journey in ministry. Recently Furtick hosted pastor and best-selling author Sarah Jakes Roberts, who talked about her personal life and ministry.
The discussion topics ranged from Roberts’ preference for spaghetti with toast, her desire to meet Beyonce, and how she would sit on her balcony during the Covid-19 Pandemic to get away because it felt like “Mexico.”
Roberts also shared that her husband and co-pastor Toure Roberts encouraged her to present her first sermon in 2014 at The Potter’s House One LA, titled “Displaced Crowns.” Prior to her husband’s prompting, she was not familiar with preaching sermons. She would only shared her life story at conferences and churches before preachers would speak.
Furthermore, she told Furtick, she was not interested because that was the day she spent time with her mother.
“It was on Mother’s Day and I’d never been away from my mom on Mother’s Day, so I called my mom like, ‘girl, you’re not going to believe this man thinks I should preach,” Roberts recalled to Furtick.
In her beginning, Roberts would write out her sermons as “essays,’’ but has become more comfortable with creating “bullet points.” Her transition in preaching style happened in 2018 when she preached a sermon called, Unleashed.
“I got unleashed from my notes and got this out of body experience where I felt like I stepped into something that was greater and bigger than me,” she said. “There is a surrender connected with preaching and I think it shines through when you do that.”
The author is very open about her testimony, sharing that she became pregnant at 13 and having her first child at 14. However, there are moments when shame arises in her because of past mistakes that she’s made. In moments when those thoughts creep up in her mind she speaks to herself like she would her child
“I speak to myself about whatever mistake I make the same way I’d want someone to speak to my daughters,’’ says Roberts. “The voices that we say to ourselves are never words we’d say to our daughters.”