talk about a marketplace...
Collections at the church's service bring in close to $1 million a week, with $20 million or so a year more sent in by mail, said Don Iloff, Lakewood's spokesman and Mr. Osteen's brother-in-law. The money goes to pay the staff of 300, service the debt on the $95 million it cost to turn the Compaq Center into a church (now about half paid off), support ministries in India and elsewhere and buy television time around the country. Mr. Osteen stopped taking his $200,000 annual salary from the church after he sold his first book.
or is equating the obscene amount of cash osteen's church is rolling in to crude capitalism an unfair assumption to make?
Joel Osteen's Credo: Eliminate the Negative, Accentuate Prosperity - New York Times
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6 comments:
wow. just wow. i feel sick.
steph
it seems like prosperity itself is the mission of this ministry, rather than to love an serve the poor.
but, see, the poor don't deserve love. clearly, they've angered God. if God loved them, they'd be rich.
see?
oh ding. for pity's sake. truly.
hey - i didn't say it. osteen said it!
he said it is God's will for us to prosper: "But I do believe, you know what, God can want you to have a better house. God wants you to be able to send your kids to college."
isn't that what the logic of a doctrine built on prosperity says, in effect? if prosperity is the manifestation of God's grace then poverty is the absence of that grace.
well FIRST of all. . . i need to read the attachments before i blather ;)
2ndly, i think what god wants is a relationship with a person -which is why he sent his son- that's his big deal, not the whole "name it claim it" thing.
i know god says in malachi that he will certainly bless you for tithing but sometimes i think that section of scripture gets a little embellished.
what's interesting is his following. it appears that people really want to believe what he's saying is true. any type of quick fix to get out of a bind.
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