Victoria Osteen

Victoria Osteen (born March 28, 1961) is the co-pastor of Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas, an author, the wife of Joel Osteen, and the daughter-in-law of John Osteen.Victoria Osteen was born Victoria Iloff in Huntsville, Alabama. She lived near Marshall Space Flight Center where her father, Donald Iloff – a mathematician with General Electric – was a member of GE’s Saturn rocket project team led by German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun. In 1963, at the age of two, Osteen moved with her family to Houston, Texas when her father took a position with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). She grew up in a southern suburb of Houston, near the Manned Spacecraft Center (now known as the Johnson Space Center). Growing up, Osteen attended the Church of Christ, a relatively conservative church, where her mother, Georgine Iloff, taught Sunday school and her father served as a deacon. Osteen attended (though did not graduate from) the University of Houston where she studied psychology while working in her mother’s jewelry business. It was while working in the jewelry store that she met Joel Osteen in 1985 when he came in to buy a new watch battery.