![]() ![]() My biggest hobby is hanging out with my family and kids. I like sports, and I enjoy playing basketball and lifting weights. What do you like doing besides being at church? I am still focused at the church and give it my best every week. I never did this for money, never dreamed I would make those kinds of funds, but I don't do anything different now than what I did eight years ago when I started. I think anybody can let money get in the way, whether you have $1,000 or a $100 million. ĭoes personal monetary wealth get in the way of your duties as a pastor? I feel like I shouldn't tell just because I told them I wouldn't. No, with my publisher, I can't tell, but it has been published if you want to look. How much have you made from your books? Have you said what you've made from that? It's been printed all over so I don't feel like I am hiding anything. I don't mind saying, you know, that I don't take a salary from the church, and God has blessed me with more money than I could imagine from my books. So I feel like sometimes I have to go overboard to make mine available. ![]() I try to be open because people are skeptical of ministers, and especially TV preachers, and they've seen so many of them go the wrong way. Do you think your wealth should be anybody else's business? You've been questioned repeatedly about wealth. You know, make it for the everyday person. I don't want to say it's a weird thing, I shouldn't put it that way, but it's an unusual thing that for some reason people that don't normally go to church, I think I have a way-not just me-but of making things not too-and I don't mean this wrong-but not too religious. I hope we can just penetrate more countries and, you know, bring more hope to people. Yesterday, I probably met people from a dozen different countries, it goes all over the world through television, so it's a different day with the media and the way the satellites and the cable take it all over the world. We are not out there doing something so we can make money. I think as we do things, it's all ministry oriented. Maybe I am not up to speed on this much, coming from the other side, the ministry side. I love the fact that we have people that do their taxes every year, give kids back-to-school backpacks, such a wide variety of things.Īs churches get bigger, offer more services, do you foresee it being a challenge to maintain tax exemption status for "religious activities" or are you already seeing that? We just have a variety of things we can offer people. The benefits are when you have that many resources you can have a great staff, you can have great music and great programs. The challenge is to always make it feel personal, or personable, or whatever the word is, and not feel like you are coming into a big area with 20,000 people, where it's like, "I didn't go to church today, I went to a basketball game." What are the main challenges and benefits of a church your size? Will there be churches of 100,000, or will we be meeting in big stadiums? I can't fathom that now, but I don't know. I don't know where we will be in 30 years. When I was growing up, a church of 1,000 was a big deal, but you know what, it's just a different day today. Hopefully we will continue to grow and help more people. ![]() How do you envision the church in the next 30 years? We are here in the South, but I don't know. With the second largest megachurch in the country across town from you, Edwin Young's Second Baptist Church, why is Houston such a draw? Sometimes we get criticized, "Joel, why did you want to build a church like this?" But we never set out to have a big church, we just never wanted to turn people away Maybe it's just where we are in America today, and it's just an outgrowth of 30 years of people being faithful to their faith. It was just, over the years it continued to grow. My dad had a church of 90 people when I was born. ![]() What do you think has driven the growth of megachurches in the past 30 years? ![]()
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