Lakewood Church

As I mentioned in an earlier post, our primary reason for visiting Houston was to attend church at the largest mega-church in the world, Lakewood Church or Joel Osteen Ministries. They've got a congregation of over 40,000, and the Sunday morning service we attended was a more-than-half-filled stadium of about 9000-10000. If you'd ever like to know more specifically what the service was like, they broadcast it live on TV. To properly explain my experience would take me much more space than I'd like to spend writing now, but in short you need to know two things: (1) I was raised by a staunch atheist who regularly spoke about the evils of religion, and (2) I'm a scientist by training who's come to question the belief in natural law and wonder if/how/where faith could possible have a place in my life.

So when Joel first walked up to the pulpit and nearly ten thousand people stood at once to share in worship, a chill passed through me. It was almost frightening, and I seriously considered the horrible scenario where they suddenly decided that I was the devil incarnate. What would I do aside from be brutally mobed by 10000 peaceful God-loving Christians in the name of ridding the earth of all evil.

Of course I'm not evil, and neither we're they going to do such a thing, even if I were. Probably any large crowd united for one cause would have scared me a bit. But try to put this in context. Whether intentional or not, I was broght up thinking of Christians, especially the type who surrounded me, muttering praise to God and blindly folling a charismatic leader, as a group to be feared as much as Nazi's. Who knows what they would do if asked to in the name of God.

Well, the feeling finally passed, as the first 30 minutes or so of the service commenced with a pseudo rock concert, and my concern passed to the regulars whose hearing was most certainly being damaged by the intensely loud sung praise to God. I hoped they didn't think it wouldn't effect them because it was worship.

When Joel finally spoke, every fifth word was God or some other incantation thereof (Jesus, the Father, Him, etc.) but if you carefully substituted your favorite scientific motive instead, most of what he said was quite inspiring. In fact, if you allow for a liberally interpretation of what God is, then I could see totally agreeing with everything Joel said. He was really a good motivational speaker, charismatic, and dramatic. By the end, when he asked that people who lacked faith but wanted help finding it stand, I stood. See, I do want faith. Faith in my convictions, faith in this world and the people on it, and faith in God, if somehow that would help me.

But I don't want to go to church, and I don't buy most of what Christianity has to offer. Nor have I found an answer in Buddhism, Judaism, science, and many other religions. I wish I could just convince myself to believe, but instead I question, as a good scientist, and lacking an answer and faith I just feel confused.