Outside of being a typical predatory mega church pastor? It's largely due to hurricane Harvey in 2017. The thing you have to keep in mind is that the Houston area is built for storms to come in and then go about their way. When Harvey eventually made its way to the Houston area, it got there....and then just kinda sat there.

Houston isn't built for long periods of heavy rainfall. It's built for heat with short bursts of wind and rain (like most hurricanes). Harvey just sat there dumping massive amounts of rain onto a metro area that was just straight up not designed to be able to handle it.

So when people's homes started flooding, they needed places to go. Not everywhere in the Houston area was affected the same (the east side of town got it way worse than the west side). Olsteen's church is on the west side and the building is MASSIVE. It can easily help shelter a shitload of people who needed to get out of their flooding homes and stay somewhere dry until the rain past/water subsided. One of the local furniture chains, Gallery Furniture, opened it's stores to anyone who needed a place to stay.

So people started wondering why this massive "church" wasn't opening it's doors to people in need. Initially, they said that the area around the church was completely flooded so they didn't want to tell people they could go there and risk their safety. Unfortunately, people have cell phones and a shitload of people started uploading videos and pictures of the entire area around the church being basically bone dry.

So it took, essentially, a public shaming for them to finally let people stay there while the storm passed. And that fucker then proceeded to act like he was doing everyone a massive favor and that he was doing everything out of the goodness of his heart.

Additionally, he has the second most punchable face in Texas. If Ted Cruz was not here, he would have the most punchable face.

So yeah, as someone who was here during Harvey: fuck Joel Olsteen.