Posted on 01/24/2024 1:38:12 PM PST by Morgana
Talk about cultish! Joel Osteen, false teacher and fake pastor, is most definitely a cult leader. The followers of Joel Osteen’s ministry do not follow Christ, they follow the man and they are in it for no other reason than to hear the man tickle their ears with his motivational pep talks and uplifting speeches.
Joel Osteen, one of the world’s most famous and prosperous false teachers–estimated to be worth about $100 million–appeared on the Today Show in 2021 to lecture people who don’t have the luxury of owning a 17 thousand square foot home with an Olympic size pool on how to be content with what you have.
Osteen, a prosperity gospel charlatan who has made millions of dollars bilking unsuspecting people who continuously give money to his organization in the hopes of receiving material gain from God in return, went on to compare God to a spare tire that you can use as back-up when things aren’t going your way.
During his last Sunday morning “sermon,” if you want to call it that, Osteen broke down in tears to tell the audience how he had paid off a $100 million loan for the former Compaq Center stadium where the “church” now meets in just 19 years. Osteen explained during the session that after a failed attempt at getting the loan from another bank, they got the loan from Bank of America. Osteen said that over the years, they have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on other programs, including outreach, but chose not to pay off the loan faster even though they could have.
Just think about how many goats have been fleeced in order to push that kind of money through their coffers. Hundreds of millions of dollars that came from poor and middle class people as a “seed offering” in the hopes that doing so would help them out of their own financial troubles.
VIDEO ON LINK
I had tears of joy when I paid off my mortgage last year.😉
G_d is in His Heaven, and we will all face Judgement.
Of these I am certain.
All the rest are just asking for your money.
And this Prosperity Gospel Con Man is on the top of the list.
Would love to hear ANY of his followers explain.
But you’d just get the glazed over Cult Eyes, and “If you really believed, you’d know” crapola.
Any former followers on FR?
The interest was killing him
I’ve certainly heard of him. Is he a Charlatan?
Not my cup of spiritual tea, but the hate that gets poured out on him defies belief. Christianity is not supposed to be all sackcloth and ashes, right? It called the "good news" for a reason and from what I've seen the centrality of Christ is part of everything Osteen preaches. So I'm not sure what the beef is.
If you’re not sure, you need to research more. This isn’t a hard one to figure out.
At my old church they had a desire to serve “at-risk” youth. Kids in homes with drug addicts, etc. They started a school held in the church, then in an expanded wing of the church as it grew.
They realized that so many of the kids needed to get out of their family environment (and some homeless) so they wanted to purchase some nearby houses to run as group homes for the kids.
They started with a girl’s house with 6 to 8 girls in the house and a set of house parents to watch over them (the kids are teens).
That worked out so well the plan was to purchase another nearby home for boys, and then over 10 years or whatever to buy more nearby homes. The neighborhood has small, older homes that are getting bought for the land, torn down, and huge mansions filling the lots.
Anyway - that 10 year plan got moved up when something like 8 homes all on the same 2 blocks got put up for sale in the same year. By some miracle the church was able to buy them all with some donations and loans. I think now they have two girls and two boys homes, and the remaining homes are rented out to pastors or workers at the church until they can get the resources to turn them into group homes.
The kids from the group homes are good kids that just need help and direction. It is pretty amazing to hear some of their stories as they get their lives turned around. One of the things they do is community outreach and help the neighbors with yard work, etc.
One could research Donald Trump and easily conclude that he was a POS, too. It’s not always so easy to figure out.
Most of the kvetching about money seems indistinguishable from envy, and the theological complaints do not match what I've heard him preach.
Of course, coming from a Roman Catholic background, I'd much rather see him spend money finding a new Bernini or Michelangelo and building a cathedral rather than renovating a former basketball arena. I don't hear him telling people to pray for cash, but I do hear him say that if you are wretched and turn away from God you can scarcely expect any of His guidance and good fortune, which strikes me as a fairly constant undercurrent of Calvinist theology.
But before I pass judgement on Osteen or his church for having large facilities (and not spending that money on the poor), I'd have to have details. For example, it's been my experience in much smaller churches that some donors give just to a particular building fund -- that money can't be used for anything else. It's also been my experience that some donors give money today and pledge future money for tomorrow, and again it's sometimes for a particular project. If that's what this church's building loan was based on, it's hard to judge them for it.
Then there are some cases where a construction company is owned by a member of the church and, therefore, the construction company gives the church a great low cost deal on making a building. I saw that first-hand in a smaller church, but it was a building that had a cost savings in the hundreds of thousands of dollars (not multi-millions). Our small church was criticized for spending a lot of money on it, when it turned out we spent a lot less than was alleged. I don't know if a similar situation happened with Osteen's multi-million dollar building. I do know that I won't criticize it without knowing those kinds of details.
Does anybody know how often Osteen does the prosperity gospel thing? If he does it every week then I have a problem. But if most of his sermons are about trusting Jesus for our salvation, being humble about ourselves, we're saved by grace, but we ought to believe it enough to live like we mean it, with only 1 sermon a year or so about prosperity gospel, then maybe his critics are trying too hard to zero in on something to complain about so they can define the entire ministry on something that's taught rarely. All while the hedonist leftists, not Osteen, are the ones making it harder to be a Christian in the U.S.
He is.
POST 7:::: AMEN
/\ This. The media, public schools, and colleges and universities and the real sinkholes of depravity and teachers of evil.
Now that is an amazing story. The Congregation must be very generous. This had to be a very expensive undertaking with a long-term commitment.
“You will know the by their fruit” is how we are to judge so before judging Mr. Osteen how about we look at the fruit of his detractors.
Why would he even mention such a thing unless he wanted more donations.
Trump never begged for you to come to Jesus and give you his money if you want to get to heaven.
Nice try tho
Well, neither one of them has begged me for anything.
But plenty of sources would make a lot of claims about President Trump just as much as the pastor.
Try.
Words and deeds. The word is good. His deeds are bad. Dirty deeds (done dirt cheap).
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