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Looming over U.S. 59 in the Compaq Center where the Houston Rockets played for tens of thousands of fans is America's largest megachurch. Lakewood Church and its pastor, Joel Osteen, attract an average of almost 50,000 worshipers every weekend. The message that he delivers is one of hope and promise, of easy Christianity and prosperity for God's people - a message that the architecture of the sanctuary and its surroundings reflect. Although Lakewood has received national, even international attention for its size, opulence, and charismatic pastor, it is not a religious anomaly but borrows heavily from the American religious past. Lakewood's self-contained and self-sustaining environment creates a Utopian experience for its congregants. Like the message of prosperity that Osteen promotes, the building itself reflects religious trends that are both contemporary and resonant of American spiritual traditions. The character of this Texas church is both Southern (with Joel's distinctive twang and the church's Bible Belt congregation) and resoundingly connected to national religious movements. And as part of the modern megachurch phenomenon, Lakewood benefits from the evolution of past religious traditions in both style and function (Boulding 29-55).
Modern megachurches exist within a complex historical context. They draw their power from the theologies, rituals, and aesthetics that extend as far back as 1 836, when Charles Grandison Finney first set foot on the Broadway Tabernacle stage.1 The megachurch has been influenced by Finney's revivalist style and the space in which he unleashed it; it has been forged from the same modern technological proclivities as Sister Aimee Semple McPherson's broadcasts; and it borrows from the secularism of famous twentieth-century revivalist (and former baseball player) Billy Sunday. The Azusa Street Revival and the Pentecostal and, subsequently, neo-Pentecostal spirit that it spurred enabled ministers like Carlton Pearson to capitalize on the power of popular faith. But it took Bill Hybels' seeker sensitive model and like-minded evangelists to cobble together the most influential and marketable characteristics of their religious predecessors to craft a new faith experience for hundreds of thousands of Americans under the banner of the "megachurch."
Every time that Osteen takes his place behind the pulpit at Lakewood Church he draws on the power of the preachers who evangelized before him. Stylistically, he and other megachurch pastors pattern their...