Joel Osteen critique
I find the parallels between this review of a Joel Osteen rally/conference, and Tony Payne and Gordon Cheng's review of the Hillsong Conference in Briefing #340 interesting—in particular, the discussion about what each event reveals about the next generation of the Charismatic movement.
In The Briefing, the point was made that:
Whatever the reasons, there is little doubt that Hillsong is representative of a growing and very influential stream of modern Pentecostalism that looks less and less like traditional Pentecostalism with each passing year ... You had to look hard to see examples of older, classic Pentecostalism at Hillsong Conference ... Traditional Pentecostalism was an offshoot of Evangelicalism .... [But it] is becoming both less pentecostal and less evangelical as time goes on. The pentecostal distinctives are being watered down or dropped, and the underlying evangelical heritage seems already to have been left behind.
The review of Osteen on the Reformation21 site (the online magazine of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals) says something remarkably similar about Osteen:
Joel's own sermons are not like those of his fathers (the late John Osteen). They strike me as the next generation of the Charismatic movement. They aren't about experiencing the power of the Holy Spirit in your life; they are just about encountering your feelings. He talks over and over again about your relationships with other people and in the end he doesn?t really ask you to do anything—except try to change. His language is a mix of manifest destiny and late night infomercial. If I had to characterize the 600 words “sermonettes” I heard I would say “Charismatic emergent, non-threatening, non-spritualized therapeutic language.” Maybe American Idol with Paula as the lone judge.
Never once did I hear the words Gospel, Jesus Christ, Trinity, Sin, Cross (except in Scripture songs sung by performers and in a video testimony played before the Osteens arrived in arena).