Prime Minister
JOEL OSTEEN’S Houston gigachurch has a congregation of more than 30,000. His television show is the highest-rated religious broadcast in the country. His first book has already sold nearly three million copies. How did the former TV producer become the world’s most talked about “pastorpreneur”? He is who he says he is. He has what he says he has. He can do what he says he can do.
(Page 3 of 6)
Next, Joel led a prayer for healing, prosperity, new beginnings, and a full measure of joy and peace. He then invited people with any special needs to come to the front of the stage to be prayed for, one-on-one, by a large team of “prayer partners” that includes Joel and Lisa and Dodie, herself a cancer survivor who specializes in praying for people with that disease. This is clearly a moving experience for many, including the partners; after he prayed for a family with two small children, Joel began to weep and returned to his seat for a few moments to gain his composure. (Such incidents, if caught on film, are edited out of the telecast.) After that, Victoria invited parents to bring their children to the front for a special prayer and then announced that it was time to take the offering. She reminded the flock of the need to give a tenth of their income to the church and offered assurance that God would bless them abundantly for doing so, but the whole process, with hundreds of gray plastic buckets whizzing along the rows, took less than two minutes, putting a damper on suspicions that the Osteens are in it for the money. (Remaining true to Joel’s father’s wishes, this portion of the service is never included in the television broadcast.) Dodie then delivered a brief sermon on how Jesus could rescue us from any trouble if we just had faith to call on him, after which it was time for her son’s sermon.
At nearly every service, Joel first greets both the television audience (“It’s always a joy to come into your homes. We love each and every one of you, and we know that God has good things in store for you”) and the live audience (“You guys are looking good”) and then begins by reading a joke: “A man came into the church office…” “A Christian lady on an airplane was reading her Bible…” That morning he began with one about a man trying to discipline a profane parrot. When the laughter subsided, he said, “All right. Hold up your Bibles and say it like you mean it. Ready?” Thousands of Bibles ascended like blackbirds as Joel led the assemblage in its standard affirmation: “This is my Bible. I am what it says I am. I have what it says I have. I can do what it says I can do. Today I’ll be taught the word of God. I boldly confess: My mind is alert; my heart is receptive; I will never be the same. I am about to receive the incorruptible, indestructible, ever-living seed of the word of God. I will never be the same—never, never, never. I will never be the same. In Jesus’ name. Amen.”
The topic of Joel’s sermon was “The Dangers of Procrastination,” and he opened by identifying procrastination as “one of the greatest enemies we will ever face.” He then listed the kinds of things even well-meaning people put off: cleaning the kitchen, straightening up the garage, paying the bills, cutting back on spending (“Listen carefully, Victoria”), losing weight and getting in shape, giving up smoking, practicing good preventive medicine (“Ladies, you know how important it is to have that regular checkup”). He admitted that he suffered the same temptations, which come to us from “the Enemy” (formerly known as Satan), but always felt much better when he did what he knew he should do, which was most of the time now. As in many of his sermons, he urged people to pay attention to their conscience, with gestures that indicated that it was located just below the rib cage.
Joel illustrated his points with simple stories of people he had known or read about, and occasionally he cited a scripture whose words seemed to fit, whether or not the author had that application in mind. As if he had an endorsement deal with Nike, he repeatedly recommended that instead of putting off those things that were nagging at our conscience, we should “just do it!” Despite that note of insistence, his conversational tone invited knowing smiles rather than guilty tears, and his entire manner conveyed encouragement rather than accusation. He wound up by assuring us that if we would stop putting things off and do our part right now, learn to bloom where we are planted, quit looking at what is wrong in our lives and look at what is right, quit letting others steal our joy, quit complaining about what we don’t have and start thanking God for what we do have, and stop putting off our happiness and start enjoying life, God would pick up any remaining slack and help us discover the champion in ourselves and, repeating two key Lakewood slogans, be more than conquerors, victors and not victims. “He will pour out his blessings and favor so you can experience the abundant life that he has in store for you. Amen. How many of you receive it today? I know you do. Amen.”
The service ended with Joel’s inviting people to accept the free gift of God’s salvation and get on the road to victory. Dozens of people streamed down the aisles, accompanied by sustained applause from those who were not already heading for the exits in an effort to avoid the traffic jam. An hour later I watched the 10:45 service from the television control room. It was virtually identical, right down to the teasing reference to Victoria’s penchant for shopping and her surprised reaction—caught both times on the monitors for the congregation to see but not included in the telecast that aired two weeks later.
NOT EVERYONE WAS INITIALLY ENTHUSIASTIC about Joel’s becoming the pastor at Lakewood. To some observers, the choice appeared to be rooted in a determination to keep control of the church within the Osteen family. How could a shy young man with hardly any experience as a preacher be up to the task of shepherding one of the largest flocks in America? Among those said to be disappointed was Gary Simons, who is married to April Osteen and was already prominent in the church as a youth pastor and praise-and-worship leader. Simons subsequently left to establish the High Point Church, in Arlington, modeled along Lakewood lines. Another plausible choice was Jim Graff, who is married to the third Osteen daughter, Tamara, and who was the pastor of a church in Victoria. Joel, however, believes he was more ready than people gave him credit for. “I grew up [in my father’s] church,” he said, “and I worked with him for seventeen years. That was an education. I kid about being the least likely to take the church, but in one sense, this is all I have ever known. I know how a church works. I just hadn’t spoken.”
Any residual skepticism about Joel was shattered when attendance at the Sunday morning service began immediately increasing. In fact, Lakewood soon ran out of room, so Joel enlarged the field of his dreams, convinced that “if we hold another service, they will come.” When they added a second service in January 2000, attendance doubled. Nine months later, a Saturday night service drew 5,000 more. Not long afterward, a one o’clock service on Sunday filled the building once again, and a Spanish-language Sunday afternoon service, led by Latin Grammy award—winning recording artist and preacher Marcos Witt, drew an additional 3,000 worshipers, bringing the average weekly total to 30,000.
Joel’s youth and energy certainly played a part in his sudden popularity, but another key to his success was his early recognition that he needed competent help. Within a month of becoming pastor he hired Duncan Dodds, who had overseen media for Houston’s giant Second Baptist Church before establishing a successful marketing and advertising business, to come to Lakewood to help implement his ambitious vision for the church’s television outreach. As executive director, Dodds coordinates media buying and handles the contracts with TV networks and individual stations. Media relations is handled by Don Iloff, Victoria’s brother, who performs his duties on a volunteer basis, though he is connected to the church in his capacity as president and general manager of Lakewood-controlled KTBU-TV55. Joining Joel and Dodds on the executive team is Lisa’s husband, Kevin Comes, who is in charge of administration, including accounting and other business, and has been consumed in recent months with heading up the transformation of the Compaq Center into a place of worship.
Joel acts as CEO, with responsibility for all major decisions and the overall vision for the church. His main role, however, is to preach. He spends all day Wednesday and Thursday preparing that week’s sermon, then two half-days practicing and polishing until he has it down cold. “It takes a lot more work,” he acknowledged, “than just getting up there with an outline and preaching to people who know your heart, but this is a responsibility, so I’m very careful. It takes the majority of my time. It’s basically what I do.”
How, I wondered, can Joel spend three days preparing a sermon, another day delivering it four times, and, in recent months, another full day giving interviews and still have time to fulfill the duties of a pastor of a 30,000-member church? The answer is that he leaves those duties to others. He performs no weddings or funerals, makes no hospital visits, does no pastoral counseling, and turns down outside speaking engagements. Shortly after his father’s death, his older brother Paul left a thriving surgical practice in Little Rock and came back home to help Joel, mother Dodie, and sister Lisa run Lakewood’s day-to-day operations. Paul and a staff of professionals and volunteers that numbers almost two hundred handle weddings and funerals (“exponentially bigger than you can imagine,” said Paul), counseling services, dozens of specialized outreach ministries, discipleship training for new members, a dozen or so “fellowship ministries” (for singles, senior adults, and families who home-school their children), and hundreds of small groups that meet biweekly all over the sixty-mile area from which Lakewood draws its members. He also oversees an extensive Sunday school program, which is expected to involve 10,000 youngsters now that they’ve moved into the Compaq Center. Paul and Lisa also share the preaching duties at Wednesday night services.
My Library
