Lakewood Church, the Houston flood, and the church's communication failure

The hosts revisit the previous week's topic: during major Houston flooding, Lakewood Church, Joel Osteen's megachurch meeting in the old Houston Rockets arena, drew outrage for not publicly opening its doors. They agree the world holds Christians to a high standard of visible compassion and that this is a fair liability to carry; the church's real failure was communication, days of silence while people filled in the blanks. A host illustrates with a corporate example, the church-software company Planning Center's radically transparent outage emails, and the rule that if you do not tell people what is going on, they just think you are failing. They allow grace for whatever Lakewood was actually doing behind the scenes, note a satirical Babylon Bee story about Osteen handing out books from a yacht that Snopes debunked, and close on the personal lesson: give context before people assume the worst.