Woman With Child Opens Fire in Joel Osteen’s Houston Megachurch

A woman walked into celebrity pastor Joel Osteen’s megachurch in Houston, Texas, with a 5-year-old boy and a rifle on Sunday and shot at churchgoers. Two off-duty police officers returned fire, killing the woman and injuring the boy and a 57-year-old man in the process.

The injured man is stable and receiving treatment, but the boy is in critical condition at a children’s hospital.

It is unknown which officer is responsible for shooting the boy and the man, but Houston Police Chief Troy Finner told reporters, “That female, that suspect, put that baby in danger. I’m going to put that blame on her.”

The identities of the woman and the boy have not been given, and the relationship between the two is unknown.

Bomb? The woman shooter claimed to have a bomb, and police reported that “she was also spraying some type of substance on the ground.”

A bomb squad searched her vehicle, backpack and the church, but no explosives were found.

Megachurch: The incident happened around 2 p.m. just as a Spanish-language service was about to begin at the Lakewood Church. About 45,000 people regularly attend services there each week, making it the third-largest megachurch in the United States.

Joel Osteen, the church’s owner and a prominent evangelical Christian pastor and televangelist, told the press, “We don’t understand why all these things happened, but we know God’s in control.”

Why shootings? If God is in control, why does He allow attacks like this to occur, even harming children? Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry explained in “The Real Solution to Mass Shootings and Violence”:

Many people don’t know it, but America’s problem with gun violence and crime was prophesied to occur in our day. …

There is cause and effect. There is a cause for every problem. The cause of our violent and bloody crimes is that as a society we have rejected God’s law!