John Osteen was an ordained Southern Baptist pastor in Houston until 1958, when what he described as a baptism in the Holy Spirit, including speaking in tongues, pushed his theology toward charismatic practices his denomination did not embrace, and he left his pulpit rather than set the experience aside. The following year, on Mother's Day 1959, he and his wife Dolores held their first service in an abandoned feed store, naming the congregation for a small lake nearby. Lakewood dropped Baptist from its name within a few years and grew as a nondenominational charismatic church, its reach extended by a television broadcast John Osteen carried for sixteen years.
John Osteen died in January 1999, and his son Joel, who had produced his father's broadcasts rather than preached, took the pulpit with no seminary training. Rapid growth followed: Lakewood became the largest weekly congregation in the country within a few years, drawing worshippers well beyond its Pentecostal base.
That growth outgrew its building. In 2005 Lakewood took over the former Compaq Center, an arena that had hosted the Houston Rockets, converting its sixteen thousand eight hundred seats into the country's largest church auditorium at a cost of roughly one hundred million dollars, a loan repaid only in 2024.
That scale drew scrutiny as well as attendance. When Hurricane Harvey flooded Houston in 2017, Lakewood initially told evacuees its building was inaccessible, a claim disputed after photos suggested otherwise, and it opened its doors only after days of pressure, sharpening a longstanding criticism that Osteen's message of positive thinking amounts to a prosperity gospel offering comfort without confronting suffering, an accusation Osteen rejects as a mischaracterization of a ministry of hope.