The Chronicle’s Tara Dooley is breathless in this Sunday Chronicle article on the ever-expanding financial empire of Joel Osteen, pastor of Houston megachurch, Lakewood Church (previous posts here):

Osteen and Free Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, will release the pastor’s second book, Become a Better You on Monday. It debuts with at least 2.5 million copies, the largest first run in Free Press’s more than 60-year history.
With an initial printing of 136,000, Osteen’s first book, Your Best Life Now, attracted an audience just waking up to Osteen and his growing Houston church. The book, which came out in 2004, eventually sold about 5 million copies in the United States and was translated into 25 languages.
Become a Better You meets a public that has grown accustomed to Osteen’s face. Taking his place with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie as one of the 10 Most Fascinating People of 2006 ó according to Barbara Walters ó Osteen’s national profile has made him an A-list Christian celebrity.
“I’m starting to realize it,” Osteen said in an interview. “It wasn’t until about a year or so ago that I thought, ‘This is something unusual and God has given us a lot of favor.’ Sometimes you think it’s just people flattering you, but I think it’s starting to hit home.”

But on Sunday night’s segment of 60 Minutes, Michael S. Horton, J. Gresham Machen Professor of Systematic Theology and Apologetics at Westminster Seminary California, raised substantial questions regarding the theological substance — or lack thereof — of Osteen’s basic message:

In the Wal-Mart era of religion and spirituality, every particular creed and any denominational distinctives get watered down. We donít hear (at least explicitly) about our being ìlittle gods,î ìpart and parcel of God,î or the blood of Christ as a talisman for healing and prosperity. The strange teachings of his fatherís generation, still regularly heard on TBN, are not explored in any depth. In fact, nothing is explored in any depth. Osteen still uses the telltale lingo of the health-and-wealth evangelists: ìDeclare it,î ìspeak it,î ìclaim it,î and so forth, but there are no dramatic, made-for-TV healing lines. The pastor of Lakewood Church . . . does not come across as a flashy evangelist with jets and yachts, but as a charming next-door-neighbor who always has something nice to say.
Although remarkably gifted at the social psychology of television, Joel Osteen is hardly unique. In fact, his explicit drumbeat of prosperity (word-faith) teaching is communicated in the terms and the ambiance that might be difficult to distinguish from most megachurches. Joel Osteen is the next generation of the health-and-wealth gospel. This time, itís mainstream. [. . .]
This is what we might call the false gospel of ìGod-Loves-You-Anyway.î . . . God is our buddy. He just wants us to be happy, and the Bible gives us the roadmap.
I have no reason to doubt the sincere motivation to reach non-Christians with a relevant message. My concern, however, is that the way this message comes out actually trivializes the faith at its best and contradicts it at its worst. In a way, it sounds like atheism: Imagine there is no heaven above us or hell below us, no necessary expectation that Christ ìwill come again with glory to judge the living and the deadî and establish perfect peace in the world. In fact, one would be hard-pressed to find anything in this message that would be offensive to a Unitarian, Buddhist, or cultural Christians who are used to a diet of gospel-as-American-Dream. Disneyís Jiminy Cricket expresses this sentiment: ìIf you wish upon a star, all your dreams will come true.î
To be clear, Iím not saying that it is atheism, but that it sounds oddly like it in this sense: that it is so bound to a this-worldly focus that we really do not hear anything about God himselfóhis character and works in creation, redemption, or the resurrection of the body and the age to come. . . . Despite the cut-aways of an enthralled audience with Bibles opened, I have yet to hear a single biblical passage actually preached. Is it possible to have evangelism without the evangel? Christian outreach without a Christian message? [. . .]
. . . ìHow can I be right with God?î is no longer a question when my happiness rather than Godís holiness is the main issue. My concern is that Joel Osteen is simply the latest in a long line of self-help evangelists who appeal to the native American obsession with pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps. Salvation is not a matter of divine rescue from the judgment that is coming on the world, but a matter of self-improvement in order to have your best life now.

Horton’s collection of essays on Joel Osteen’s ministry is here and Tim Challies provides this critical review of Osteen’s new book.