Alex Wang Openness in Prayer and Programming: Social Media and the Lakewood Church The Lakewood Church

is a megachurch based in Houston, Texas. It is remarkable for a number of different reasons. First, the church is based in the Compaq center, which has an enormous capacity of 16,000 seats and boasts a weekly attendance of more than 43,500 congregants over six services. The Church is a multimillion dollar entity which has a significant following online and offline. What is most remarkable however, is that the Lakewood Church and Joel Osteen organize the production of their services and their presence online around the idea that God is free and accessible to everyone. In a way, the entire premise of the church is as much a platform for organizing social events as it is a successful business for Joel and Victoria Osteen. A consequence of this organizational principle is that the Church falls into many of the pitfalls and problems that Jaron Lanier describes in open web culture. Services at the Lakewood Church are radically different from more traditionally churches, such as the Roman Catholic Church or the Anglican Church. Traditional church services typically incorporate elements of contemplation, majesty, and silent wonder in their services. In my experience with several different Episcopalian Churches, services tend to begin with traditional Christian hymns which usher in the regal procession of the priest or minister as well as their retinue of acolytes carrying polished crucifixes and beautifully woven medieval standards. Priests read verses from the gospels, acolytes spread incense with the pendulum-like swing of the thurible, and pipe organs melodically resonate throughout the sanctuary. Congregants speak and sing psalms aloud together, kneel at pews to pray, and sit together as they listen to the hierarchy of priest deliver sermons and readings from the Old and New Testament. Altogether, traditional churches evoke mystery, timelessness, and wonder in their services;

coming together on Sunday is both a way for people to gather as a community and a way to step out of time and space into a reality dedicated to a more ancient, more ethereal , more meditative view of reality and relationship toward God. Technology is seldom used beyond basic lighting and sound systems. By comparison, the Lakewood Church is different from traditional church services in nearly every way. Recordings begin with an uplifting video montage of inspiring images set to a contemporary Christian song, resembling an iPad commercial more than anything from the Christian tradition. The multi-camera perspectives pan over the crowd to reveal thousands of congregants packed in stadium seating and standing room oriented towards a stage that looks more appropriate for Saturday Night Live than Christian ministry. Pithy messages of individualism and worship of Jesus are delivered by the charismatic Joel Osteen and his wife, Victoria Osteen, in the breathless, energetic, spirited style of charismatic and Baptist ministers. Soon afterward, they are joined onstage by contemporary Christian band with a full choir and multiple instrument sections. Bright lights, a sophisticated sound-system, and colossal widescreen television monitors with captions project the stage throughout the entire stadium. The whole production of the Lakewood Church services uses technology in a way which makes services more physically and emotionally accessible to both congregants and newcomers. Many services are available online at the Churchs website and on Youtube, giving users the chance to experience the Osteens vision of worship from the comfort of their home. These services are professionally edited and recorded, far surpassing the basic service recordings of even other contemporary Evangelical churches. The stadium seating for 16,000 occupants both enables a greater number of people to attend church services in person and takes advantage of the familiar setting of the Compaq center, which likely reminds people more of the entertainment

they get from attending a baseball game or a concert than the relatively tedious traditional Church services. The Osteens actively use the television monitors during services to capture whomever is speaking on stage, to display Bible verses and images, or to project soothing, screensaver-like background images during interludes. On the whole, the production of services is highly evocative of the spirit with which Steve Jobs created his products; end-to-end control which married design and functionality to compliment each other. Like Jobs, Joel Osteen seems to have wanted to create a product that was easy to use, functional, appealing, and progressive. While not progressive in the political sense, the production of Lakewood Church is certainly progressive in that it sets the standards for ease of access. The mission and services Lakewood Church evoke an individualism seen in Robert Bellahs The Habits of the Heart. Like many Evangelical churches, the Osteens preach message that God wants you to prosper in your health, in your family, in your relationships, in your business, and in your career. Osteen has also written and published several self-help and motivational novels which offer advice for the reader to break out of the barriers of normal life and live a happier, more successful, more connected life. In this regard, the Osteen version of the prosperity gospel bears many similarities to Bellahs conception of utilitarian individualism, the maximization of individual gains in favor of extrinsic and intrinsic rewards. What is especially telling is how Bellah describes the moral character of utilitarian individualists as having a ...focus on moral self-discipline and self-help, not primarily material rewards. Worldly rewards are simply the sign of good moral character. This description fits the Osteen approach to worship with chilling accuracy; the Osteens encourage the accumulation of wealth not for its own sake, but to live a happier, successful, and more connected life within Gods presence. Certainly, this view would scandalize many more traditional Christians, who would criticize

Osteens theology as being out of line with the teachings of Jesus Christ, who disavowed wealth in any form and readily admonished the rich and powerful. Yet the Lakewood Church and Joel Osteen dont encourage pure utilitarian individualism. Some expressive individualism is mixed in with his messages, encouraging people to utilize their wealth in order to become more like their true selves. In this sense, Osteens ministry is decidedly individualistic, but contains elements of both utilitarian and expressive individualism, rather than subscribing solely to one paradigm. The accessibility of the Lakewood Churchs sermons and services carries over to online presence. At a glance, their website is much like any other HTML5 website, with a familiar arrangement of navigation bars, banners, slideshows, and news feeds. Yet, closer examination reveals that the website is peppered with various messages which invite users into the community: scrolling advertisements for volunteering, product advertisements which say get yours today!, invitations to prayer circles, and buttons which redirect you to video streams of the services and sermons. The nav bar is even as ostentatious as to have a get help option, which redirects to a page describing various affiliated counseling services. What appears to be incidental at first glance thus is more likely a very intentional strategy to bring casual visitors to browse their website and access the resources available. In the long run, this strategy will likely increase both the attendance of the Lakewood Church and the Osteens book sales. The Lakewood Church has also penetrated a number of different social media. While their Google+ page hasnt been updated since September 2013, they have a significant presence on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and a collection of different recordings on Youtube. A common theme to these sites is that they all present views of the Lakewood Church and its leadership as well as views of its congregants, achievements, and other noteworthy occurrences

within the community. For example, the Lakewood Church Facebook profile picture depicts an upward angle shot of the Compaq center, while the cover photo depicts a two-shot closeup of Joel and Victoria Osteen superimposed on a wide shot of the interior of the Lakewood Church. On the wall are numerous inspirational, quasi-religious quotes, pictures of momentous events at the Church, and pictures of community achievements such as volunteering and charity. The Instagram page is similar, containing pictures of a diverse and moral community unified under the banner of the Lakewood Church and Joel Osteen, their charismatic leader. The Twitter account is simpler by comparison, containing only inspirational quotes and a handful of inspirational photographs. In this sense, these pages act as a way for the Church to promote its greatness and share its achievements with the rest of the world. Interestingly, redirecting to these Churchs social media sites directly from the Lakewood Church website also redirects users to a prompt to follow or subscribe the particular platform which the Church has a presence on. Thus, not only does the Church utilize the social media in order to spread its message individualism, but it also uses it in order to increase its user base. From this perspective, the Church behaves much in the same way as a secular internet celebrity in that it promotes itself to a user base through microblogging, content sharing, and gathering a fandom. Rather than behaving like a more traditional church and dedicating its energy toward works of art or like a liberal church and dedicating its energy towards philanthropy, the Lakewood Church instead chooses to move with the technological times and spread itself to social media. The Church and the Osteens philosophies are symptomatic of much deeper problems which are present in both the development of the Web 2.0 and religious experience in general. In his book, You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto, Jaron Lanier criticizes the internet for making people smaller and less expressive in order to fit the mediums through which they communicate

and socialize; people become locked-in to preferred channels of communication and thus fail to realize that these channels are flawed in their construction and obliterate nuance and subtlety. The Lakewood Church can certainly be seen as suffering from lock-in in terms of how it represents itself on the web. After all, the media which Osteen utilizes do not adequately capture the deeds of the Church itself; inspirational quotes and image macros, pictures of volunteering success, and testaments of religious experience do not represent the religious experience of attending a Lakewood sermon or participating in the community in person. However, Laniers critique penetrates deeper than merely how the Lakewood Church uses social media. Rather, his critique can be applied to the production of the Church as a whole, and perhaps extends to the entirety of modern religious experience. Writing about the music industry, Lanier posits, If money is flowing to advertising instead of musicians, journalists, and artists, then a society is more concerned with manipulation than truth or beauty. If content is worthless, then people will start to become empty-headed and contentless. Although the Lakewood Church has dedicated a significant amount of effort to its counseling, charity, and philanthropic ministries, it has also spent a similarly significant amount of money on its presentation and propagation (e.g. the renovation of the Compaq center cost approximately $95 million dollars). Though people do find great meaning and enjoy the religious experience which the Lakewood Church represents, its message of self-promotion, self-indulgence, and Jesus-worship is a far cry from the original values of compassion, humility, and radical worship espoused by Jesus Christ. After all, the apostles would likely be ill at ease in a megachurch which forgets the most marginalized people in favor of bringing in a half-hour Christian rock band, or which openly encourages the accumulation of wealth when Jesus Christ explicitly warned against the spiritual bankruptcy of wealth. Like Web 2.0, the Lakewood Church has evolved from a previous tradition into

something which ultimately limits the expression of people who participate in it. In this sense, the Lakewood Church is not merely represented by social media; it is itself a metaphor for social media, how content becomes distilled when the presentation is favored. From a certain perspective, the Lakewood Church is an overfunded gadget designed to propagate itself and encourage people to worship Jesus, but not follow his teachings. The Lakewood Churchs departure from tradition thus parallels open-web cultures departure from programming which truly empowers expressive individualism, according to Jaron Lanier. In trying to appeal to the broadest audience, the Lakewood Church has become something radically different from its roots and has twisted its principles to become smaller and more utilitarian than what Christianity was originally intended to be.

Works Cited

http://www.sermoncentral.com/articleb.asp?article=Top-100-Largest-Churches https://www.joelosteen.com/Pages/AboutJoel.aspx https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ds48HEZe6kM http://www.christianpost.com/news/interview-joel-osteen-on-prosperity-gospel-crystal-cathedraland-jesus-74040/ http://www.lakewoodchurch.com/Pages/Home.aspx