Dodie Osteen, the co-founder of Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas, and the mother of the church’s current leader, Joel Osteen, has died greater than 4 many years after she said she was miraculously healed from metastatic liver cancer, although doctors gave her weeks to live in 1981. She was 91.
Joel Osteen announced his mother’s passing on his social media on Wednesday night, saying she died “peacefully at her home” of “natural causes.”
“It is with a heavy heart that Victoria and I, together with our family, announce the passing of our cherished mother and grandmother, Dolores’ Dodie’ Osteen. She was the beloved matriarch of Lakewood Church, an inspiration to hundreds of thousands of individuals all over the world, and a faithful servant of God,” he wrote. “Known as ‘Mama Dodie’ to your entire Lakewood family, together, we have a good time her amazing life and lasting legacy.”
Christian leaders have shared on social media how the Lakewood Church matriarch’s testimony of healing inspired their faith.
“Dodie Osteen has gone home to be with the Lord. She has been an inspiration to me within the realm of standing to your healing,” global prayer movement leader Jennifer LeClaire of Jennifer LeClaire Ministries wrote in a statement on Facebook Thursday.
“Decades ago she battled terminal cancer once they gave her just weeks to live. She cried out to God and took her stand and was miraculously healed. She lived to be 91 years old. … What an inspiration! She ran her race. She finished her course. Let’s pray for the Osteen family on this time of loss.”
Megachurch Pastor John Gray of Love Story Church in South Carolina, who previously served at Lakewood Church, said Dodie Osteen would pray for the sick while fighting cancer herself.
“A lightweight has gone out. She was a real woman of God in every sense of the word. When my family moved to Houston to serve the vision of pastor Joel and Victoria and @lakewoodchurch, it was momma Dodie who spoke life, prayed, encouraged, and showed up every Wednesday to support and pray me through,” he said in a statement Wednesday.
“She raised Godly children. She prayed for sick people — while battling cancer herself. She was firmly committed to a selfless life and completely dedicated to Jesus Christ and His church.”
In a 1987 recounting of Dodie Osteen’s healing testimony, her husband, John, who co-founded Lakewood Church together with his wife in 1959 and died in 1999, highlighted how doctors told him she would die from cancer after giving her just weeks to live in 1981.
“My wife Dodie was on this hospital for 20 days trying to seek out out what was unsuitable together with her body. I remember in the future the doctor got here to me at the top of those tests and said, ‘Pastor, I’ve got bad news for you. Your wife has metastatic cancer of the liver. She cannot live. She’ll be dead inside a number of weeks,” he recalled.
Instead of accepting the death sentence pronounced by the doctor, John Osteen invoked his faith.
“I said to the doctor, ‘We consider in miracles.’ He said, ‘You’re going to need to have a miracle for her to live.’ I checked out him and I said, ‘We’re going to get that miracle,'” John Osteen declared.
“I lifted Dodie out of that bed. She weighed 89 kilos. [I] put her in a wheelchair and took her home. We got on our faces before the Lord and we pled His guarantees. I’m glad to announce that Jesus Christ, the Son of the Living God, who is similar yesterday, today, and ceaselessly, healed Dodie.”
Dodie Osteen said she was devastated when she got the news about her cancer diagnosis 15 days before Christmas in 1981.
“When I discovered about it, I used to be, after all, devastated. The whole family was devastated. Here I had finally gotten to the purpose where I could enjoy life a bit because I did not have little children and had been well all my life, after which rapidly was struck with the news of cancer of the liver with a tumor the scale of an orange,” she explained.
A day after she left the hospital on Dec. 11, she said she joined her husband in faithful prayers.
“I got up on the eleventh of December. John and I got on our faces in our bedroom, and we prayed. And he, as head of the home, rebuked that cancer in my body. And I set the date of December eleventh, 1981, because the date that I used to be healed,” she recalled.
“Now I’d advise you, in the event you’re fighting a battle, it might be thing for you in the event you’d wish to set a date because I believe that when the devil comes against you and torments you in the midst of the night like he did me, you possibly can all the time say, ‘No devil take your hands off of me because on December eleventh I feel I received my healing,'” she added.
“I say that day-after-day after I awake within the morning, and if I forget to say it, I say it in a while within the day because I feel that on that day God began the healing means of cancer in my body. John commanded that cancer to wither and die. It began to die so far as I’m concerned on that day.”
 Dodie Osteen, the co-founder of Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas, and the mother...){kind=link}