Joel Osteen, the televangelist and pastor at the massive Lakewood Church in Houston, has responded to controversy after reports claimed his church was closed to those seeking shelter after Hurricane Harvey.

In general, it seemed there were various mixed messages about the status of Lakewood, which can fit more than 16,000 people, after the storm. Initially, a church Facebook post claimed the building was inaccessible because of severe flooding, but locals pointed out there was no observable flooding near the building. But some church members tweeted photos of the water damage in the building.

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In a statement to CBS News on Tuesday, Osteen claimed his church actually never closed its doors, and was working as"distribution center for those in need." They said they were getting ready to shelter people "once the city and county shelters reach capacity." But later that day, Osteen changed his tune, saying his church was open to anyone who needed shelter.

Osteen spoke out himself in interviews with multiple morning news shows Wednesday. "Our doors have always been open," he told CBS This Morning. "We received people even as soon as the water started to recede." But he said the city set up an official shelter four miles away with room for thousands, and wanted the church to be a distribution center and not a shelter.

But that was without the knowledge of just how many people needed a place to stay; once the city's shelters filled up, Lakewood opened up. "This notion that we would turn people away, or that we're not here for the city, we've been here for 60 years doing this,'' Osteen said. He said he's raising money for people affected by the flood, and his church will be there to help for years to come.

And in a separate interview with the Today show, Osteen said Lakewood would have been a shelter the moment the storm started, had the city asked them to. "If we needed to be a shelter, we would have certainly been a shelter right when they first asked," he said. "But once they filled up, never dreaming we'd have this many displaced people, they asked us to be a shelter."

He also said that the church had flooded before, so they were trying to be careful due to safety concerns. "Think of the story if we had housed a whole bunch of evacuees and the building flooded, that wouldn't have been a good story," he said.

Overall, it came down to safety precautions and not predicting how devastating Harvey's damage would be. "It's easy to say, 'There's that big building, and they're not using it,' but we don't have volunteers and we don't have staff that could get here," he said. "If they would've asked us to be a shelter early on, we would've prepared for it all."