Joel Osteen's Lakewood Church got $4.4 million in federal PPP loans

Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church is among the large local congregations that received multi-million dollar loans as part of the federal government’s COVID-19 stimulus package.

Lakewood received a $4.4 million loan through the Paycheck Protection Program, a part of the federal CARES Act that provided loans to pay employee wages or for other basic operational costs such as utilities.

The program marked the first time federal lawmakers allowed for direct financial assistance to houses of worship.

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Early this summer, as the program was accepting its first round of applicants, Lakewood officials said that they had not applied for a loan. And the church was not included on the list of recipients released by the Small Business Administration a short time after.

The SBA later reopened the program, and its most recent data shows that Lakewood’s loan was approved in mid-July.

Church officials could not be reached for comment Monday afternoon.

More than 1,000 religious groups in Texas received hundreds of millions of dollars to retain a combined 59,000 jobs, the Chronicle reported in July.

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Other large religious groups — including the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston, First Baptist Church of Houston and St. Mark Lutheran Church — also received loans through the program.

Some religious leaders opposed the program out of fears that it would create a financial tie between the government and churches and thus weaken separation of church and state.

“You’re talking about a significant number of churches that were assisted by the government,” William Vanderbloemen, the head of a Houston-based church consultancy group, said in July. “That’s just unprecedented.”