Osteen, Joel

▪ 2006

      Riding a huge wave of popularity in 2005 was American evangelist Joel Osteen. As pastor of the nondenominational Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas, Osteen led the largest and fastest-growing congregation in the U.S. His weekly television broadcast reached households in more than 100 countries and had become the top-rated inspirational program on the air, according to Nielsen Media Research. His 2004 book, Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential, remained a fixture on best-seller lists. In addition, he conducted a 15-city U.S. tour in 2005, preaching in front of packed crowds at virtually every stop. An affable, youthful-looking man who had earned the nickname “the smiling preacher,” Osteen typically avoided heavy theology in his sermons. Instead, he delivered simple and upbeat messages that underscored his oft-repeated belief that “God wants us to have a better life.” While this approach struck an obvious chord with the public, it also drew sharp criticism from those who viewed Osteen as more of a motivational speaker than a Christian minister.

      Osteen was born on March 5, 1963, in Houston. His parents, John and Dodie, founded Lakewood Church in an abandoned feed store in 1959. His father served as pastor of the church and over the years built a regional following as a Pentecostal-style preacher. Osteen attended Oral Roberts University, Tulsa, Okla., but he left school in 1981 after less than a year to help his father develop Lakewood's television ministry. He worked behind the cameras as a producer of the church's television programs, and when his father died in 1999, Osteen took over as pastor.

      One of Osteen's first steps as head of the church was to expand Lakewood's media strategy. This included advertising on billboards and in other venues, doubling budget allotments to purchase television airtime, negotiating with different networks for optimal time slots, and targeting the largest media markets. Church growth came rapidly. Weekly attendance at Lakewood rose from 6,000 in 1999 to more than 25,000 by 2005. To accommodate the sudden growth, Lakewood acquired the Compaq Center in Houston, where the city's professional basketball and hockey teams had formerly played. Some $95 million was spent in converting the arena into a 16,000-seat “megachurch” that officially opened its doors in July 2005.

      To critics who maintained that he was offering a watered-down interpretation of Christianity or promoting what amounted to a “prosperity gospel,” Osteen responded that he wanted to remain focused on the “goodness of God” and that he did not define prosperity in purely materialistic terms. He also defended Lakewood's unabashedly commercial approach to attracting new members, arguing that churches opposed to “changing with the times,” as he put it, risked losing members or folding altogether. That seemed unlikely to befall Lakewood anytime soon—given weekly attendance figures that some believed could eventually top 100,000.

Sherman Hollar

* * *