The purpose-driven pastor (Rick Warren calls Christian fundamentalists an enemy)

LAKE FOREST, Calif. - This week, it was the Rose Bowl players' breakfast. This month, it will be the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Then the President's prayer breakfast in Washington, followed by an entertainment industry conference in Los Angeles.

Rick Warren, the Southern Baptist preacher's son from tiny Redwood Valley, Calif., is much in demand these days.

The founding pastor of the Saddleback mega-church south of Los Angeles and the author of the best-selling The Purpose Driven Life, Warren is perhaps the most influential evangelical Christian in America.

With his book - the best-selling hardback nonfiction book in the nation - and Purpose-Driven Life videos and 40-day Bible study plans, Warren has created an unparalleled international network of millions of individuals and 400,000 churches, spanning faiths and denominations.

Now he wants to use his growing influence - and wealth - for an ambitious global attack on poverty, AIDS, illiteracy and disease.

"The New Testament says the church is the body of Christ, but for the last 100 years, the hands and feet have been amputated, and the church has just been a mouth. And mostly, it's been known for what it's against," Warren said during a break between services at his sprawling Orange County church campus.

Fresh from preaching to 38,000 congregants during Christmas week services, Warren was looking to the future by invoking the past.

"One of my goals is to take evangelicals back a century, to the 19th century," said Warren, 51, shifting painfully in his chair because of a back sprain suffered during an all-terrain-vehicle romp with his 20-year-old son, Matthew. "That was a time of muscular Christianity that cared about every aspect of life."

Not just personal salvation, but social action. Abolishing slavery. Ending child labor. Winning the right for women to vote.

It's time for modern evangelicals to trade words for deeds and get similarly involved, Warren contends.

At the end of his second sermon last Sunday, he reminded his largely affluent Orange County audience: "Life is not about having more and getting more. It's about serving God and serving others."

That, simply put, is his message. Give your life to God, help others, spread the word. It is the same message that Christians have been preaching for 2,000 years. Warren has updated the language, added catchphrases and five-step guides, but he readily admits "there is not a new idea in that book."

The Purpose Driven Life has sold more than 24 million English-language copies since 2002, with millions more in other languages. It has been popular with Lutherans, Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, with pastors and priests using it as a Bible-study handbook.

The book figured prominently in a hostage drama in Georgia last March. Ashley Smith, held by alleged Atlanta courthouse killer Brian Nichols, said he released her after she gave him methamphetamine and read to him from the book.

Warren "is able to cast the Christian story so people can hear it in fresh ways," said Donald E. Miller, director of the Center for Religion and Civic Culture at the University of Southern California. He is "a very important figure in evangelical Christianity," part of a "trend we'll see more of," Miller said, citing Warren's independence, social activism, informality and ability to reach across racial and national lines.

"The Gen X-ers are sick and tired of flash and hype and marketing," Miller said. "The soft sell of a Rick Warren is far more attractive to them than a highly stylized TV presentation of the Christian message."

Among evangelicals, Warren is more influential than better-known and more-divisive figures such as religious broadcasters Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell or radio psychologist James Dobson, and is often seen as the heir to the Rev. Billy Graham as "America's pastor."

Scott L. Thumma, a professor of the sociology of religion at Hartford Seminary and the author of a forthcoming book on mega-churches, said polls of church leaders often put Warren in first or second place among most-influential evangelical leaders.

"And one of the interesting things is that he crosses boundaries... . He's not just respected by the evangelical world but by many outside that world," Thumma said.

In North Philadelphia, the Rev. Herbert Lusk, the former Philadelphia Eagles running back who is pastor of the Greater Exodus Baptist Church and a prominent supporter of President Bush, brought Warren to town in November to raise money for aid to Africa. Lusk also tutored many of the Eagles' players and coaches in the Purpose-Driven Life program last year.

Lusk said Warren "took the principles that we preach about every Sunday and packaged them in a way that are palatable for Christians and non-Christians."

"The guy is a preacher's preacher... . He's the leading evangelical in the world, unquestionably," Lusk said.

Broadly defined, evangelicals are Christians who have had a personal or "born-again" religious conversion, believe the Bible is the word of God, and believe in spreading their faith. (The term comes from Greek; to "evangelize" means to preach the gospel.) The term is typically applied to Protestants.

Millions of Americans fit the definition, although estimates vary on exactly how many. Forty-two percent of Americans described themselves as evangelical Christians in a Gallup poll in April, while 22 percent said they met all three measures in a Gallup survey in May. The National Association of Evangelicals says about 25 percent of adult Americans are evangelicals.

Evangelicals are often equated with fundamentalists or the religious right, which annoys Warren. Although he's politically conservative - opposing abortion and gay marriage and supporting the death penalty - he pushes a much broader agenda and disdains both politics and fundamentalism.

Warren is a friend of President Bush and a repeat visitor to the White House. But he also met for several hours at Saddleback last month with Sen. John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee, to discuss issues such as poverty and the environment.

"I'm worried that evangelicals be identified too much with one party or the other. When that happens, you lose your prophetic role of speaking truth to power," Warren said. "And you have to defend stupid things that leaders do."

"Politics is always downstream from culture. I place less confidence in it than a lot of folks. I don't think that's the answer... . Politics is not the right tool to change the culture."

With his goatee and penchant for Hawaiian shirts and colloquial language, Warren embodies a laid-back approach to worship that resonates with Americans who have little allegiance to formal denominations or rituals.

His 120-acre hilltop campus, with palm trees, waterfall and meandering brook, is a kind of religious theme park, where worshipers meet in different buildings to suit their musical preferences, while watching simultaneous video feeds of Warren preaching at the main worship center.

Warren's father and grandfather and great-grandfather were all preachers. He followed their path by starting Saddleback in 1980 with his wife, Kay, and a congregation of seven. His ministry prospered in booming Orange County, as Warren went door-to-door, asking residents what they'd like in a church. For 15 years, he and his growing flock were nomads, meeting in schools, homes and other buildings. Construction started on the current campus in 1995, and Warren now has 80,000 names on Saddleback's rolls. Saddleback is a a Southern Baptist church, but it doesn't advertise the fact.

As the money has rolled in from his book, Warren said he has given most of the millions to the church and the three social-service foundations he has established. He stopped taking his $110,000 annual salary and repaid the church for his 25 years of salary since its founding. He and his wife became "reverse tithers," he said, keeping 10 percent of their income and giving away the rest, including $13 million in 2004.

This month, he is leading a trip to Rwanda, to train pastors and distribute medicine and money to battle AIDS and other diseases. It's part of what he calls his global PEACE plan (Plant a church, Equip leaders, Assist the poor, Care for the sick, Educate the next generation).

Last month, he launched the first major evangelical effort to battle AIDS, convening a three-day conference at Saddleback to mobilize American Christians to help AIDS victims and raise money to fight the disease. Part of the battle for Warren is overcoming resistance from evangelicals who view AIDS as strictly a gay disease or even as divine retribution for immoral behavior.

Warren said he sees religious institutions as more powerful forces than governments for solving the world's problems.

"I would trust any imam or priest or rabbi to know what is going on in a community before I would any government agency."

But, powerful as churches can be in working for the powerless, they can't succeed without governments and nongovernmental organizations, Warren said.

Warren predicts that fundamentalism, of all varieties, will be "one of the big enemies of the 21st century."

"Muslim fundamentalism, Christian fundamentalism, Jewish fundamentalism, secular fundamentalism - they're all motivated by fear. Fear of each other."

The church is to build up believers making them mature Christians able to take Christ out into the world (have an answer for the hope that is in you). The church was never the primary place of conversion, as you know during much of church history ( and Jewish tradition that the apostles came from) proselytes were not allowed into the church until they were baptized believers. The idea of making the church service the place of conversion is a fairly new phenomenon, and I see many problems with that practice and having the expectation that is where someone should be saved.

Amen and Amen! Well said. That is what I had been trying to say (without much success) on this thread. Taking it a step further, I believe that it is actually dangerous, (as in not giving the sheep all their nourishment) if they think that they have to "sell" coming to such and such a church for their unsaved friends and loved ones.

If they are properly nourished in the Lord and in the Word, then they should be ready, willing, and lovingly able to speak the gospel - in however way that the person may need to hear it. If they do not know what to say, then they should be taught that the answer is in prayer, not in bringing someone to a church or handing them this book or that book. That may include going to church (or reading such and such a book), but it is not to be the main option. Evangelizing is first an individual not a corporate duty because it flows out of our response to His grace and it makes it a personal faith. Making it a coporate duty takes away from the need of the individual sheep to feed on the Bread of Life and to seek His face when witnessing to someone in their walk or with their words. Seeker churches make the corporate preaching of the gospel the main source of hearing. They steer the people in the pews toward their methods and away from scripture, little by microscopic little.

Actually what sounds like a rarity is where "the whole church be come together in one place". If we glean from that verse that the presence of unbelievers in the assembly is rare then we would likewise have to glean that the assembly of the whole church together in one place itself would have also to be considered a rare event.

It is very possible that you are right about that too. I have no doubt they rarely got together in one place, considering the persecution they were under. Jesus said himself 'wherever two or three are gathered'- so the size of the assembly, it sounds, doesn't matter much. And it certainly doesn't mean that where only one believer is, as I'm sure you would agree, Jesus is not there.

That is a copout for believers too scared to stand alone in the world for Christ.

To the weak I became as weak.

I honestly don't see how that applies here. ya have me going "HUH?" with that one... and of course, that is the one text that every church growth teacher uses to justify Church Growth philosophy.

Now I will say it again -- Taking on the customs and culture of the time is not in and of itself necessarily bad. But putting out of the church those who don't wish to do so IS bad, and that is what happens at these churches. The minority's 'felt needs' are not considered, which belies where the focus is -- on the numbers.

Now, if you're going to say 'when I was with the GenXers I became as a GenXr that's fine, but if you don't present the clear gospel to them,then you are using it as a cloaking device. Rick does not present the gospel in his books, and I haven't heard it in a message or in anything he's said publicly, in fact, more often I hear him say things that are mutually exclusive to the gospel (e.g. saying the five fundamentals are 'narrow' when they are exactly the opposite!) and saying "anyone can be saved if you just find the key to their heart" -- that smacks of pelagianism, or semipelagianism, synergeia, and heresy.

So are we to say from that 'to the sinners I became a sinner'? To the prostitutes I became a prostitute? Just how far do we draw this 'when in Rome' analogy?

"Why is there a need for something "new"? Did God not foresee evanelism in the 21st century? "

Simple. God does not change. Man does. Translating the Bible into English (remember when Latin was the norm?) was new? Was that anti-scriptural. The organ was, at one time, "new". Was that anti-scriptural?

The thing that is being hammered in most of these cases are merely old traditions that people have somehow attributed to "true Christianity" when, in fact, they are really just cultural traditions.

That said, I DO have one E. Power Biggs album. 8^>

But putting out of the church those who don't wish to do so IS bad, and that is what happens at these churches.

I would agree, but once the people who have been ordained to make the decisions on the direction the church will take have made their decisions, I don't believe that you are scripturally in any place to continue to complain. For better or worse God has ordained that the church will go in this direction and your choice at that point is to follow the shepherd or find a new one.

Undoubtedly God led you away from your former church. God very well may have led others to it.

He didn't run after them shouting, "WAIT! COME BACK! We're going to install a pool table and ping-pong table next week! What? You don't like the psalms? Well, we can sing something different if you want! What didn't you like about what I said - I'll change it!"

Exactly. And in the story about the rich man who said he had followed all the commandments concerning others but then Jesus said - ok, now give up everything you own and follow Me, when he turned away, Jesus did not say - oh, wait, you can keep those if they make you more comfortable and make it easier for you to listen to what I have to say. Jesus didn't cater to anyone's preconceived ideas of what they wanted to hear. If they didn't like it, He let them walk away.

So it's kinda personal with you, huh? Did you submit to the authority of your pastor? When you found out that you could not submit to the authority of your pastor, did you sew dissention or did you leave?

When the pastor is disenfranchising godly men who challenge him to support his positons from scriptures (very gently and respectfully) is he a pastor at all?

Cyrano might have more to say regarding this since he was punished without even being asked what was going on, in spite of having good rapport with the pastor for years. But in a nutshell, authority in a church is only extended to those who submit to the authority of the Word, from whence they derive their authority.

IN the aftermath, several upstanding men who have always been gentle and respectful with the pastor have left, because they saw me pull the curtain away from the wizard.

I may have crushed balaam's foot against the wall, for which I apologized, but my apology was not accepted until I agreed never to speak anything against the leadership in any form, ever again. There was no effort to reason with me from the Scripture.

Our pastor just finished a sermon series on the fact that he's NOT our friend, and is not ever meant to be. He's been called to be a shepherd of the flock and a preacher of the Word, not our bestest buddy.

You know, I remember our pastor (ex pastor) saying that...or something along those lines ONCE. And then things started to change. he hasn't said that again, but ... that can also be used as an excuse to disregard your valid concerns, if applied wrongly.

I will really try to get to those.

That's all I can hope for. Thanks. They aren't anything you have to order (other than the Transitioning book itself depending where you get it from) - the mcallister articles are on the links for free.

But He was Gods intrument in bringing me to the Lord. Well, him and a series of "coincidences" that followed.

yep I am sure that some really have been saved through it. I have no doubt that some people really are saved at my ex church, infact, probably most of them. The thing is, the Gospel,the Word... divides the sheep from the goats. Bringing in unregenerate minds and putting them into leadership positions is not what we should be doing. Because we reduce 'spiritual maturity' down to passing membership courses and signing commitment contracts, there are more and more people climbing the ranks of leadership for the status it brings, not because they truly are called or even know what it means to believe, sometimes.

And of course, this is not to say that non-purpose driven churches don't have similar problems.

You are only making an assumption about what Warren meant.

You don't know for sure (but hoping for the best I would guess).

But read all of his writings and take them as a whole...he downplays doctrine, waters down the Gospel and references false teachers...In that light, his dislike for the Five Fundamentals and unswerving fundamentalists becomes more understandable.

However, one thing we can tell from Warren's statement that you referenced (A fundamentalist would deny the miraculous today)...Mr. Warren speaks in over-generalizations and untruths.

When the pastor is disenfranchising godly men who challenge him to support his positons from scriptures (very gently and respectfully) is he a pastor at all?

Maybe not. If he cannot be removed using the bylaws of the church, then IMO that would be an indication that for me it would be time to find a new church.

There was no effort to reason with me from the Scripture.

Well, there's your answer. Praise the Lord. All things work together for good, do they not? Whatever happened at your church was ordained by God and will be used for good to those who are called according to his "purpose" will it not?

Imagine a church where the organ player simply cannot play, and doesn't seem to be able to improve. Do you "fire" them? If not, what do you do?

You teach people that it is shallow to look at the outward appearances.

I am perfectly capable of handling very difficult music of just about any style, as is my husband Cyrano, and I really have a problem when people expect everyone to be a professional in order to sing joyfully unto God. I think it's wonderful for someone to get up and sing happily for God, totally un-self-conscious, and totally off key. Just because it makes it hard for me to sing next to them is my problem. We are all giving our two mites worth.

Now, if the lady playing the organ is bad and her attitude is bad too, that is another story. A bad attitude would be someone who isn't interested in improvement in offering their gift to God because it's too much of a bother, or they cannot accept direction, or any number of things. (paradox, no?)

I'm still wrestling with the practical aspects of working this out... which is why I stopped singing while I was going through all this and before we took our stand at the church. I felt the focus was all wrong and I wasn't quite sure myself how to proceed, not only in music, but church in general.

Rick Warren has publicly said that he will not preach against homosexuality and abortion as it may offend some in his congregation.

This is one example of a "watered-down" message.

Also, look at his Gospel presentation (in books and interviews)...It will contain statements about purpose, love and so forth but not sin and repentance.

This is another example of a "watered-down" message.

My old pastor almost exclusively preached Rick Warren sermons purchased from www.pastors.com (RW's site)...They were very simplistic, feel-good, "watered-down" sermons.

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The purpose-driven pastor

By Paul Nussbaum

Inquirer Staff Writer