Networking Opportunity: You Go to Lakewood with Me

I moved to Houston, Texas six and a half years ago and allegedly Joel Osteen's church – Lakewood – is here. I've mostly taken this as granted. I used to work next to the defunct arena that allegedly houses the megachurch. One time I saw a bunch of cops go inside the church from my office window and then later I saw on the news that they'd found a bunch of money in the walls there. That was a fun experience that I enjoyed.

In general, I hear all the things you'd expect to hear about the prosperity gospel hub: It's not real Christianity, it's bombastic, it's full of rich people. The thing is though, everything I've heard about Lakewood isn't even second hand information, it's entirely conjecture. I haven't met a single person who has been inside that building, or even knows someone who has. I've never heard of any real person attending a service. I'm kind of starting to think people are making the whole Lakewood thing up.

You might be thinking: "Maggie, you just don't talk to the right people." And maybe! I avoid people who work exclusively in real estate and that's who imagine as Joel Osteen's demographic. But I work in the legal field, downtown, with a bunch of Republicans; you'd think I'd meet at least one person morally bankrupt enough to go to a Rave for the Lord every week.

Anyway I don't like this gap in my knowledge, and it's been bugging me so much that I've started to need first hand information about this place before I believe any more hearsay about it. This leads me to my proposition:

You go to Lakewood with me on a Sunday, just to see.

I just need like one or two people, probably no more than that, to go and see what the deal is and whether it's really weekly thing that people do. You could think of it as an anthropological trip to see loan shark franchise owners in their native habitat. Or, if you're more enterprising, you could see it as a networking event full of C-suite whales who can help grow your B2B or B2C business. Or maybe we go and it's actually spiritually transformative and we're all moved and changed by the experience! Literally I think the worst case scenario is we find out it's exactly the tax evasion scheme we think it is and get stuck in the weird underground parking garage.

Anyone reading this knows how to get ahold of me, just let me know if you're down. We can pre-game if the service is late enough I don't even care.

Thanks in advance for your consideration.

Media Roundup 1/12/2025 – First one! Y'all seem to like my recs, so I'm gonna share:

I was sick this week and watched a lot of movies. Babygirl was perfect. The new Keke Palmer movie "One of Them Days" was awesome. I also loved the movies Flow, Conclave, and The Outrun. I watched Maria and Blitz, which were boring. I also watched Emilia Perez, which is one of the worst movies I've seen in my whole life but you can probably game-ify watching it if you're bored.

May and I watched the behind-the-scenes featurette that Mubi released for The Substance. Any fans of The Substance should watch the BTS.

I finally listened to the new MICHELLE album, which was amazing. I tried the new Magdalena Bay album again but I just can't vibe with the vocals right now. I listened to a lot of Koko Taylor, as I've been doing since 2019.

I also finished reading the last book of Earthsea this week, so obviously that made my week really worthwhile too.