A few weeks ago, there was a tragic shooting at Joel Osteen’s megachurch, Lakewood, in Houston, Texas. A woman walked into the building armed with several guns, and was shot down before she could do too much damage. Fortunately, no one besides her was killed (2 people were wounded — one being her son whom she had brought with her), though it is obviously still tragic that she initiated this and then lost her own life.
Osteen made statements on TV the same day, lamenting the loss and the tragedy and trauma. The next Sunday service was spent mostly reflecting on the events and praying for the shooter’s son, who was still in the hospital.
In other words, everything he and the church did to respond were what most pastors would have done in response to a tragedy like a shooting. He seems to have done a great job of leading his church well in response to the event.
The issue is the years of theology taught in Lakewood previously which doesn’t seem to fit with events like this.
Like, the fluffy teaching taught by Osteen for decades doesn’t sit right, and did not prepare his listeners to deal with something like this in their own church (much less, the tragedies happening daily around the world).
We live in a broken world. And each one of us is broken and in need of healing. To fail to acknowledge this in our ongoing teaching and liturgy is to set our people up for failure, or at least, a brutal wakeup call when tragedy strikes. And if this has taught us anything, it’s that tragedy will strike each and every one of us, sooner or later. Hopefully not on the magnitude of a shooting, but family and friends get sick and pass away; accidents happen; we lose jobs; and so on.
It’s not a matter of if a tragedy will strike us, but when.
Church leaders need to be constantly preparing those they lead for how to deal with tragedies. We need to communicate the brokenness of the world, and how Christ entered into that brokenness, into the horrors of our reality, in order to heal us.
We cannot skip over the lament and sin and just live in the happy-clappy world of prosperity preaching, hoping the pain never finds us. That is not good leadership, or good theology.
Good theology dwells in the real world, not the one we wish we inhabited.
I pray for the community at Lakewood Church and hope for healing and unity. And I hope that some of the silver lining of this tragedy will be a redirection of focus: On a God who interacts with our real lives, with the pain and sin and fallenness we experience every day, rather than ignoring it or pretending we can ‘believe it away.’
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