By Dallas Broker-Realtor Bill Cherry

Forty-eight years ago this past Mother's Day, a Baptist minister with degrees from John Brown University and Northwestern Baptist Seminary, left the security of his Houston church and founded a nondenominational church in an abandoned feed store in north Houston. His name was John Osteen, and he named his church Lakewood.

The Baptist church had decided to make life hard for him because he had recently divorced, and because he had become lenient on those who wanted to worship by speaking in tongues, a way of worshiping usually associated with Pentecostals.

At the time he calculated that if worshipers were packed in really tight, the feed store would hold 200. But then having 200 at a service, much less ever outgrowing the building, Osteen knew, could only come if God were to shine His light of favor on the new ministry.

John Osteen prayed and persisted. Cheap bumper stickers, an awful shade of blue with non-artistic lettering, began appearing, mostly on one junk car after another. Soon you saw them all over Houston and Texas.

They said "Lakewood Church. An Oasis of Love." You were probably right to figure the car's gas tank didn't have more than a buck's worth in it, for in the main, the people Lakewood was attracting were poor.

And Lakewood Church wasn't any more financially prosperous than the members. Most area theologians thought that John Osteen's message was probably as close to bankrupt as that of his supporters' bank accounts, so they ignored him.

But with the passage of a mere forty years, denominational Christian churches in Houston and nearby had to accept that Lakewood Church and others that sprang up like it, were exponentially siphoning their congregants, leaving them with scores of empty pews and bare bones operating budgets.

Denominations that stretch back centuries - Catholic, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Episcopal, Baptist and the like -were, and still are, finding their expressions of theology and worship are now appealing to fewer and fewer.

It was just a matter of time before John Osteen had built a 7,800-seat sanctuary and soon it was filling-up three times every Sunday, plus there would be a good showing at the Spanish service. That meant more than 25,000 people were worshiping in person at Lakewood every Sunday, and several million throughout the world did because of its television broadcasts. Most of the people came from other churches.

Today more people throughout the world watch Lakewood's television broadcasts than those of any other ministry's.

And they have new bumper stickers with slick visual graphics that say "Discover the Champion in You. Lakewood Church." This time they are on more late-model Lexus and Mercedes and Fords and Hondas than they are on junkers from Honest Frank's Used Cars.

John Osteen died in 1999. His family decided that his son Joel should be his successor. Most nondenominational churches die a quick death when the founder dies. However, in four years, Joel Osteen, who is about forty-five, and his team have increased the membership of Lakewood to more than three times the size that it was when his father died. It is now the largest nondenominational Christian church in the world.

About four years ago when a good part of Houston flooded from persistent rain storms, Lakewood Church gave a million dollars to help the flood victims, and they did it without taking up a special offering.

So what is the draw of Lakewood and its sisterhood of mega-nondenominational churches? At Lakewood, you are considered a member if you adopt it as your church. There's no formal initiation into the club.

Each service starts with an hour of incredible spirit-building music by an orchestra and choir. The entire congregation stands and sings throughout it all. The half-hour sermon comes at the end.

Susan Rice of Tie Dyed Production, a company that handles the sound for rock concerts and the like, says that the music, the technology and the production at Lakewood are equal to or better than any major rock concert. It's very high energy, she says. It's what young people, even their parents, are used to and want.

And then there's Pastor Joel Osteen. He is probably the most talented and accomplished public speaker of all of the television ministers. His sermons and teachings follow cognitive therapy to the letter:

God wants nothing but the best for you. It's there for you if you won't let the Enemy (the devil) get in the way. Here's how you keep the Enemy from getting in the way. Do that and you can defeat him so that you can live the life of the champion that God has in you.

Lakewood Church has now converted the huge Houston Compaq Center into its new church. They budgeted $75 million to do that. When I contacted Joel Osteen's office, his assistant Noel Wright told me that they already had all of the money committed to meet that budget.

The Rt. Rev. Roger Howard Cilley was once a Shakespearean actor in New York, before he found his way to join the Episcopal clergy and later became one of its most prominent bishops. He understood show business. I once asked him why the Episcopal church didn't have a television ministry.

"Bill," he said, "It's not that it wouldn't be a good idea. In fact, we've thought about it. The problem is we can't agree on which of us will be the star."