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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With all the growth that occurred as a result of its marketing efforts, the only plausible way for Lakewood to expand even further was to find more space. When Joel learned in 2001 that the Houston City Council was going to be leasing out the Compaq Center, he and his associates put together a proposal and hired Dave Walden, who had served former mayor Bob Lanier as a top aide, to lobby the council on their behalf. Their only competitor was Crescent Real Estate Equities, which owned nearby Greenway Plaza and wanted to tear the building down to make way for additions to that complex. A lively struggle ensued. Crescent argued that the space should be put to more varied use and that giving a religious organization exclusive access to a city-owned facility violated the separation of church and state. The Lakewood forces pointed out that the city had rented the Compaq Center and other facilities to religious organizations over the years and promised to spend tens of millions of dollars on improvements. They also bombarded council members with a phenomenal number of calls, letters, and e-mails asking for their support. Ultimately, Lakewood prevailed, agreeing to pay $12.1 million for thirty years, with a $22.6 million option for a second thirty years. Even though their new facility will hold more than twice as many people as the old one, the current plan is to drop only the one o’clock Sunday service, with the option to resume it if the remaining three English-speaking services grow too crowded.
In the meantime, Lakewood’s staff is considering other ways of growing beyond Houston by establishing satellite churches that would have a local pastoral and teaching staff, with the worship and preaching service beamed in directly from Houston. “I can’t speak for the pastor,” said Dodds, “but I can see us having Lakewood Philadelphia, Lakewood Atlanta, Lakewood Detroit, and having Joel preach the message every week. I think we could have churches of four thousand to six thousand [in other cities]. I see the potential there from the marketing side. I see the opportunity to expand this ministry and almost franchise it in that way. I think we will get there.”
AS DIFFERENT AS THEY AND THEIR ERAS MAY HAVE BEEN, the great popular preachers with an enduring legacy in American religious history—Charles Finney in the 1830’s, D. L. Moody in the 1870’s, Billy Sunday in the World War I era, Billy Graham in our lifetime—have shared three characteristics: a good organization, a distinctive and appealing personality, and an easily grasped message aimed at a mass audience. Joel’s organization has clearly met the competence test, and even his detractors concede that he is an enormously charismatic young man with no apparent dark side or hidden agenda. Still, detractors aplenty exist, and the criticisms they raise pertain directly to Joel’s message, which is variously characterized as a barely baptized version of the secular doctrine of Positive Thinking or a damnable heresy that legitimizes materialism and endangers the souls of those who embrace it.
Some of the most vitriolic criticism comes from biblical literalists who use their Web sites to attack him as “a devil in disguise…a flashy, smiley, jokey human being” who is “a stench unto God for twisting God’s holy Word” and for preaching “the doctrines of devils and demons.” Specifically, they charge him with being a Word of Faith preacher. Faith healers often espouse this teaching because it provides a convenient explanation for failures; the supplicant lacks the faith to “name it and claim it.” (In the process, it also gives healers an inflated rate of apparent success, as people claim cures they have not yet experienced, lest doubt thwart God’s willingness to heal them.) Word of Faith advocates also urge people to claim material blessings, including new cars, new houses, and financial windfalls. Some, including a few who have preached at Lakewood, go even further. One night in late 1981 I heard television preacher Kenneth Copeland, host of the Believer’s Voice of Victory program, tell a Lakewood audience about a farmer whose cotton was withering and dropping to the ground like little brown marbles. When the farmer took his preacher into the field to read some scriptures promising rewards to the righteous, Copeland claimed that they began to hear sounds like popcorn popping, and as they looked about them, they saw the field filling with large, fluffy bolls.
One can understand why some critics place Joel in the Word of Faith camp when he says such things as “You can change your world by simply changing your words” and “When you make declarations of faith, you are charging the atmosphere, and your own words can help to bring it to pass.” Joel does not disown such statements nor categorically reject the teachings in question, but he softens them considerably. “I never knew it was such a bad thing to be a Word of Faith preacher,” he said, “but I never preach that whatever you say, you can get —‘I want five Cadillacs.’ ‘I’m going to be the president of this company.’ I never believed that kind of stuff.” When I mentioned what Copeland had said about the magical cotton bolls, he said, “I like Brother Copeland, but I don’t believe that. That’s just not me. I encourage people to say what God says about you, to say, ‘I am strong in the power of the Lord. I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.’”
Other critics accuse the Osteens of preaching a gospel of prosperity and materialism, a charge with even more evidence to support it. Like his father, Joel often speaks of God’s desire that his children do well financially, and prayers at church services frequently invoke God for jobs and promotions and good homes and good cars. Joel and Victoria live in a large home in tony Tanglewood, as do Lisa and Kevin Comes; Dodie’s townhouse is a stone’s throw from the senior president Bush’s, and Paul lives on a small ranch near Tomball. None of the family members seem inclined to fear that affluence poses much of a danger. During the tour event in Dallas, Lisa made the somewhat surprising statement that “if you look through the Bible from Genesis to Revelation, every person who served him faithfully, God blessed financially.” When I asked her about that later, mentioning Jeremiah, who spent time at the bottom of a well and died in captivity, and Stephen, who was martyred, and Paul, who made tents to support his missionary activities, she backed up a bit, noting that she had been thinking mainly about Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob: “The Bible says they had a lot of things. God is just a blessing God. That’s my point.”
Well aware of the criticism, Joel said, “People will probably laugh, but I don’t feel like I am a prosperity preacher. I do believe, though, that God wants us to prosper. I don’t see how I could get up there and preach that we need one hundred million dollars for the Compaq Center and have a poverty mentality. I just don’t think Christians should feel that they have to stay at the lower rung of the ladder. I also point out that prosperity is not just money. It’s a healthy relationship with your wife, with your kids; it’s a healthy body. We need to get away from the dollar sign on prosperity. In my next book, I’m going to be clearer about that. I believe God wants us to be blessed, but it’s only so that we can be a blessing. I think God blessed me by writing this book and giving me a lot of money, but it’s not so I can go buy thirteen cars or a bunch of other stuff. After the book started selling a couple hundred thousand copies, I called a friend on staff and asked, ‘Do I get paid [more] for that?’ They gave me some [advance] money. I thought I’d already been paid for it. I didn’t know. He said, ‘Yeah, you get a royalty.’ I said, ‘Have you figured that out?!’ I had never in a million years thought about doing it for the money, but I thought, ‘You know what? That’s great. I never dreamed that I could be one of the biggest givers in our church, and now I can. I can underwrite a whole wing of this thing.’ I don’t see us changing our lifestyle. It’s so I can help more people’s lives. We are stewards of God’s money.”
Joel and his associates are less comfortable with the characterization of his message as Christianity Lite, an appealing but less filling version of the real thing. Dodds contends that such criticisms “come from a lack of experience and full knowledge of what we are doing. I always tell people who say that, ‘Just come to church.’ There is no way you can sit in our services during a time of worship and not know we are lifting up the name of Jesus. I have heard the criticisms. I just don’t think they are valid.”
Once again, however, the critics can make an argument. Joel readily acknowledges that he is not an exegetical preacher who begins with a passage of scripture and expounds upon its meaning for his congregation. Even in the early days, when Joel preached on such topics as “The Truth of the Resurrection” and “The Great Commission,” it was hardly in a standard fashion; at the 1999 Easter service, after a rather conventional sermon, he told a series of amusing stories about his family, even admitting that they had little to do with the drama of resurrection. And eventually, those gave way to sermons with Tony Robbins—style titles such as “Developing Your Potential,” “Persistence and Determination,” “Your Life Follows Your Thoughts,” and “Enlarge Your Vision.”
“Daddy would often just teach the Bible,” Joel said. “I take a little different approach. I may give a whole sermon and give the scripture at the end—‘This is what Jesus meant when he said this, that, and the other.’ I know doctrine is good. We need doctrine, but I think the average person is not looking for doctrine. They are looking to ask, ‘How do I let go of the past?’ ‘How do I have a better marriage?’ ‘What is wrong with me?’ If you want to reach the culture, you need to speak in their terms. When Jesus was here on this earth, he did such practical stuff. He taught using simple examples like the parable of the prodigal son; everybody can relate to that. I tell a lot of stories in my sermons. Most of what I preach is about the simple things.”
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