Innovations & Innovators
Nation’s largest Protestant congregation worships in an uplifting spirit of joy
Joel Osteen transformed Lakewood Church into an international powerhouse.
As spiritual intensity goes at Lakewood Church, it was a firecracker of a Sunday morning.
Gospel music propelled by two drum kits, flashing strobes and a kaleidoscope of geometric patterns on a backstage screen had thousands filling the onetime Houston basketball arena on their feet and ready to worship.
Then, in a choreographed shift in mood, boyish senior pastor Joel Osteen and his co-pastor wife, Victoria, stepped into the light. There were no mediocrities in this morning’s congregation, Osteen told the throng. Everyone was talented, focused and poised to receive the glorious gifts of God.
To the more than 50,000 who attend services at Lakewood each week or the tens of millions who view them on television or the internet, the message of boundless divine love, forgiveness and beneficence was a familiar one.
Such sermons have made Lakewood, founded 57 years ago by Osteen’s father, the nation’s largest Protestant church. They have catapulted inspirational books by Osteen, his wife, mother and sister, to the top of best-seller lists and filled sports stadiums across the land.
“People respond better when you tell them about what they can become rather than what they’re doing wrong,” Osteen said. “You say, ‘You can break that addiction, you can treat your spouse better or overcome that illness,’ rather than, ‘you’re sinning, lying, doing wrong.’ I think people feel guilty enough as it is. We’ve all made mistakes. I think the goodness of life leads them to repentance.”
A mere 90 people attended Lakewood’s first services, when the church was founded by Baptist-turned-charismatic John Osteen and his wife, Dodie, in a onetime Houston feed store. From the beginning, worshippers perceived manifestations of the holy spirit described in the Bible’s New Testament.
God saved the life of Joel Osteen by blowing a tractor-trailer rig out of the path of the future pastor’s car on a rain-slick highway and spared Osteen’s sister, Lisa Osteen Comes, from the deadly impact of a package bomb that exploded when she opened it at the church office, Dodie Osteen recalled.
Most dramatically, she said, was her recovery from metastic liver cancer, an illness that easily could have been fatal. “I could have died when I was 48,” the Lakewood matriarch said. “Now I’m 82, and working for Him. I want people to know that God is a good God.”
Joel Osteen, 53, stepped into the Lakewood pulpit following his father’s death in 1999.
Since 1982, the younger Osteen, who had attended but did not graduate from Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Okla., had managed the church’s broadcast ministry.
“When my dad died, I hoped to maintain what they had built, never dreaming of how it would grow,” Osteen said. Under the young pastor’s tenure, Lakewood’s weekly attendance increased from 5,000 to more than 50,000. Its annual operating budget soared to $90 million. In 2005, the church moved to the remodeled 16,000-seat Compaq Center.
“I was very accustomed to being behind the scenes. I liked being behind the scenes. I’m not a big extrovert, but I learned, looking back, that God gives you grace,” Osteen said. “I was very nervous for years. I had to remind myself that I wasn’t a performer, not an entertainer. I was a minister. I was a person. I didn’t have to be perfect.”
Phillip Sinitiere, history professor at Houston’s College of Biblical Studies and author of “Salvation With a Smile: Joel Osteen, Lakewood Church and American Christianity,” credited Osteen with creating a “nimble, technologically oriented ministry that offers predictable and positive emotional and spiritual teaching of second chances in unstable times . ... Joel thinks like a minister and a religious broadcaster.”
Rooted in post-World War II Pentecostalism, Osteen’s “second chance theology,” Sinitiere said, resonates with Houston’s cultural identity as a city for new beginnings.
Beyond Osteen’s adroit multifaceted performance as senior pastor, Lakewood’s success is based on a broad base of Osteen family members and church staff, Sinitiere said.
Osteen’s mother presides at church and hospital healing services; Victoria Osteen reinforces her husband’s positive messages, emphasizing empowerment for women; Lisa Comes, author of books of personal and godly uplift, serves as spiritual encourager.
Spanish-speaking musician Marcos Witt’s decade at Lakewood, beginning in 2002, opened doors to Houston’s Latino community. Hiring of AfricanAmerican comedian and pastor John Gray helped solidify the church’s reputation as one of nation’s most ethnically and racially diverse congregations, the professor said.
Church spokeswoman Andrea Davis suggested Lakewood may not only have the nation’s largest Protestant congregation, but the largest Latino and AfricanAmerican congregations as well.
From his father to evangelists Billy Graham, Oral Roberts and Atlanta’s Charles Stanley, Osteen acknowledged a wide array of influences on his pulpit style.
“I grew up with some of those ministers,” he said. “They were people who inspired us as a family. Billy Graham — I draw strength and inspiration from him. Of course, I went to Oral Roberts University. Watching that generation — it was a blessing to know them.”
The sermons of John Osteen, who spent his formative years behind Baptist pulpits in Baytown and Houston, also impacted the younger minister — if largely as a point of departure.
Joel Osteen’s sermons reflect what he termed his natural optimism.
While his sermons seem more relaxed than those of his father, paradoxically they are more carefully planned. John Osteen was a gifted wordsmith whose prowess as an extemporary exhorter was formidable.
Joel Osteen, by contrast, devotes days to crafting a message that seems spontaneous.
Beyond his 30-minute Sunday sermons, which remain “key to what I do,” the pulpit presence of Osteen and his wife have filled stadiums from New York to California.
Over 10 years, more than 2 million people have paid to attend the husband-wife preaching team’s “Night of Hope” events.
In terms of the Lakewood ministry’s continued growth, Osteen opined, “It happens so fast, we almost have to just take it one day at a time.
“We want to be open to growth, consistent and faithful. We want to be open to touching more people.”