Joel Osteen
Joel Osteen is a prominent American pastor, author, and television personality, best known as the senior pastor of Lakewood Church, a megachurch located in Houston, Texas. Born on March 5, 1963, Osteen is the son of John Osteen, who founded Lakewood Church. After graduating from Oral Roberts University with a degree in radio and television communications, Osteen initially worked behind the scenes, producing his father's sermons. Following his father's death in 1999, he stepped into the role of senior pastor, quickly growing Lakewood's congregation from thousands to around 45,000 attendees weekly by 2024.
Osteen's sermons, characterized by a focus on positivity and personal empowerment, have been broadcast to millions globally, making him the most-watched evangelical preacher in America. He has authored several best-selling self-help books, with his most notable work being "Your Best Life Now." While Osteen's uplifting message resonates with many, it has also faced criticism from more traditional Christian circles for a perceived lack of scriptural references and formal theological training.
Amidst his success, Osteen has navigated controversies, including reactions to Hurricane Harvey and the church's receipt of federal COVID-19 relief funds. He is often associated with the prosperity gospel, a belief that faithfulness to God results in blessings in life. Osteen lives in Houston with his wife, Victoria, and their two children, who are also involved in the church.
Joel Osteen
Pastor, preacher, televangelist
- Born: March 5, 1963
- Place of Birth: Houston, Texas
Education: Oral Roberts University
Significance: Joel Osteen is the senior pastor of Lakewood Church, a megachurch in Houston, Texas. Thousands of people attend Lakewood's services each week. In addition to his pastoring duties, Osteen is also a prolific and successful author whose books have often placed high on the New York Times Best Sellers list.
Background
Joel Osteen was born on March 5, 1963, in Houston, Texas, the son of John Osteen, a preacher who founded Lakewood Church. The senior Osteen instructed his son in preaching from a very young age. Osteen attended Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and graduated with a degree in radio and television communications. Osteen then produced and broadcast his father’s sermons until John Osteen’s death in 1999.
Life's Work
Prior to his father’s sudden death, Osteen had refused to preach at Lakewood. Afterward, Osteen stated that he had heard God’s calling and decided to continue his father’s work. Two weeks after his father's death, Osteen became the senior pastor of Lakewood Church.
Osteen proved a charismatic leader. He had studied under his father's tutelage since he was a small child and smoothly transitioned into leading his father’s congregation. Osteen dramatically increased Lakewood Church’s media presence, and membership began to multiply quickly. In 2013, Lakewood Church boasted more than five times the number of members as in 1999. During Osteen’s tenure, the congregation had grown by tens of thousands of people.
In 2005, Osteen moved Lakewood Church from its previous location to the Compaq arena, which he purchased and renovated at a cost of $95 million. Prior to Osteen’s ownership, the Compaq arena had been home to the National Basketball Association's Houston Rockets basketball team. All 16,800 seats in the facility in downtown Houston were filled for the inaugural sermon.
By 2024, Lakewood Church reported about forty-five thousand adults attended activities and services every week. Broadcasts of services were viewed by millions of people; according to the church, its media broadcasts reached more than two hundred million households around the world.
Osteen often preaches that God is kind and merciful and blesses those who are obedient and faithful to him. Osteen encourages Christians to follow the example of Jesus Christ, God's only son, and avoid sin to receive God's grace and goodness to be happy, joyful, and blessed in life. Osteen often holds up his own prosperous life as an example of this philosophy.
His weekly sermons are broadcast in every television market in America and in one hundred nations worldwide, bringing his message to more than twenty million people each month. Osteen is said by Nielsen Media Research to be the most-watched evangelical preacher in America.
The extreme popularity of Osteen’s teachings led to his first book, Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential (2004). The self-help book quickly climbed the New York Times Best Sellers list and paved the way for a variety of other works. These included Become a Better You: 7 Keys to Improving Your Life Every Day (2007), Every Day a Friday: How to Be Happier 7 Days a Week (2011), Break Out! 5 Keys to Go Beyond Your Barriers and Live an Extraordinary Life (2013), Think Better, Live Better: A Victorious Life Begins in Your Mind (2016), Empty Out the Negative: Make Room for More Joy, Greater Confidence and New Levels of Influence (2020), Rule Your Day: 6 Keys to Maximizing Your Success and Accelerating Your Dreams (2022), Your Greater Is Coming: Discover the Path to Your Bigger, Better, and Brighter Future (2022), 15 Ways to Live Longer and Healthier: Life-Changing Strategies for Greater Energy, a More Focused Mind, and a Calmer Soul (2023), Believe: Hope Has Your Name on It (2023), and Speak the Blessing: Send Your Words in the Direction You Want Your Life to Go (2024).
In addition to the success of his many books and his duties as senior pastor of Lakewood Church, Osteen periodically travels across the nation on speaking engagements.
Osteen’s sermons have been criticized by more traditional Christian preachers for their lack of adherence to scripture. In many sermons, Osteen chooses not to reference scripture at all. Others complain that Osteen has no formal seminary degree or certification from any theological or philosophical school.
In the summer of 2017, Osteen and his church were further criticized in the wake of the touchdown in Texas of devastating Hurricane Harvey. Many in the media reprimanded Osteen because he did not open his church as a shelter for people displaced and trying to survive the harsh conditions, including extreme flooding, in Houston after Hurricane Harvey made landfall on August 25. Though Lakewood Church did eventually open its doors to serve as a shelter a couple of days later, critics still claimed that Osteen had reacted too slowly. Osteen, on the other hand, defended his actions to the media and in the first service following the storm's conclusion, saying that it would have been potentially dangerous due to flooding to open the facility earlier and that the city had not immediately requested that the church serve as a shelter.
Though Osteen continued delivering sermons online following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, by later that year, he had reopened Lakewood for in-person services. At the same time, Osteen and the megachurch were criticized for receiving over $4 million in funds from the CARES Act passed to provide COVID-19 relief. It was then announced in 2021 that the church had decided to repay the loan. In 2022, another high-profile incident involving the church occurred when activists in favor of abortion rights disrupted Osteen's service with a protest of the potential for the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade. That same year, Osteen hosted another large event at Yankee Stadium.
The church was robbed of $600,000 in cash and checks that were taken from a safe in 2014. On November 10, 2021, a plumber working in the building found cash and checks in that amount in a wall behind a toilet. Police believe this hoard was from the 2014 theft. The CrimeStoppers organization gave the man a $20,000 reward.
Lakewood Church was in the national spotlight on February 11, 2024, when a woman described as being mentally ill entered the church building and began firing. Off-duty police in the congregation shot and killed the woman. A man in the congregation was shot and injured. The woman had brought her son with her; he was shot and critically injured. Osteen was elsewhere in the building when the shooting occurred but was notified. The shooting prompted further discussion of red-flag laws, which Texas does not have, when it was revealed the woman's family had tried to get child protective services to remove her seven-year-old son from her custody due to her mental state. Red-flag laws allow family members and law enforcement to temporarily remove weapons from people who are a danger to themselves or others.
Impact
Osteen is regarded as the pioneer of the megachurch. Megachurches are a more recent trend, in which a new Protestant or evangelical congregation quickly grows to several thousand members under the direction of a charismatic leader. Lakewood Church is commonly regarded as the most successful of the megachurches. Osteen is sometimes referred to as the successor to Reverend Billy Graham, one of the first televangelists. His preaching is often referred to as the prosperity gospel, or the idea that God will bless His followers with success; critics say this directly contradicts Jesus's teaching.
Personal Life
Osteen married Victoria Illoff on April 4, 1987. They have two children, Alexandria and Jonathan Osteen. Victoria, Alexandria, and Jonathan have all given regular sermons at Lakewood Church. Osteen lives with is family in Houston.
Bibliography
Alsharif, Mirna, Amy Calvin, and Marissa Parra. "Joel Osteen Preaches About Living Without Fear in First Sunday Service at Lakewood Church Since Shooting." NBC News, 18 Feb. 2024, www.nbcnews.com/news/joel-osteen-preaches-living-fear-first-sunday-service-lakewood-church-rcna139381. Accessed 30 Sept. 2024.
Associated Press. "Nation’s Largest Church Opens in Stadium." NBC News, 17 July 2005, www.nbcnews.com/id/8565629/ns/us‗news/t/nations-largest-church-opens-stadium/. Accessed 26 May 2016.
"Books." Lakewood Church, 2024, www.lakewoodchurch.com/store/books. Accessed 30 Sept. 2024.
Cochran, Amanda. "Lakewood Church: The Houston Megachurch by the Numbers." Click2Houston, 13 Feb. 2024, www.click2houston.com/news/local/2021/12/03/lakewood-church-the-houston-megachurch-by-the-numbers/. Accessed 30 Sept. 2024.
Downen, Robert. "Joel Osteen's Lakewood Church Repaying $4.4M in Forgivable PPP Loans." Houston Chronicle, 9 Oct. 2021, www.houstonchronicle.com/business/article/Joel-Osteen-Lakewood-Church-COVID-funds-pay-PPP-16519313.php. Accessed 25 Apr. 2023.
Gleeson, Scott. "Three Abortion Activists Strip to Underwear in Protest during Joel Osteen Church Service." USA Today, 7 June 2022, www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2022/06/07/abortion-activists-strip-underwear-joel-osteen-church-service/7542303001/. Accessed 25 Apr. 2023.
"Joel Osteen." Joel Osteen Ministries, www.joelosteen.com/our-ministry/about-joel. Accessed 25 Apr. 2023.
Kuzydym, Stephanie, and Kristine Phillips. "Joel Osteen Calls Claim He Shut Church Doors on Harvey Victims 'a False Narrative.'" Washington Post, 30 Aug. 2017, www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2017/08/29/we-were-never-closed-joel-osteens-houston-megachurch-disputes-claims-it-shut-its-doors/?utm‗term=.5f037fd89a1d. Accessed 19 Sept. 2017.
Maxouris, Christina. "What We Know About a Woman Who Fired Inside a Houston Megachurch." CNN, 14 Feb. 2024, www.cnn.com/2024/02/14/us/lakewood-church-shooting-joel-osteen-texas/index.html. Accessed 30 Sept. 2024.
"Megachurch: Thieves Steal $600,000 from Joel Osteen's Megachurch." The Christian Science Monitor, 12 Mar. 2014, www.csmonitor.com/USA/Latest-News-Wires/2014/0311/Megachurch-Thieves-steal-600-000-from-Joel-Osteen-s-megachurch. Accessed 19 Sept. 2017.
Osteen, Joel. "Joel Osteen: The Man Behind America’s Largest Church." Interview by Kristi Watts. CBN, 12 Oct. 2022, www1.cbn.com/700club/joel-osteen-man-behind-americas-largest-church. Accessed 30 Sept. 2024.
Pulliam-Bailey, Sarah. "How Kanye West Put Joel Osteen's Prosperity Gospel Back Under the Spotlight." Washington Post, 19 Nov. 2019, www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2019/11/19/how-kanye-west-put-joel-osteens-prosperity-gospel-back-under-spotlight/. Accessed 30 Sept. 2024.
Weisholtz, Drew. "Plumber Who Found Money Stashed in Wall at Joel Osteen's Church Gets $20,000 Reward." Today, 8 Dec. 2021, www.today.com/news/news/plumber-found-money-stashed-wall-joel-osteens-church-gets-20000-reward-rcna8019. Accessed 30 Sept. 2024.