I’ll try. But this Internet Monk post on Joel Osteen’s inaugural sermon was too good to pass up. This was one of the big religion stories last week, so we’re justified in coming back to it as new comments pop up.

Further, it gives the Catholic readership of this blog some context. Religious life in the United States doesn’t exist in a vacuum, obviously. Religious expression and practice is influenced by the culture, pop and otherwise. In some areas of the country, Catholics are bleeding members to these kind of full-service ministries. Catholics read Osteen, Warren and Joyce Meyers, I would guess in greater numbers than they do Catholic authors.

I mean seriously. Even with all the recent heavy sales do you really think that more Catholics are reading Ratzinger than they are Osteen and Warren? I don’t. I would bet that if you surveyed an average parish’s reading habits, a greater percentage of them would have read one of those authors cited above than would have read a Ratzinger, Nouwen or Merton book (the perpetual bestsellers).

Plus, Catholics are (as we’ve seen in our comments boxes) constantly tempted to imitate these kinds of churches, both in substance and style. Should we? One favorite commentor and former blogger (he may come forward if he wishes, but I’ll keep his anonymity for now) wrote me last year and said that his Catholic parish is probably more like a "megachurch" than any other Catholic church in his area – full service ministries, small groups, energetic liturgies, etc. Nevertheless, he said, a new Protestant megachurch was still leeching members – I think he said three (if not four) couples involved in leadership in the parish had left for this Protestant megachurch in the month before he’d written me. Food for thought.

Anyway, here’s the IM’s closing shot (and remember, he’s Protestant himself!)

I have no doubt that Joel Osteen is a Christian, but as a pastor, as a minister of the Gospel, as a preacher of Jesus Christ and salvation by grace through faith, he is a zero. Non-existent. Invisible.

And his first sermon in the era of Lakewood’s dominance of evangelicalism shows what he is: a motivational speaker with a 15 second prayer at the end of the talk.