Angela Coleman was left with more questions than answers after her daughter died in a car accident November 3, 2017. That was until she came across televangelist Joel Osteen on the radio.
“It just felt like he was speaking to me. I had a lot of ‘whys’ running through my head. He showed me that there was a bigger picture,” she said. “God had nothing to do with taking my daughter away. God gave me my daughter.”
Coleman lined up with thousands of others Thursday to see the prosperity gospel champion she credits with giving her hope. She said she felt honored that Osteen would drop by Fredericksburg for an hour-long dialogue with Lifepoint Church’s Pastor Daniel Floyd inside what used to be an ice skating rink in Central Park. Osteen, whose teachings center on the belief that God will bless those who have faith, had been in Washington, D.C. to discuss his latest book called “Next Level Thinking.”
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“His team reached out, saying his book is coming down this week, and if they could come,” Floyd said Thursday. “I told them D.C. is an hour away and it’s not a big metropolitan area. But they didn’t mind.”
The man who regularly draws 7 million viewers to his Sunday sermon hardly needed an introduction for the 1,650 people who reserved spots at the event within 30 minutes. To get the best seat, organizers said some people parked lawn chairs outside Lifepoint Church at 9 a.m. Thursday.
“The pastor needs to reserve the expo center next time,” Dana Bageou of Fredericksburg said.
Like others in the crowd, Bageou said she felt inspired by Osteen’s message that relied more on positive thinking techniques and self-esteem building skills than biblical passages. The main takeaway from his book, Osteen said, is that your life follows your thoughts. At one point, he weaved the psychological term of “internal dialogue” with a message from the Bible to make a point about guarding your mind from negative thoughts.
“We’re living in this day where you feel good about yourself until you get on Instagram. So just be confident with what God gave you,” Osteen said. “God made you a masterpiece. God did not make you a mistake.”
The thousands clapped, with a few yelling “come on.” It’s a stark parting from the message some like Steve Teator, a Lifepoint volunteer, said people receive from traditional church before they give up on it. When Teator said he first arrived at Lifepoint, close to 50 people shook his hand or high-fived him before he got into the building, giving him a new sense of belonging.
“Church made them feel guilty. Church made them feel beat down,” Osteen said of people who had gravitated to his megachurch based in Houston.
Osteen told the crowd that he swatted away his fair share of negativity by keeping his faith that God is good and he’s on his side. Osteen faced questions last year over whether his Texas church adequately helped in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, and his mansion and yacht have been held up as symbols for his lack of charity.
“My personality type is that I want people to like me. This is my nature. I got into the public eye, and I realized that some people won’t like you because they don’t like what I stand for. They don’t like that I’m successful. But I realized that you won’t get everyone to like you,” Osteen said.
His personable demeanor had an obvious effect on the crowd, with some of his self-deprecating jokes causing loud laughter throughout the room. To keep up the positive lifestyle, Osteen encouraged people to plug in to one of Lifepoint’s six locations in the Fredericksburg region.
One of the fastest-growing churches in the Fredericksburg area that went from a few hundred followers 13 years ago to a 6,000-person crowd on Sunday, Lifepoint is grounded on a message of hope Floyd said is similar to Osteen’s.
“It’s a message of God isn’t out to get them,” Floyd said. “People get negative enough, and we believe God can make everyone’s lives for the better. And I think that is contagious.”
For Ceyonna Lewis from Caroline County, who saw Osteen for the first time Thursday, she could see the message possibly helping her.
“I think if I felt like I was in a rut or depressed, I would turn him on,” she said.