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Brian McLaren’s two most important books -- A New Kind of Christian and the recent A Generous Orthodoxy – both open by raising the specter of an evangelical pastor leaving the ministry or the church altogether. The fictional lead character in New Kind is poised to abandon his ministry until a wise new friend initiates him into the ways of postmodern Christianity, rehabilitating his ministry and life. Orthodoxy reaches out to the disaffected in first-person plural: "So many of us have come close to withdrawing from the Christian community. It’s not because of Jesus and his good news, but because of frustrations with religious politics, dubious theological propositions, difficulties in interpreting passages of the Bible that seem barbaric, or embarrassments from church history." Something has to change, or those on the ledge may go ahead and jump.

McLaren wants to make space for someone to be "postconservative." According to the subtitle of A Generous Orthodoxy, he himself is a "missional + evangelical + post/protestant + liberal/conservative + mystical/poetic +biblical + charismatic/contemplative + fundamentalist/calvinist + anabaptist/anglican + methodist + catholic + green + incarnational + depressed-yet-hopeful + emergent + unfinished CHRISTIAN."

To understand McLaren, one must understand the sort of church from which he comes. It is nondenominational yet conservative Reformed in doctrine, holding to God’s eternal election of some to blessedness and some to perdition. It is proud of its opposition to modern liberalism and its defense of the five "fundamentals" -- the virgin birth, biblical inerrancy, substitutionary atonement, and the bodily resurrection and imminent return of Jesus. It is often (but not always) mobilized politically in support of the Religious Right and culturally in opposition to such movements as feminism, environmentalism and the liberalization of sexual mores.

Emerging from such a background, McLaren is urging his readers to embrace a more "generous orthodoxy." What exactly does he mean by "generous"? He seeks to draw on resources from across the spectrum of Christian history and experience. An early chapter speaks of the "seven Jesuses" McLaren has known, beginning with the two most familiar to him: the conservative Protestant Jesus and the Pentecostal Jesus. He has also learned from the Eastern Orthodox Jesus (culled from Tolstoy and Dostoevsky), the Roman Catholic Jesus (from Flannery O’Connor and Thomas Merton), the Anabaptist Jesus (with his way of nonviolence), the Jesus of the Oppressed (from liberation theologians) and, most strikingly, the liberal Protestant Jesus.

Many conservative evangelicals would have a hard time calling any of these five Jesuses anything other than heretical, especially the last. But McLaren has great sympathy for liberal Protestants. He jokes that "if you scratch a liberal, you’ll find an alienated fundamentalist underneath."

He knows something about being an alienated fundamentalist. As he writes, "I am far harder on conservative Protestant Christians who share this heritage than I am on anyone else." He hopes followers of each of these Jesuses will find themselves able to work with the Emergent network, though he seems to have the most hope for the ones who don’t follow the "conservative evangelical" Jesus.

We can see McLaren’s generosity also in his refusal to make a judgment about non-Christians’ eternal destiny. He thinks the incarnation suggests an affirmation by God of human culture generally -- including other religions, to a degree. Jesus’ own approach to those who were different from him was to "threaten them with inclusion," to urge them to accept their acceptance (Tillich couldn’t have said it any better). A religion might best be judged by the "benefits it brings to its nonadherents."

In fact, all religions face a common threat in the "McDonaldization and Wal-Martization of the world" and the weapons of mass destruction not in Arab countries but "down the road from my home in Washington, D.C."

McLaren’s politics are another dramatic departure from conservativism-as-usual: "‘The Lord is my shepherd’ becomes ‘the Lord is my president,’ ready to sacrifice 10,000 lives of noncitizens elsewhere for the safety of U.S. citizens here . . . it sickens me," he says.

McLaren skewers the Sunday school version of faith from which he comes as only one who grew up in the fold can: "Christians are nice people who know the truth and do good. Non-Christians are bad people who don’t. Therefore we need to avoid non-Christians or convert them as fast as possible or try to pass laws to keep them under control and protect ourselves from them -- until we can escape them forever in heaven."

McLaren is also challenging a conservative staple in his philosophical commitment to nonfoundationalism. The Enlightenment confidence in our ability to appeal to universal "reason" as an arbiter in debate has crumbled. Post-moderns have realized that there is no one thing called "reason," that rationality is always embedded in specific stories and practices. Therefore the conservative defense of "absolute truth" in the culture wars is built on a cracked foundation. There are no "absolute" truths that float above the cultural fray, discernible apart from engagement in specific practices.

This stance is what finally allows McLaren to be so generous toward fellow Christians, non-Christians and liberals generally. Where they are right, they are fellow pilgrim seekers after truth. Where wrong, we can be sympathetic, since their efforts to discern truth are limited by their own time, place and background -- as, inevitably, ours are too.

So far McLaren sounds as "generous" as any good liberal. So what makes him "orthodox"? Primarily it is his passion for Jesus. He celebrates the seven different approaches to Jesus not simply because they display a "diversity" of views about which he seeks to be "open-minded," but rather because they each show facets of Jesus viewed from different angles. McLaren is not trying to convince anyone to do anything other than follow Jesus.

On doctrinal matters McLaren professes allegiance to the historic faith presented in the Apostles’ and Nicene creeds. His church, unlike the vast majority of non-denominational and evangelical parishes, celebrates the Eucharist weekly. He displays an ongoing love of the scriptures, explored not as an infallible fact book but as a richly multilayered narrative of God’s ongoing work on Israel and the church, with Jesus at its center. His most-often quoted authority on the historic faith is C. K. Chesterton; on scripture it is such postliberal interpreters as Walter Brueggemann and N. T, Wright. Theologians such as Nancy Murphy and Stanley Hauerwas have been invited to speak at Emergent conventions. Postliberals and post-conservatives may have broken off from different branches of the tree of Christendom, but they now seem to be grafting into the same trunk theologically.

McLaren is most clearly "orthodox" in his embrace of evangelicalism’s traditional love of missions. He cites missiologists Lesslie Newbigin and Vincent Donovan in claiming that missiology is misunderstood as a subfield in Christian theology. On the contrary, theology is a subfield in the greater discipline and practice of Christian missions. Such a missional focus consists not only in preaching to non-Christians with hope of conversion; it also includes work for justice in cooperation with all-comers.

Perhaps most tellingly, mission involves "passion." McLaren elaborates: "When evangelicals sing, they sing. When evangelicals pray, they pray. When evangelicals preach, they preach. When evangelicals decide something is worth doing, they do it. They don’t tend to establish committees to study the feasibility of doing it. They don’t ask permission from the bureaucracy to do it. They don’t get a degree that qualifies them to do it. They just do it -- and with passion." Elsewhere he writes that as enthusiastic as he is about orthodox understandings of the Trinity, these understandings are useless without trinitarianly shaped love of neighbor. Orthodoxy without orthopraxy is St. Paul’s "noisy gong or clanging cymbal."

McLaren’s work succeeds finally because of its tone. He offers not another treatise about why everyone else is wrong but his group is right; he insists regularly that he must be as blind to his own vices and oversight as those he criticizes. He offers a vision of Christianity in which no one has to lose. And that has deep appeal across the theological spectrum.

Yet it also has its possible problems, one of which is a weakness for kitsch. His book’s subtitle shows this, as does an initial chapter titled "for mature audiences only," which asks the reader, Web site-like, to check a box if she or he agrees to the terms laid out. At one point McLaren compares the variety of faithful Christian traditions to the variety of ethnic foods one might eat -- shouldn’t we enjoy all of them? One worries that the embrace of ancient Christian thought and practice could turn out to be no more deeply rooted than a consumerist choice between options at the food court.

McLaren’s work and Emergent’s conferences display an unflinching embrace of technology and cultural relevancy, like so many nerds who have only recently discovered they can be cool. Yet even here McLaren disarms with winsome honesty. He reveals that he has never attended seminary (though he now regularly is an adjunct professor at several), but in the common evangelical practice was chosen by a house church as its preacher. "I am a confessed amateur," he says. He concedes that he could at least have "footnoted reputable scholars who make the same generalizations I do," but, perhaps mercifully, he has spared us. This academically amateur status has driven McLaren and Emergent to look for intellectual resources where they can find them.

In the best evangelical tradition, I can offer personal testimony as a witness to the significance of McLaren’s project. When I was in high school I encountered a youth pastor at a non-denominational church who was intellectually curious and intellectually rigorous, politically engaged, doctrinally orthodox, yet not rigidly so. That experience allowed me, later on, to learn from an even wider range of Christian thinkers, past and present. McLaren’s vision is that each of us -- and not only those of us with "post" attached to our name -- will learn something of Jesus from one another that we would otherwise have missed.

The Westport neighborhood of midtown Kansas City, Missouri, is a mix of avant-garde youth and aging hippies. If bumper stickers are any indication, political views range from the muscular left ("Veterans for Kerry") to the forthrightly left ("Peace is patriotic") to the crudely left ("Dump the son of a Hush?"). The first man I passed on the street had his shirt off and displayed pierced nipples. No doubt he was on his way to one of the area’s many wine bars or tattoo parlors.

This neighborhood is also home to a thriving church called Jacob’s Well, which attracts about 1,000 people each week to its various services. The church is led by Tm Keel, who, along with author Brian McLaren, is a founder of the Emergent movement. I went to JW hoping that it could help me understand a phenomenon that remains elusive -- the Emergent church.

The innovative JW is housed, ironically, in a classic church building that Presbyterians erected in 1930. The building is the envy of the numerous congregations in the neighborhood, including two that have exchanged their denominational labels for more jazzy names and logos -- one Southern Baptist (now River City Church) and one Evangelical Covenant (now City Church).

The classical space and biblically resonant name suit JW just fine, and they also say something about the Emergent movement. If yesteryear’s evangelical church was the equivalent of a starter castle in the exurbs, JW is more akin to a rehabilitated loft in a gentrifying city. ‘Whereas evangelical churches (and increasing numbers of mainline ones) seek to attract young people by designing spaces stripped of Christian symbols or tradition, JW people seem to like the traditional feel of the sanctuary, with its dark wood, stained glass and high ceilings. While other churches would be thrilled by the numerical growth -- 1,000 attenders after seven years of existence -- JW worries that the growth means it may not be intimate enough to nurture community and friendship. A recent sermon on stewardship insisted, apparently in all seriousness, that the church didn’t need any more money or volunteers, so giving of time or money should come only out of genuine gratitude.

In short, JW is a rebuke to those churches that, in imitation of cutting-edge 1970s evangelicalism, deliberately strip themselves of historical symbols, creeds and practices in an effort to grow. JW is succeeding by moving in precisely the opposite direction.

JW changed very little about the sanctuary when it bought the building in 2003 (with cash) after renting the space for four years. It moved the altar table out from the wall, removed choir pews to make room for a band, and took down the pulpit (Keel preaches at eye level). Other parts of the building were changed more dramatically. Walls were splashed with trendy purple or deep blue paint, and a parlor was turned into a prayer room with floor pillows and scented candles. A large Sunday school classroom was turned into a coffee bar and recreation room -- now mostly for staff. since the congregation has long since outgrown it.

Emblazoned on that rec room wall is a quote from Stanley Hauerwas: "The work of Jesus was not a new set of ideals or principles for reforming or even revolutionizing society, but the establishment of a new community, a people that embodied forgiveness, sharing and self-sacrificing love in its rituals and discipline. In that sense, the visible church is not to be the bearer of Christ’s message, but to be the message." How many churches have a quote from Hauerwas on a wall?

The opening prayer on the Sunday I visited was written by Walter Brueggemann. The interest of Emergent churches in people like Hauerwas, Brueggemann, Miroslav VoIf, Nancey Murphy and N. T. Wright indicates that while members may be sons and daughters of evangelicals or fundamentalists, they take their theological cues from mainline theologians.

Keel is drawn to theologians who articulate a post-Christendom perspective and who argue that Christians are most faithful when they are not seeking cultural or political power. Keel carries no weapons in the culture war, and he figures that his people, hardly stereotypical evangelicals, vote Democratic or Green as often as Republican. Recognizing that we live in a post-Christendom world means, for Keel, never assuming that his listeners have a basic knowledge of Christian thought, language or practice. He cites the late British missiologist Lesslie Newbigin, one of the first to describe the West as a new mission field: "How can this strange story of God made man, of a crucified savior, of resurrection and new creation become credible?. . . I know of only one clue to the answering of that question, only one real hermeneutic of the gospel: congregations that believe it."

Sunday worship at JW reveals some of what Emergent means by calling itself postevangelical. The music is led, conventionally enough, by a rock band that plays loudly enough to shake the wooden pews. But this is not happyclappy "Jesus is my boyfriend" music. It’s much more edgy, closer to grunge than to praise-chorus music. (Says Keel: "Grunge is what happens when the children of divorce get guitars.") The lyrics, many written by worship minister Mike Crawford, lift up pain as well as praise: "Jesus full of grace, / the humble you adore. / This world’s a hungry place, / with no justice for the poor. / Jesus full of peace, / yet our hearts so full of war. / We take our pruning hooks / we beat them into swords."

The songs are new, and the words are flashed up on a plasma screen by PowerPoint, but the language is as old as scripture. Most songs, in fact, are paraphrases of scripture. And as loud as the music is, the singing is louder. Andy Crouch of Christianity Today, who is critical of much of the Emergent movement, praises JW as "the best singing white church I’ve ever been to." JW’s effort to make music participatory rather than performance-based struck a chord with Crouch, who also signaled his awareness that JW is rooted in its own particular neighborhood and could not be easily replicated elsewhere: "It made me want to move to Kansas City. Really."

Keel begins his sermon after the introductory music and prayer end. Few announcements or even greetings clutter the service. He offers questions he expects the congregation to answer. "I’m not just trying to be engaging," he says. "I really want to know what everyone else thinks." Regulars, who often mention Keel’s preaching as a major reason for their attendance, remember times when he has taken his sermon in a different direction because of the feedback he’s getting.

Keel’s expository style reflects his evangelical heritage and his training at conservative Denver Seminary. He takes his listeners through an odd corner of 1 Samuel 4 in which the Israelites respond to defeat at the hands of the Philistines by fetching the Ark to ensure victory -- after which they are defeated again, with far worse casualties. "Some passage, eh?" he jokes.

Keel observes that Israel treated the Ark as a totem, a magic object that would force God to give them success.

"It reminds me of meaningless God-talk," he says to appreciative nods. "This is my pet peeve -- just ‘Godding’ evexything to pretend you have control when you don’t." He draws a lesson for his congregation: "We can’t assume that because God has blessed what we’ve done in the past here at Jacob’s Well that he will again. We serve a living God, and are hardly the same as we were a year or two ago.

This embrace of change worries Emergent’s critics, who think that the movement’s style is just one more churchly fad. Keel worries about Emergent being a fad too, and he criticizes the recurrent search for techniques of church growth, well aware that churches that have followed other trends -- whether the Alpha course or Purpose-Driven Life studies -- are likely to try out aspects of the Emergent movement. He assails the notion that (as he wrote in an essay in The Relevant Church) "if only we can (re) discover x (fill-in-the-blank: prayer, fasting, worship, community, drama, service) and implement it, then the Church will have y (fill-in-the-blank: impact, relevance, meaning, validity, profile, etc.)." Many of Emergent’s leaders, including Keel, got their start in the Willow Creek -- inspired Leadership Network, which they found to be a sort of factory geared to church growth rather than anything more authentically communal. Looking for a technique is "much easier, short-term, than living out the life of the gospel in community."

Jacob’s Well reveals the theological and ecclesial fissures not only in evangelicalism, but in Emergent itself. Many in that group sound fed up with the church as a whole and make sport of bashing it. But Keel stresses, "I love the church. . . . Anyone wanting to manifest the kingdom of God proclaimed by Jesus must deal with and through the church, specifically the local church."

God loves not only the church today, but the church through time. Keel makes spiritual retreats to a local Benedictine monastery where he has a spiritual director. JW celebrates communion at every gathering not as an afterthought, but as a response to the word and the climax of worship. Its people take no membership count because they envision something like a monastic rule of life -- attracting fewer members but higher commitment. On its Web site (jacobswellchurch.org), instead of articulating its own statement of faith, JW cites the Apostles’ Creed.

Yet innovation is part of the atmosphere at JW because of its large community of artists and the artistic environment. Keel even talks about JW as an "artistic haven." There are so many musicians in the church that the members of the band behind Mike Crawford change every week. The prayer room doubles as a gallery, which hosts regular art shows and is part of a city program that brings art lovers -- not usually a churchy crowd -- into the professionally lit space. Art photographs adorn JW’s Web site.

"Artists have a nose for propaganda," Keels says, and they often smell it on evangelicals. JW tries to make space for whatever art community members create and then design space or liturgy around it. This fits with Keel’s and JW’s theology of salvation: "What if instead of seeing salvation’s story as one of creation-fall-redemption, we saw it as creation-incarnation-re-creation?" he wonders aloud.

Such exploratory questions about core Christian teachings reflect an Emergent trait that disturbs critics who see the bogeyman of theological liberalism at work. D. A. Carson has launched a book-length attack on the movement, Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church (Zondervan, 2005), and former Emergent leader Mark Driscoll and Christianity Today columnist Charles Colson have also inveighed against it. Their primary criticism is that Emergent is abandoning Christianity’s claim to objective, universal truth.

It’s true that Keel and others in Emergent avoid the language of objective truth. They believe that such language is defined by the categories of the Enlightenment, that there are different ways of reasoning, and that the church must make its claims to truth on a contested field without shouting in advance that others are wrong and it alone is right. Keel deplores the "bounded-set thinking" that such charges evidence -- the urge to define "in" and "out" groups. He characterizes Emergent as pursuing "center-set thinking," in which Jesus is the center of a circle whose edges are fuzzy. "I see so many Christians with so much of their lives not in submission to Christ, and so many non-Christians with so much of their lives in submission to Christ."

Driscoll and others have argued that Emergent churches show little growth through conversion and merely recycle sheep within the fold. Keel responds to this charge by telling me about a Hindu student who began coming to Jacob’s Well for the art and leaving before the service began, but then started staying just for the music, and finally stayed for the whole service. "If most evangelicals follow a pattern of believe-behave-belong, we reverse that pattern and make it belong-behave-believe," said Keel. "We say, ‘Try on these clothes, take up these practices, and see what happens.’"

Some aspects of JW -- its post-Christendom political posture and its postliberal theological tone -- are hardly unique. Even its effort at grunge worship and to be an artistic haven has imitators and precursors elsewhere. Hut Keel says, "I’d hate to think JW could be imitated elsewhere," since, as he sees it, churches need to be "environmentalists" -- to take the temperature of their particular place and serve it accordingly. Nevertheless, students at the three seminaries in the Kansas City area and other people interested in church plants are paying attention to JW (two study groups were visiting the night I attended).

Emergent members are often kidded for their body piercings and tattoos, but such displays simply reflect the demographic of these churches. "Twenty percent of people aged 20 to 50 have a tattoo," Keel reports. He adds that tattoos are usually a marker for some experience of pain. Part of JW’s success is that it doesn’t hide from pain. Keel speaks regularly of his experience of his parents’ divorce, and about the consequences of drug and alcohol abuse and sexual experimentation. He talks about being "naked in the pulpit" (the title of an essay of his). This is not exhibitionism, he insists, but being authentic about one’s brokenness and ongoing need for healing.

Authenticity is a word one hears a lot at JW. Perhaps that (and a weekly Sunday evening service) is why JW has become a haven for a number of pastors, who come to the

Sunday evening or a midweek service. "Pastors often feel they can’t be human with their own churches," Keel laments as he shows me a thank-you card from a minister who said he had been ready to leave the ministry before encountering JW.

Another person who appreciates JW is Susan Cox Johnson, a United Methodist district superintendent in Kansas City. She writes in the denominational publication Circuit Rider of how Broadway UMC had once been the largest church in its conference, largely because of the success of a Sunday school ministry. Under JW’s inspiration she started a coffee house in the Broadway church, whose congregation is now graying.

Cox-Johnson believes that the Emergent movement can help mainline churches reach out by reminding them of their own neglected resources, such as the Methodist emphasis on holy friendship, which these days can be nurtured in coffee shops.

Emergent types are also kidded for their love of "cool" -- their trendy hair and their up-to-the-minute pop-culture references. In this case, the shoe fits. In his sermon Keel made a reference to a movie, Snakes on a Plane, which had yet to open but was getting a lot of buzz on the Internet. He admits on his blog, "I love Apple products so much.. . . My wife has completely given up making photo albums. We take gads of digital pics and then load them onto iPhoto. From there I either import them into iMovie and burn a slide show through iDVD, or I make a slide show right in iPhoto, upload it onto my iDisk, then connect it to my Mac homepage for viewing. . . . If you want a sample of what I’m talking about, click here."

Keel grew up as something of a church mutt, spending time with Methodists, Presbyterians, charismatics and Jesus People. He laments the day that Roanoke Presbyterian folded and sold JW the building. Worshiping with the Presbyterians, he says tenderly, "was like worshiping with our grandmothers."

Perhaps Keel’s positive interaction with mainline churches explains his openness to things catholic and ecumenical. He is not tempted to speak as though Emergent is inventing the wheel, as many of his colleagues do, when it places women in leadership roles or advocates for social justice. Though he has his doubts about whether Emergent can "work" in the structures of a denomination -- he says he was never tempted by the "golden handcuffs" of church-plant funding -- he values interaction with mainline pastors such as Cox Johnson. Emergent as a movement has never sought to be a brand, much less a new denomination, but instead is a friendship network among members of several church bodies.

As one looks at the 20-somethings and 30-somethings involved at JW, it seems as though Gen-Xers are reacting to their parents of the Me generation by rebuilding the structures that their parents tore down, literally moving into a neighborhood and church like the ones in which their grandparents lived and worshiped. In JW’s case, the emphasis is on the importance of the local, of community, of friendship. Keel writes, "I belong to these people, and they belong to me. Together we belong to Jesus. It doesn’t stop there: because we belong to Jesus, we belong to other communities of people who belong to Jesus" -- thus enunciating an ecclesiology that closely reflects John’s Gospel.

JW has been praised for putting into practice the emphasis on community and on the kind of post-Christendom, mission-oriented faith that McLaren, Newbigin and others have written about. The people I talked to at JW had never heard of Emergent or of McLaren. They’re just going to church with their friends, unaware that their congregation is a model for how to be "post" many things (postevangelical, postliberal, postconservative, postmodern) precisely by sinking its roots deeper into the local, the particular and the church catholic.

When she came to church it was a big event. She wore her nicest dress and a grand Sunday hat. But then she wouldn’t appear again for months. Every time I visited her she would assure me that she wasn’t backsliding. "Don’t worry -- when I’m not at church on Sunday I’m watching Joel Osteen on TV"

Then, to curb my disappointment, she said, "You remind me of him. I bet you’ll have a church like his one day."

That would have been quite a change from our 80-member rural congregation. With some 30,000 attending, Osteen’s Lakewood Community Church in Houston has recently purchased the 16,000-seat Compaq Center, formerly used by the NBA’s Houston Rockets, for its new home. Osteen appears before millions more on television. "The smiling preacher, as he is referred to, has also charmed his way into a longtime presence on the New York Times best-seller list with Your Best Life Now: Seven Steps to Living at Your Full Potential (Warner Faith).

Osteen has reason to smile. He has taken the congregation started by his father and turned it into what is reportedly the largest church in the U.S. And he has (as he is quick to tell us) an elegant home, well-adjusted kids and an adoring "partner in ministry." A dozen celebrities from the realms of politics, sports and entertainment praise him on the book jacket.

Like most religious-television and -publishing moguls, Osteen has received scant attention in the mainline church world. And even evangelical commentators have not been complimentary. One has referred to Osteen’s "cotton-candy theology."

Indeed, there’s not much substance here. Your Best Life Now is another entry in the long list of American contributions to the prosperity gospel: just improve your attitude, keep your chin up, and God’s blessings will rain down on you. Russell Conwell said it a century ago, Norman Vincent Peale said it 50 years ago and Bruce Wilkinson said it with The Prayer of Jabez a few years back.

Still, one has to acknowledge that something is working for Osteen, and that it isn’t all quackery. A quick glance at his television audience shows his church to be a model of multiethnic ministry. Osteen doesn’t talk about race much, but his church is full of people of different races. He’s a good storyteller, helped by a caramel drawl and an aw-shucks Texas manner, He’s not only affable but genuinely funny, with humor not infrequently directed at himself. Whereas many televangelists spew

judgment and hate, Osteen seems like someone you’d like to meet, and who’d make you want to go to church and bring a friend.

In some ways Osteen echoes an ancient and venerable Christian tradition that borrows from Aristotle in calling itself "eudaemonistic." That is, Christianity offers the happiest life possible. The church fathers and medieval thinkers who picked up this philosophical tradition did have ample biblical material with which to integrate it. "Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart," the psalmist promises. "Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you," Jesus says. What Christian could fail to agree that our faith claims to offer the fullest life of joy and abundance possible?

Osteen certainly thinks so. He takes aim at all those who are content with "mediocre" lives and who think such negative thoughts as: My marriage never will get better. My finances never will improve. I never will get promoted or be respected at work. I’d better get used to not having friends. My health will never be fully restored. Pain will always be the final word on our lives. That family member never will get right with God.

To such people Osteen says, Friend [few lines go by without him calling the reader this], you have to start believing that good things are coming your way, and they will!"

The secret is to enlarge your vision. Are you satisfied with that little house you’re in? You shouldn’t be. You should want the sort of mansion the Osteens live in (his example). You should expect people to go out of their way to help you -- then they will.

You must also "discover the power of your thoughts and words." If you beat yourself up all the time, if you don’t thAikyourself worthy of divine abundance, God won’t give it. God helps us, to be sure, but we must help ourselves ffrst. You must "let go of the past." Rather than being consumed with bitterness, you have to forgive and move on.

Finally, you must "choose to be happy." You can’t put it off till tomorrow or till that next financial milestone is reached. You should smile a lot, and good things will come your way. You also must work hard, for God won’t bless someone who’s slothful. You have to be a person of excellence. Arrive at work early, leave late, respect your boss, don’t waste time on the job -- then you’ll be promoted and then you’ll be happier.

Osteen imagines an objection: "You may be thinking, ‘this sounds too good to be true, Joel."’ To which he replies: "I know it’s true! I saw the power of our thoughts and words turn an impossible situation in my own family into a modern-day medical miracle." His mother was diagnosed with cancer and given only weeks to live. She overcame the disease by claiming victory over it, firing scripture verses at adversity and thumbing her nose at death. She is still living, decades later.

Osteen describes one occasion of a fairly direct encounter with God. It happened when he was about to run an errand while still wearing his ratty work clothes: "God spoke to me, I mean if God has ever spoken to me, He spoke to me right there! . . . He said, ‘Don’t you dare go in there representing me like that! Don’t you know that I’m the King of kings?" Osteen went home, cleaned up and represented God in a more princely fashion.

As these examples indicate, Osteen’s illustrations are often less than compelling. Naturally, we cannot rule out God’s speaking to us dramatically, but the claim that God took an active interest in Osteen’s weekend attire seems to overreach a bit. Other examples seem even more dubious.

Osteen speaks of remaining positive as a teenager when police would pull him over for speeding around Houston. In several cases they recognized his father’s name and let him off with a warning. Whether his attitude or the privilege of a famous father’s name did the trick, the chief lesson he should have learned was to slow down. He frequently mentions a legal dispute that arose when Lakewood originally moved to purchase the Compaq Center. A lawsuit was brought by an opponent with deep pockets and fancy lawyers that could have prevented the church’s move. But Osteen stayed positive, prayed and won. Never mind that his church had its own deep pockets and fancy lawyers.

Nevertheless Osteen has winning moments throughout his book. He speaks tenderly of his relationship with his dad, of his hesitation to enter the ministry and step into his father’s large shoes, and of overcoming observers’ assumptions that Lakewood would die with its founder. He suggests that we respond to a bad day or discouragement by helping others -- for in giving we receive. One way of developing the sort of attitude God blesses with abundance is by giving money away, for it shows our trust. We have to plant seeds abundantly if we want anything to grow. Addressing a scandal close to Houston’s heart, Osteen notes that the executives at Enron didn’t wake up one morning and decide to bilk investors out of millions of dollars. Small lies accumulated until big ones became acceptable. Christian virtue ethicists would agree and so would their medieval forebears.

Similar examples of good advice appear frequently in the book, One doesn’t doubt that his counsel helps people to have better marriages, careers, families and lives. Salespeople, whom Osteen often addresses, will indeed perform better with more upbeat, self-confident attitudes. These claims are true, as far as they go. But that doesn’t make them Christian.

It’s striking how unnecessary God is to Osteen’s project. People can "enlarge their vision" and "choose to be happy" with nary a thought of God. "Understand this: God will help you, but you cast the deciding vote." We have to be positive -- only then will God bless us. Of course, since being positive itself gives those rewards, it’s unclear what Cod has to do in the scenario. Even when Osteen speaks of the seemingly most supernatural of events -- the healing of his mother’s cancer -- the accent is on her attitude rather than on divine activity.

Osteen’s version of the gospel is full of "ifs." If we enlarge our vision, if we choose to be happy, if we think thoughts and speak words of victory and blessing, if we give of ourselves abundantly -- then God will bless us with everything we want. The conditional nature of these sentences is telling. This is not a gospel of grace, in which God acts in spite of our lack of faithfulness to redirect our wants. Instead this is a gospel of reward in which God does nothing until we get our act together. In traditional Christian theology, Protestant and Catholic alike, we can do nothing in and of ourselves to merit God’s favor. Rather, God comes to us in Christ when we are without merit, without ability to please God and without reason to think we can be saved or helped. Such a view of grace is surely part of the grumpy theology Osteen seeks to upend -- but it is central to Christianity.

It is striking how closely Osteen identifies wealth with divine blessing, to the point where he risks placing a Christian overlay on a pagan gospel of acquisition. In scripture, wealth is a much more mixed blessing, to say the least. It is a source of "peril and obligation," to quote biblical scholar Sondra Wheeler. For the prophets and for Jesus, especially in his Beatitudes, it is the poor who are truly blessed by God. The rich will be measured by standards of justice that demand care for the widowed and orphaned rather than for the ballooning of their own bank accounts. Not a few saints in the history of the church have heard Jesus’ words as an invitation to divest themselves entirely of their wealth.

Osteen’s book abounds with examples of trivial everyday concerns. Can’t get a green light? Pray with faith, and that light will change. Can’t find a parking place? Claim God’s victory, and see divine favor as someone pulls out and leaves you a space in the front row. Worried that you haven’t found the perfect date, someone like Osteen’s wife (who is, by the way, praying for us as we read her husband’s book, as Osteen promises in an epilogue)? You’ve guessed the answer by now: pray, stay positive, and God will build up the remarkable list of coincidences to have you meet that special person. Osteen knows enough to say this doesn’t always happen. We can’t treat God "like an ATM machine." But the qualification doesn’t mean much in view of Osteen’s repeated references to claiming God’s promises for your parking and dating needs.

This theology is politically quiescent, accommodating itself perfectly to an imperial age. That is, it matters not what the government is doing, or what your company does as you work for promotion within it, or where you are driving while praying for green lights. The nature of our desires, and our potential self-deception about them, gets very little attention from Osteen. He assumes the standard set of American middle-class desires for a house, career, spouse, kids, etc. But what if I want a mistress? Or the cruel death of my enemies? What if it’s the nature of my desires, or my vision of the abundant life, that is the problem?

If God matters little for this worldview, Jesus matters even less. "If you’re always thinking positive, happy, joyful thoughts, you’re going to be a positive, happy, joyful person, and will attract other happy, upbeat, positive people." If only Jesus could have heard Osteen’s message -- things might have turned out much better! His preaching could have been brightened up considerably. And his friends wouldn’t have been the sorry bunch of losers he consistently attracted.

Osteen is an easy theological target. He merits attention mostly as an unreflective exemplar of temptations all ministers face -- to translate the charged political and theological language of the scriptures into a vague religiosity, or into more easily digestible categories of self-help and self-improvement. His unending smile also reminds us of the ministerial temptation of relying on personal charisma, an upbeat attitude or an eagerness to please rather than the more difficult claims of scripture.

Osteen is absolutely right in saying the gospel promises our "best life now." He’s just mistaken on what the form of that life is. Jesus, God’s best life lived among us, is the shape of our best life. That shape includes a cross and a totally unexpected triumph in the form of the resurrection. It offers hope rather than mere optimism, and a church gathered in worship to remind each other that God’s promises will come true. In the meantime, those who weep now are truly blessed, for they see the incongruity between the promised kingdom and things as they stand.

This version of the gospel shows the most ironic failure of Osteen’s promises of prosperity -- they can’t really lift the luggage psychologically. They may work to make midlevel managers mildly more successful, but in the face of genuine desolation -- say, cancer that doesn’t respond to prayer and a positive attitude -- they fall to dust.

I wonder then what my parishioner saw in Osteen, and what help he gave her. Her husband had died decades earlier following an accident. He was severely burned and lost both arms, and he died before they could have children. She works in a fairly menial service job, and when not working mostly grumbles about coworkers and the manners of kids these days. Perhaps the dreariness of her life is alleviated somewhat by the smiling preacher, without the difficulty of encountering people in pews around her who would give her more to grumble about. The promises of unabated wealth and illustrations of lawsuits over sports stadiums are so disconnected from her life that they don’t spoil the show. A light shines in her small house for that short hour, and Osteen’s affability makes it possible.

Osteen is fine as one to "rejoice with those who rejoice," but not as one to "weep with those who weep" (Rom. 12:15). He sounds like the writer of Proverbs in some of his more chipper moments, but not at all like the somber writers of Ecclesiastes or Job, or the psalmists who hit both notes. Without both heights and depths, the gospel offered by the smiling preacher on the screen is simply the same platitude over and over. What the church can offer instead is friendship with others in Christ, the chance to offer service to others, broken bread and wine poured out around a table, the grace to see in Jesus the promise of restored relationship and a healed creation. Something more like that would be my parishioner’s "best life now."