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.
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Although the Osteens seemed slightly amused when I characterized Lakewood as a family-owned business, they did not protest. “Yes, the family is in charge,” Lisa agreed. “The board is all family members. Joel decides what he feels like the Lord wants him to do, but we work with attorneys. We call other ministries. We get as much counsel as we can. We have a great accountability to the Lord and to the people and we feel that. We hold ourselves to a high standard.” None of them saw this arrangement as a cause for concern. “The beauty of our organization,” Paul observed, “is that we don’t have to pass things by a thousand boards or a bunch of people with different opinions. If we want to add an extra service next week, we can do it. There’s a real beauty about the way we work together. We know our parts. It sounds a lot like the body of Christ.”
Inevitably, some wonder about the wisdom of having a small family group exercise almost total control, with little outside accountability, over more than $60 million in annual revenue, a figure almost certain to grow in future years. When I spoke with Joel about the financial scandals that have bedeviled some independent ministries, he revealed that the church did not currently make its budget available to the congregation but that the executive team had been discussing the need to do so. I noted that Billy Graham and other ministries associated with the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability had been able to deflect much criticism—and, in the process, erect a barrier against temptation—by providing an audited financial statement to supporters. As a family ministry, Lakewood cannot belong to the ECFA, nor is it required to submit 990 forms to the IRS listing income and major expenses, including the salaries of its five highest-paid officials. Joel recognized, however, that nothing was stopping the church from doing this on a voluntary basis. Later that week, I learned that on the day following our conversation, he had spoken to Iloff about the need to provide a more complete picture of the church’s finances, “like Billy Graham does.” A few days later, I received audited financial statements for the two previous fiscal years.
“We don’t set our own salaries,” Lisa pointed out. “An outside group approves compensation.” (In addition to contributing a substantial portion of his earnings from the book to the church, Joel has stopped taking his $200,000 salary.) And Dodie stressed that she had always told the children, “Daddy’s name was always squeaky clean, and we intend to keep it that way.” She seemed to feel this had been sufficient, observing, “They are so respectful of their father and of me. You don’t hear much criticism about Lakewood Church or about the Osteen family.”
Indeed, rather than make an attempt to conceal the family-run nature of Lakewood, the Osteens obviously regard their image as a faithful unit as one of their greatest strengths. From Lakewood’s beginning, Dodie has played a prominent role in the worship services. The tiny (size 2 petite), neatly dressed Osteen matriarch still speaks at every service, frequently noting her pleasure in her brood, and it seems that no service passes without some mention of “Daddy.” Even when they are not on the program, Lisa and Paul are also present, and the giant screens remind everyone that they will be speaking at the Wednesday night service. Pictures and promos for the church feature Joel and Victoria in affectionate poses, and they have recently brought their two children into a more prominent role. At the Dallas event at the American Airlines Center, six-year-old Alexandra sang “Come Just as You Are” during the invitation. And at this spring’s Easter service, at Minute Maid Park, eleven-year-old Jonathan led the Bible affirmation, then drew warm laughter from the crowd of nearly 40,000 by repeating his father’s familiar line, “You sound great, as usual.” Just as Joel’s sermons often imply that following his own advice has helped him achieve a near-ideal life, so the extensive involvement of his immediate and extended family offers church members another model for their lives.
TO WATCH JOEL AND THE LAKEWOOD team at work and to visit with them offstage is to become aware of dual narratives for explaining the ministry’s meteoric success. At one level is a clear sense that the entire venture has been ordained by God and continues to operate under the direct micromanagement of the Holy Spirit. In trying to account for his popularity, Joel mentioned several possible factors—the head start he got by inheriting an already successful ministry, his youth, his consistently positive message—but finally confessed, “I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s just God’s favor and blessing.”
Lisa told me about the first Lakewood service after their father’s funeral. “I always sat behind my dad to assist him. So when Joel was sitting there and getting ready to preach—he was so nervous—I was sitting behind him, and I leaned up to say something to him, and in that split second the Lord spoke to me down in my spirit, and he said, ‘Lisa, I am transitioning you to work with your brother, and just as you served your dad, I want you to serve your brother as pastor of this church.’ I knew that was the Lord who had said that to me, and I was just so happy after that.”
Dodie, whose oft-repeated story of surviving metastatic liver cancer serves as a premier warrant for belief in miraculous healing, also finds it easy to accept her son’s success as part of a divine plan. “Not long after John died, Joel said, ‘Mama, I need to talk to you. I think God is calling me to be pastor of this church.’ I said, ‘What?!’ I thought he was the last one. He didn’t want to get up there and pastor, but he felt like it was God’s will.”
A second set of explanations for Lakewood’s success, not perceived as conflicting with the first in any way, is heavy reliance on technology and a great deal of marketing savvy. Although the weekly television show can be seen in almost every home in America, Joel and his associates work constantly to raise the odds that it actually will be seen. In addition to repeated showings on religious channels TBN and Daystar, the program currently airs on national network affiliate stations in 35 major cities, including the top 30 markets, and on 5 secular cable channels (ABC Family, USA, Discovery, PAX, and BET). Iloff noted that some people disapprove of having the program appear on USA and BET—“Don’t you see the stuff they put on those networks?”—but said, “That’s where we need to be: reaching the unreached, telling the untold.” Dodds added, “We love Christian television. We are on TBN and Daystar. But we are committed to reaching those who don’t believe yet. You have got to go with what they are watching. They are not typically tuning into Christian stations. We try to place our program within the habits and patterns of those people. I am convinced that if they will give Joel five minutes, they will be hooked.”
To increase the chances that this will happen, Joel and his media team analyze the Nielsen ratings at the end of each quarter to see how their show is doing and how it might improve. Are they on the strongest station in a market at a time with the highest number of homes watching television? Is a better time slot available? What is the cost per rating point? “We want to know all the same things you would if you were placing your slicer-dicer on the air,” Iloff said. In slightly less-commercial terms, Dodds agreed: “We want to make sure we are spending God’s money wisely.”
The programs themselves are slickly produced, as good or better than any daytime talk show. And even though most people watching never see the joyful-music-and-tear-filled prayer segments of the service, they still get a feel for the church as cameramen roaming the aisles capture the earnest look, the delighted laugh, the agreeing nod, and above all, the remarkable diversity of the crowd. On an average Sunday, the congregation appears to be about evenly divided among whites, blacks, and Hispanics, with a growing number of Asians, who seem to have a better-than-average chance of being shown on television. In addition, all the major services are now webcast live. Lakewood has an extensive Web site that provides a wealth of background information about the church, including transcripts of classic John Osteen sermons and some of Joel’s first sermons. The site also offers tapes, CDs, videos, and books for sale—bookstore sales account for more than $3 million of the church’s annual income—and makes it possible for donors to contribute online. This spring, a webcam, updated hourly during the workday, enabled members to see how the work on the Compaq Center was going.
As an astute observer of both popular culture and other television ministries, Joel realized that people who watched his program would likely have a strong interest in seeing him and other regulars on the program in person. This gave rise to the phenomenally successful tour events, called “An Evening With Joel Osteen.” At these programs, which Dodds likes to compare to concerts, complete with searchlights scanning the crowd and floor-to-ceiling light columns that move through bright yellow, fuchsia, and purple hues during warm-up segments and musical numbers, the audience not only gets to experience all the ingredients of a typical Lakewood service, including a full choir, but also hears much more explicit references to such pillars of Christian belief as the atoning death and resurrection of Jesus, topics scarcely mentioned on the half-hour program.
Regular viewers have no difficulty finding out when the tour will visit their city. When Joel occasionally quotes a Bible verse during a sermon, a banner at the bottom of the television screen identifies it and displays the crucial part of the text. Much more frequently, that space advertises future tour stops or reminds people that Your Best Life Now and its companion text, Your Best Life Now Journal, are now on sale.
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