Posted on 07/24/2005 1:36:58 PM PDT by zzen01
With 300 employees, a projection of $77 million in annual revenue and audited financial statements, Houston's Lakewood Church sounds a lot like a business. ADVERTISEMENT
And in many ways, it is.
"It would be naive to say, 'No, we're not a business,' " Senior Pastor Joel Osteen said in an interview. "We obviously are a business because we're dealing with millions of dollars. And I say that because we don't take that lightly."
According to a copy of the church's most recent audited financial statement obtained by the Chronicle and a review of public records including court documents, Lakewood is a sophisticated and successful business operation.
"We have to be good stewards of God's money, so we run it by sound, solid business principles," said Osteen, who this year stopped taking his $200,000 salary from the church and instead lives on profits from sales of his best-selling book, Your Best Life Now, which has sold 2.8 million copies.
The documents show revenue for the 2004 fiscal year of $54 million, including $3.4 million from the church bookstore, which sells religious videos, CDs and books.
Records also show:
•It owns and operates KTBU Channel 55, "The Tube," a local television station that features religious shows and retro programming like Gunsmoke and I Love Lucy. •Employees have access to retirement plans. •It has had a multimillion-dollar line of credit at Northern Trust Bank and has seven-figure investments in securities.. •Lakewood structured a sophisticated $60 million construction loan with Bank of America to revamp its new home at the former Compaq Center using collateral pledges from its members, a deed of trust on its northeast Houston campus and a life insurance policy for Joel Osteen. •The church has successfully sued to protect Joel Osteen's name as a valuable trademark. •Osteen, who lives in a home appraised at $2.3 million in the ritzy Tanglewood neighborhood, is listed as president of Lakewood Church, a nonprofit organization. (A spokesman for the church noted that Osteen paid $380,000 for the home when he bought it, though it has since been remodeled.) If Lakewood is to be compared to a business, there is no doubt it is family-run:
Osteen's wife, Victoria, his mother, brother, sister and in-laws all play central roles.
Kevin Comes, who is married to Joel Osteen's sister, Lisa, who also is a pastor at the church, is the administrator who handles the day-to-day business. He attributes much of the success to penny-pinching.
"We have an incredible budgeting system," Comes said. "We budget all the way down to hot chocolate."
Comes said Lakewood has done "significant analysis" that shows the church will increase its revenue by 42 percent, from $54 million in fiscal year 2004 to $77 million in the current fiscal year, 2006. At the same time, annual operating expenses will rise from $45 million to $75 million.
Comes said the increased revenue will come from a sharp increase in weekend attendance — already at 30,000 strong before the church moved into the former Compaq Center. Worshippers are encouraged to tithe 10 percent or more of their income annually.
Lakewood recently held its first services in the 16,000-seat arena, drawing standing-room-only crowds.
The church has few big donors and counts on a large volume of middle-income families, Comes said. "We have a huge middle class that gives responsibly," he added.
While Lakewood is considered the largest church in the country by attendance, it is not alone in finding success among the masses. Hundreds of other so-called megachurches — defined as having 2,000 or more weekly attendants — are cropping up around the country, and they're filling the pews using business tactics.
"Lakewood, and megachurches like it, are efficiently marketing an interchangeable product better than the competition," said James Twitchell, a professor of English and advertising at the University of Florida who's written about churches and marketing.
"They have been able to tell a story, dynamically market a brand and are harvesting the reward, namely, greater consumption at higher profit margins thanks to economies of scale."
John Green, a political science professor at the University of Akron in Ohio, who studies megachurches and their impact on society, refers to Osteen and other megachurch leaders as "religious entrepreneurs" who excel at niche marketing.
"If you go to a megachurch, you'll find that they emphasize different things, and if you're looking at this from a business point of view, that's good marketing. You find your niche," he said.
Interpretations of the Bible, for example, vary widely from church to church and are sometimes tailored to their demographics, Green said.
Lakewood features "prosperity gospel," which promises the faithful that if they ask, God will reward them financially. Its niche is what Osteen calls "the unsaved" or "unchurched."
"We like to target people who do not go to church today," Osteen said.
Green also said megachurches are frequently structured like corporations.
Lakewood Church, for example, has a president, a chief financial officer who oversees a team of accountants, a board of directors, a public relations officer, and health and retirement plans.
Osteen said he is mainly involved in the spiritual side of Lakewood's operation but that the church has hired "top-quality people to manage the money to help us be good stewards."
It's common for a megachurch to have annual revenue in the millions of dollars, and for most if not all of that money to be spent on construction, highly produced services, advertising, promotion and broadcasting, according to the Hartford Institute for Religion Research.
The average annual income for a megachurch was $4.8 million, with expenditures of $4.4 million, according to a 2000 Hartford study.
Just 25 years ago, there were only about a dozen megachurches in the United States. There are at least 1,200 today, according to the Hartford Institute's Scott Thumma, who is wrapping up a study on the phenomenon.
Thumma said those churches are mainly nondenominational and are in 45 of 50 states. Texas leads the nation with 174 megachurches, followed by California with 169 and Florida with 83. Houston and Dallas account for 56 megachurches alone.
Broadcasting is a big part of the megachurch.
Some 44 percent use radio and 38 percent use television to spread their gospel and in turn get bigger, according to Thumma's research.
While no one knows for sure how much the megachurch industry is worth, most experts say that with their millions of attendees, who often tithe 10 percent of their income or more to the church annually, it's in the many billions of dollars.
"This is a business that dwarfs all other businesses. This business dwarfs the car business. Nothing compares to it," said Twitchell, who wrote Branded Nation: The Marketing of the Megachurch, College Inc., and Museumworld, which examines how religion, education and culture are relying heavily on brand recognition and marketing.
He's working on another book, Shopping for God, which will show how megachurches are targeting audiences using highly developed marketing skills.
Megachurches, he said, are marketing salvation.
"From a consumer point of view, we may not think we're church shopping, but from their point of view, they're shopping God," he said.
And to do it, they are targeting an audience that Twitchell said churches once largely failed to court — men.
"That's been the marketing breakthrough. If you want this thing to succeed and get big and get strong, pitch it to men," he said.
Megachurches, he said, are unlike the churches of yesteryear in that they feature what men like: comfortable cineplex-style seats, glossy professional-quality performances with high-tech sound and video systems, and rapid-fire sermons about issues related to day-to-day living.
In its glossy magazine's summer edition, Lakewood Church features an article written by a star of the Houston Texans football team, David Carr, whom it counts as a member.
With a laid-back tone and action photos of the popular quarterback playing football, Carr discusses how his faith guides him as a father and a field general.
At a recent Sunday service at Lakewood, among the crowd of several thousand were family men in their 20s and 30s.
On that Sunday, while her brother Joel was in California preparing to preach to a sold-out stadium in Anaheim, Lisa Comes gave a sermon to several thousand churchgoers on personal finance, which she called "financial freedom from the Bible's point of view."
Financial freedom, she said, will come to those who tithe.
And the church isn't shy about asking the congregation to ramp up its tithing. Joel Osteen said he wants to pay off "as quickly as possible" the $60 million construction loan used to refurbish Compaq Center. He said he expects church members, who have already paid $35 million of the $95 million cost, to carry the load.
"We're just going to put it to the congregation that we want to pay this thing off," Osteen said during a recent media tour of the arena.
He said he doesn't fret over filling the stadium or raising enough money to pay expenses.
"I don't lose any sleep over it," Osteen said in an interview. "If something's not working, we'll scale back."
Osteen suggested that the church could even eventually outgrow its new home.
"I'm satisfied with this, but 10 years from now, you never know," he said.
"We might need something bigger."
The obvious coment is that the main-stream, or main-line churches have all failed miserably at quenching the thirst that people have for a creditable message of faith..OTOH, I'd rather have this guy put his whole family on the payroll, as compared to what ECUSA does with its Diocesan pledeg here in NY.
Theologically speaking, his sermons are hardly 'meaty'.
Some find him to be inspiring and uplifting, which is fine. To me, his sermons are motivational messages sprinkled with a little religion.
Not knocking the guy...he could be doing lots worse.
If he's sincere, then good for him.
If they're making audited financial statements available to the public, then it seems to me they're being honest with their contributors. It's up to the congregants to decide whether they're getting something they value.
It is sad if this phenomenal church growth is because people are drawn to a pastor that refuses to rebuke sin.
A bit different than the way Jesus ministered. He had no home, no mega buildings, traveled about the country with a few disciples. He preached about the kingdom of God not what you could accumulate on this earth. He gave his life that others might live. He was a servant not a CEO.
It is sad if this phenomenal church growth is because people are drawn to a pastor that refuses to rebuke sin.
I wonder what percentage of their income goes towards supporting missionaries and charitable outreach?
"The obvious coment is that the main-stream, or main-line churches have all failed miserably at quenching the thirst that people have for a creditable message of faith."
An additional point is that Osteen refrains from hammering his congregation with his political opinions. Nothing turns me off like going to church and having the pastor assume I'm a liberal Democrat.
This might be a style thing with me, but I never have liked the "shiny happy people" version of Christianity prevalent in the American church. A premium is placed on having a perfect smile, perfect suits, perfect family, hyper-polished presentations, etc. I would much rather listen to a preacher that is rough around the edges and has had his share of dark times. After all, Christ was called "the Man of Sorrows" and Solomon wrote "a sad face is good for the heart." Seeing a preacher with an eternal 1,000-watt smile and ubiquitous $2,000 suits makes me squeamish from the start. But as I mentioned, that might be more of a style than doctrinal issue.
What sin didn't Osteen rebuke?
1. Good work, if you can get it.
2. Sounds like a 'business', should be taxed as such.
I have absolutely NO qualms about criticizing most, if not all, of these 'made-for-TV' 'ministeries'. Joel sounds and looks a little too slick, for me. As does that slickster in Columbus or the weird bearded one that is always selling his books (has to do with 'gifts of life' or something like that).
Give me an old-fashioned Cathloic priest any day; not these 'happy-people' ministers that are only a small upgrade from a used-car salesperson.
"A bit different than the way Jesus ministered. "
Indeed. Jesus preached about giving one's wealth away and joining him, NOT using His Word to generate a $200,000/year salary.
I don't know the context of this statement, but I strongly disagree with it as it reads. God does indeed bless some people with "wealth and prosperity", but we not entitled to that from God. In fact God calls people to follow Him wherever He leads whether that would be serving as missionaries to Africa or serving in small churches in backwoods America. There is no guarantee that we will be "comfortable" but rather we are commanded to just follow Him.
I think that statement refers to the verses in Malachi chapter 3 about "opening up the floodgates and pour out so much blessing". However those verses are not talking about financial blessings per se, but we will be blessed in other means.
....but it 'is' the......'TAKE'....as USUAL....$$$$....the love of _______'is' the ...........hidden....Terrorism!
....impossible?
1st John 4:1......
I agree with you totally. I wish these churches would preach more about Jesus and less about getting rich
Let me get "everyone" on the phone, then we'll tell you.
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