A Night of Hope - Joel Osteen and wife, Victoria Osteen, at Yankee Stadium in 2009
Watch a rare clip of Joel Osteen’s first sermon at Lakewood Church
He stumbled through sentences. He shuffled his notes. He shifted nervously in an oversized suit.
Steadying himself, he directed the congregation to verses from 1 Corinthians. As several thousand worshippers at Houston’s Lakewood Church flipped the pages of their Bibles, he read aloud: “Run your race with purpose in every step.”
God has a purpose and a plan for you.”
Those ideas would vault him from obscurity to the height of religious celebrity within the next few years. But on that January morning in 1999, he was just a stand-in for his father, televangelist John Osteen, who lay dying in a hospital bed.
Joel Osteen is the nation’s most ubiquitous televangelist and one of its wealthiest. Explore his rise to prominence and his gospel of positive thinking with our three-part series, “The Preacher’s Son,” on our subscriber website, HoustonChronicle.com
Katherine Blunt joined the Houston Chronicle’s business desk in August 2016 and now covers refining, petrochemicals and LNG. Before joining the Chronicle, she covered transportation for the San Antonio Express-News. There, she wrote about infrastructure funding, urban planning and transit development. She also unraveled the murky investment structure underpinning the first public-private toll road in Texas. She grew up in Maryland and attended Elon University, where she majored in journalism and history..
