TIME Magazine: "Does God Want You to be Rich?"

"Most unnerving for Osteen's [Joel, megachurch minister of Lakewood in Houston] critics is the suspicion that they are fighting not just one idiocyncratic misreading of the gospel but something more daunting: the latest lurch in Protestantism's ongoing descent into full-blown American materialism. After the eclipse of Calvinist Puritanism, whose respect for money was counterbalanced by a horror of worldliness, much of Protestantism quietly adopted the idea that 'you don't have to give up the American Dream. You just see it as a sign of God's blessing,' says Edith Blumhofer, director of Wheaton College's Center for the Study of American Evangelicals. Indeed, a last-gasp resistance to this embrace of wealth and comfort can be observed in the current evangelical brawl over whether comfortable megachurches (like Osteen's and Warren's) with pumped-up day-care centers and high-tech amenities represent a slide from glorifying an all-powerful God to asking what custom color you would prefer he paint your pews. 'The tragedy is that Christianity has become a yes-man for the culture,' says Boston University's Prothero." (Sept. 18, 2006, pp. 55-56)

This is a great cover-story in TIME, well worth reading. John read it to me this morning. It focuses on megachurches, an interest of mine, especially in my book "Left Behind in a Megachurch World." See Ruth Tucker's Books at www.ruthtucker.net.