Now there’s so much wrong with the Copeland situation that I’m almost speechless. There’s no reason for churches to be building mansions.

I see little difference between what Copeland is doing and the events during the Middle Ages that led to the Protestant Reformation.

Exactly. Lutherans lump me into the "church growth" movement, mostly because I think a church ought to be able to support more than a membership of about 200. But there are two types of growth, and they’re both important: the personal growth of the people attending the church, and the growth in numbers. Growth purely for growth’s sake isn’t healthy.

On Sunday morning after I watched Meet the Press, I flipped through the channels and Osteen was on one of them. I guess I should have given him five minutes, but I didn’t.

It sounds like Osteen is building his megachurch by preaching what people want to hear, rather than what God needs us to hear. I’m Catholic, but I don’t go to church to get my ego stroked and told that I deserve great things. I go to Church to be reminded that if I live a good life, do good, help others, and keep my nose clean, I might get those rewards, later rather than sooner.

Osteen seems to be the type of fellow who wants a big church – I don’t know what that says, but I suspect it gets him a bigger income…

UPDATE:
From fiction to fact.

AP IMPACT: Relatives of televangelist prosper
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080726/ap_on_re_us/rel_prosperity_preacher;_ylt=AitBQaJdUmTCzOhBBblF4Kes0NUE

"To one who had never made more than five thousand a year himself, it was inspiring to explain before dozens of popeyed and admiring morons how they could make ten thousand — fifty thousand — a million a year, and all this by the Wonder Power of Suggestion, by Aggressive Personality, by the Divine Rhythm, in fact by merely releasing the Inner Self-shine. … In some ways he preferred New Thought to standard Protestantism. It was safer to play with. He had never been sure but that there might be something to the doctrines he had preached as an evangelist. Perhaps God really had dictated every word of the Bible. Perhaps there really was a hell of burning sulphur. Perhaps the Holy Ghost really was hovering around watching him and reporting. But he knew with serenity that all of his New Thoughts, his theosophical utterances, were pure and uncontaminated bunk. No one could deny his theories because none of his theories meant anything… How agreeable on bright winter afternoons in the gilt and velvet elegance of the lecture hall, to look at smart women and moan, ‘And, oh my beloved, can you not see, do you no perceive, have not your earth-bound eyes ingathered, the supremacy of raja’s quality which each of us, by that inner contemplation which is the all however cloaked by the seeming, can consummate and build loftily to higher aspiring spheres?’" XVI-2, p. 224.
Elmer Gantry