Lakewood Church pastor Joel Osteen returned to the podium to face his congregation on Sept. 3, Sunday, after being criticized for not opening his church to help evacuees of the recent Hurricane Harvey. He told the congregation to not have the victim mentality in the middle of this crisis.
According to The Huffington Post, the known mega church pastor has been scrutinized for not welcoming evacuees in his church's building, which can hold up to 17,000 people. His first reason was that the city of Houston did not ask him to open it for the said purpose.
However, he gave another reason, saying that the church building might be flooded and it would not be safe for hurricane victims to stay in there. Osteen was firm enough to stand by this reason despite a video that was posted by TMZ that showed his church building was free from flood and was perfectly safe for evacuees to take shelter in.
Eventually, the church became available for evacuees on Sept. 3 with a tweet from Osteen that said their doors are always open. The pastor from Texas said that he would like to clear things about the misinformation that the media has been feeding the masses.
He said that a storm back in 2001 flooded their building and he just did not want the same thing to happen again, as it would also affect a lot of people they intended to rescue. Osteen said they needed to wait for a couple more days to make sure that the church building would be safe enough to accept evacuees, otherwise, they did not want to risk possibly injuring people.
The 54-year-old preacher continued to explain that they started welcoming people inside their church once when they thought that it was safe to do so.
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