Osteen hasn’t necessarily tailored his message for the downturn. Instead, he has continued his feel-good preaching, his exhortations to focus on the positive and banish negative thoughts, his reminders that God wants you to have a good job, a beautiful home, and decent cash flow. His vast ministry has become, in effect, shelter from the storm. “God wants you to have a big life,” Osteen reminds his flock. “That is his blessing. God has a big dream for your life.”

We live in a time of miraculous congregations. Osteen’s Lakewood Church, in Houston, is the largest in the United States, with 45,000 regular weekly attendees and 7 million more tuning in. His television show is the most-watched inspirational program in America and is seen in 100 countries around the world. He has sold 7 million copies of his two books, Your Best Life Now and Become a Better You. Podcasts of his sermons are downloaded 4.5 million times a month. He preaches to more than 15,000 people at a time in the basketball arena turned sanctuary that is Lakewood Church. His pulpit stands near the spot where Hakeem Olajuwon helped the Houston Rockets win two consecutive N.B.A. titles. But the Rockets, who have since moved across town, never put as many people in the seats as Osteen does.

Osteen will tell you that his success is a result of God’s favor, that his message is God’s message, and that all that he has achieved is a blessing from God. Clearly, he is more than just an inspiring pastor; he is also a master marketer and—pardon me for saying this, Joel—a damn good chief executive.

He presides over an empire that takes in tens of millions of dollars a year and has been growing at a boom-time pace. (Though Osteen gives a significant portion of his book and CD earnings to the church, his take is still ample enough to allow him and his family to live in 5,000 square feet of leopard-skinned luxury in one of Houston’s tonier neighborhoods.) Rough economic times, Osteen believes, make the business of saving souls that much richer. “I would think that our message would have increased relevancy in a time of economic uncertainty. I think people want to know that God is taking care of you. As it gets darker, I think the brighter message shines.”

Joel’s father, john osteen, was a pastor who dissociated himself from the Southern Baptist Church to start his own congregation, Lakewood, in an abandoned feedstore in 1959. It was John who started the family march toward a more gentle Jesus, focusing on the goodness and love of God and downplaying the Old Testament anger and wrath. One of John’s prevailing themes, and the underpinning for much of Lakewood’s current message, can be found in one of his sermons: “It’s God’s will for you to live in prosperity instead of poverty. It’s God’s will for you to pay your bills and not be in debt. It’s God’s will for you to live in health and not in sickness all the days of your life.”

Joel is the second youngest of six siblings, and the one considered least likely to take the pulpit. To say that he was a quiet child would be an understatement. The diminutive boy—he would grow six inches after he graduated from high school—was easy to underestimate. As his lifelong friend Johnny McGowan says, “On the basketball court, guys would take a look at Joel and say, ‘I’ll guard him,’ and then Joel would go right by them.”

After a year at Oral Roberts University, Osteen dropped out to return to Houston, in part to care for his mother, Dodie, who was then recovering from cancer (a miracle regularly cited at Lakewood Church). He then married his wife, Victoria, and took a formal position at Lakewood, helping out with the television show and the design of the platform, as the stage around the pulpit is known, and eventually becoming the producer of Lakewood’s Sunday service. “Victoria would kid me because I would spend four hours adjusting a light,” Osteen says. “I learned you can’t separate the message from the presentation of that message.”

It was perfect training for a 21st-­century televangelist. Osteen developed a keen understanding of the television market—time slots, lead-ins, cost per rating point—and to this day can tell you the top stations in most of his major markets. So passionate was he about the medium that he invested $2 million of Lakewood’s money for a stake in a television station, KTBU, in 1998, and an additional $6 million for the remainder in 2005. The independently operated station would turn out to be a wise purchase, returning $32 million when Lakewood sold it in 2006.