posted on January 1, 2008 in Features | Be the First to Comment | Print

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Rick Warren, photo - CPI

The new face of evangelicalism is down to earth — it comes barrelling in from southern California in the form of a big bear-hug of a man in faded blue jeans. All in orange and green and brown in his trademark Hawaiian shirt, Rick Warren is the pastor of one of the biggest congregations in North America, Saddleback Church in Orange County, just south of Los Angeles. He’s also the author of The Purpose Driven Life, the world’s bestselling book from 2003-2005.

I met Warren a year ago at a mission conference for university students in St. Louis, Mo. Along with his wife Kay, he spoke about the role the North American church can play in responding to the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Africa. Over three days, I raced after him through downtown St. Louis, interviewing him in various settings, including a one-on-one conversation and a prolonged interchange with another journalist, sitting in on press conferences with him, hearing him lead a range of seminars and, in the end, joining 20,000 other onlookers at the plenary talk he delivered, which included a cameo appearance from Bono of the rock band U2.

On the surface, Warren may line up with the stereotype some people have of a typical megachurch leader. At 53 years of age, he’s the consummate baby boomer — relentlessly charismatic and casual. He can talk and entertain and talk and not stop talking for alarming stretches of time. He conjures up impressive numbers every couple of minutes, highlighting his own success and promoting his church and his books. His sense of humour is charming, despite the inevitable football analogies. He travels the world exuding entrepreneurial confidence in the importance of his particular version of the Christian message.

“There are a lot of people in the church and in the whole world who disagree on a lot of different things,” says Warren. “That’s true. But we do agree on this: we do agree on God’s love for the world, we do agree that He loves every individual, we do agree that the AIDS crisis is a tragedy and that it can be prevented, we do agree that God calls us to stand up for the vulnerable and weak, to speak for those who have no voice or whose voices have been ignored. We have so much we need to work on and so much that we could agree on, and we are finally realizing that we do agree to a large extent. That’s where we need to start. And that may be different from what some people understand evangelicalism to be, where in the past we tended to start with our disagreements and what we’re against. But now we’re looking to build up from common ground.”

And there’s no denying that Rick Warren can build with the best of them. In 1979, he moved from Texas with his wife, Kay, and their new baby girl to Saddleback Valley in southern California to plant a church. He had no particular plan for how it was going to happen, but he had learned that Orange County was growing faster than any other part of the country and that seemed like a good location in which to try something new. For weeks he went door to door and met people in whatever way he could. He listened to their impressions of church, mostly comments about why they thought it was irrelevant to their lives. And, along with Kay, he started a small group in the living room of his tiny condominium.

Three months later, Warren got up to preach his first sermon in front of 200 people. He told them to look forward to a day when their church would grow to 20,000 people. Playing at both prophet and cheerleader, he went further and proclaimed to the gathered congregation that this megachurch would eventually rise up on 50 acres of land. Three years ago, on its 25th anniversary, Saddleback Church rented the stadium where the Anaheim Angels play baseball and filled it with 50,000 worshippers because its 120-acre campus does not have sufficient room to accommodate the whole church at one service.

“Building the church was the first challenge,” says Warren, “and we did that with small groups. Saddleback wouldn’t work without our small groups — that’s where people get excited about God, where church becomes really relevant for them, that’s where people spring into action. But then we were given a new vision. We started to teach others how to plant churches and make them grow. Eventually our whole focus came to be summed up by this word ‘purpose’ and that has taken me through two books and a world-wide ministry network, training pastors and other church leaders, into a much more global orientation and a preoccupation with putting an end to poverty and AIDS in Africa and throughout the world.” Warren has devoted the last three years of his life to mobilizing the members of Saddleback Church for the challenge of defeating global poverty, in particular the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Africa.

The books, above all, have catapulted Warren into a different orbit. Based on his success at Saddleback, he first wrote The Purpose Driven Church in 1995. In 2002 came the real rocket-launcher: The Purpose Driven Life. Good sales were expected, but the results took everyone by surprise, except, that is, for Rick Warren. To date, the book has sold more than 30 million copies, making it among the best-selling works in the history of publishing and making Warren very wealthy.

The genius of The Purpose Driven Life is the way it helps people to see their existence as meaningful. It opens readers up to something bigger and then tries to lead them to the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. That is also Rick Warren’s genius. He makes a vital connection to the common longing for an experience that transcends life’s frustrations. Still, criticism has come fast and furious. From accusations that he ignores the importance of sin and the need for repentance to being dismissed as the purveyor of a simplistic pop theology, Warren has been attacked from every quarter. But the numbers suggest a different version of the story. It may represent an inadequate individualistic version of the gospel, but The Purpose Driven Life has found its way into millions of homes and has clearly met a need.

Warren calls it an “anti-self help book.” In its first paragraph, he writes: “It’s not about you. The purpose of your life is far greater than your own personal fulfillment, your peace of mind, or even your happiness. It’s far greater than your family, your career, or even your wildest dreams and ambitions. If you want to know why you were placed on this planet, you must begin with God. You were born by His purpose and for His purpose.”

Kay and Rick Warren of Saddleback Church, Orange County, Calif., photo courtesy of IAC

Ironically, when the truckloads of money from royalties for The Purpose Driven Life began to roll in, Warren had to figure out his own purpose, all over again. “I found God’s purpose for me in Psalm 72,” he explains. “In that psalm, Solomon asks God for more influence and power, which seems strange because he was already a powerful king. But if you read on you see why; it’s so that he can better defend the oppressed, better save the children of the needy, and more effectively come to the rescue of those who are weak and vulnerable. I had been given influence but until that time I had not seen how I was called to pursue justice. There’s so much in the Bible about poverty and how God has a heart for the poor and I’d missed it all. I was safely insulated in Orange County, but then I resolved to change all that.”

After years spent focused on his own backyard and the growth of Saddleback Church and its related ministries, Warren set out to transform the North American church and through it, the world. “Mostly, the church is known for what it’s against rather than what it’s for,” he suggests. “I intend to change that. I think we need to be known for what we’re for. I’m for the poor, I’m for the sick, I’m for the uneducated, and I’m for treating all people with respect and dignity. Let’s be known for what we’re for and what we’re doing. Let’s reattach the hands and feet to the body of Christ.”

Warren has put his money where his mouth is and now “reverse tithes,” by living on 10 per cent of his income and giving away 90 per cent of what he has earned from the sales of his books. He and Kay have founded three charitable foundations which channel most of these funds to a range of causes around the world. Kay Warren runs Acts of Mercy Foundation and he directs the vision of the other two: Equipping Leaders and the Global Peace Initiative. When AIDS came to their attention as a global tragedy of epic proportions, they sat down with leaders of the gay community in California to discuss how they could fight it together, at home and overseas. Africa quickly came into focus for the work of his Global Peace Initiative and, in particular, the Warrens’ contribution to the global effort to defeat AIDS.

A remarkable opportunity soon presented itself in Africa. After Paul Kagame, the president of Rwanda, read The Purpose Driven Life he decided to call Warren and ask him for help. Soon Warren and Kagame, who was not a religious man, were discussing how to turn Rwanda into “the first purpose-driven nation.” A Rwandan government delegation visited Saddleback Church and, in turn, approximately 6,000 Saddleback members, including some world-renowned leaders in health care, education, business and international development, have travelled to Rwanda for various assignments over the past three years. Each one of the 2,600 small groups in Saddleback focuses on a particular village or town in Rwanda.

The Global Peace Initiative is ambitious. Warren outlines its goals by means of the acrostic P.E.A.C.E. No surprise there; Warren has few rivals in his ability to spew slogans and acronyms at a dizzying pace. P.E.A.C.E. stands for: Plant church (or Partner with existing churches); Equip servant leaders; Assist the poor; Care for the sick; and Educate the next generation. Ultimately, the initiative comes back to the local church for Warren.

“Like everyone, we are daunted by the scope of the world’s problems. But we are also confident that the church as God’s presence in the world can offer hope like nothing else. Only the church is big enough to tackle global poverty. No corporation can begin to match its reach. There are countless local congregations out there, millions of them. You’ll find a church everywhere, even in places where there’s no school, no clinic, no government office and no international development agency. The churches will distribute what needs to get to the people; they will care for the people. And they’ll do this better when they have well trained leaders. That’s where church networks and the cause of social justice come together. It’s a hope that comes from God and no merely human effort can match it.”

Warren surprises a lot of people. Megachurch leaders are not usually associated with innovative attempts to redirect the interests of their privileged suburban members’ commitment to the pursuit of social justice. Evangelical big-shots have more often been associated with conservative politics and the culture wars surroundings such hot-button issues as abortion and gay marriage. But Rick Warren also personifies a new evangelicalism which rejects the assumptions of the religious right.

“One of the problems in the church today is that evangelicals are no longer known for good news, they’re known as a political force. People always ask me, are you left-wing or are you right-wing — and I say that I’m for the whole bird. A one-winged bird will fly around in circles. You can’t fly with one wing; you have got to have two wings.” Still he shows no reticence about divulging his contacts in Washington. He is close to George W. Bush and has frequently assisted the president as an adviser on issues related to faith and church; and yet he simultaneously manages to count Hillary Clinton as a good friend. In December 2006, Warren invited two prominent politicians to the second annual AIDS conference at Saddleback Church. One of them, Republican Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas, was a natural fit. Raised as a Methodist, Brownback became a “born again” Christian before migrating to the Roman Catholic Church in 2002. For more than 10 years, he has worked as a tireless advocate for the religious right in Washington.

Barack Obama, on the other hand, did not belong. As a senator for Illinois since 1997, Obama was a staunchly pro-choice Democrat. He had distinguished himself as a rising political star, but offered no track record that would obviously endear him to conservative Christians.

Warren describes the encounter: “When they [Obama and Brownback] were at Saddleback, I said that I want to pray for both of you guys and I held hands with both of them. I said to them [respectively]: this is the face of compassionate conservatism and this is the face of compassionate liberalism. What I like about both of them is the compassion part. The compassion part is the Jesus part. The other stuff isn’t going to matter in heaven. What’s going to matter is the compassion. Can we get along here? Can we have a little civility? Can we not demonize each other? We all believe that people need to live so let’s work together to make that happen. Let’s maximize the compassion.”

Peter Heltzel, a professor of theology at New York Seminary, identifies Warren as a sign of what could be a new consensus in North American Christianity.

“The nasty divisions of another era are fading,” he observes. “Evangelicals are rediscovering an emphasis on social justice which all along had been embedded in their genetic code. Liberals are acknowledging the ground-breaking work that evangelicals have done over the last 20 years in reforming the church and translating the message so that it comes across in the native language of the culture around it. If Jerry Falwell represented a combative way of being a Christian, one that was hostile and defensive towards the world around it, Rick Warren is the antidote. He’s the great symbol right now of how stereotypes can be overcome and people can do the unexpected.”

Hans Kouwenberg, moderator of the Presbyterian Church’s 2007 General Assembly, sees this new evangelicalism as a sign of renewal. “Evangelicals need to learn from their mistakes like anyone else. People get tired of certain people singing the same song over and over again; you sound like you’re a crank. Evangelicals have tried to be strong on personal morality, but in some ways they’ve overdone it. It’s a welcome development that evangelicals are now saying that the church needs to be involved with big issues like poverty, global injustice. It goes back to the foundation of the evangelical tradition which always had justice in view.”

Photo - Anna Lisa Sang

According to Kouwenberg, “Warren should be seen as a pioneer. He was and is at the forefront of North American Christianity, saying that we have to do Christianity in a different way. But, I think Warren over-reached himself with Rwanda. He wanted to develop the purpose-driven nation. I’ve been to Africa. Anyone who comes from affluent North America and who thinks they can dictate terms to an African nation has some learning to do. That’s a nation that needs to ponder its failure, not think about whether it can be purpose-driven, whatever that means. The purpose-driven model may work on a personal/individual level, but I’m skeptical of Warren’s global ambitions.”

Rev. Carey Nieuwhof, on the other hand, applauds Warren with fewer reservations. “He is a man of great vision and he’s obviously able to motivate people like few others. At Trinity Community Presbyterian Church [in Oro Township, Ont.] we did the 40 days of purpose and studied The Purpose Driven Church. We read books together as a leadership team. It was a useful exercise; it encouraged us to re-imagine what church could be. We do that all the time. We study some of the cutting-edge innovators in church leadership.

Photo - Anna Lisa Sang

“I wouldn’t necessarily see Warren’s new vision as a shift towards the left,” reflects Nieuwhof. “It’s a shift towards compassion. Within the evangelical tradition in Christianity, people are always returning to their first calling, which is to respond to Jesus and to point others to him. That’s the reason that evangelicalism should become more compassionate — less concerned with what we know and more concerned about the extent to which we truly reflect Jesus.”

As for Warren, he hopes to embrace it all within his mega-congenial bear hug Christianity. He talks in animated fashion about the promotion of a “coalition of civility.” He says that he’s tired of polarization in the church. He wants to bring people who may have thought they were enemies together to address the greatest needs of our world. He suggests that the new evangelicalism should shut its mouth more often and seek to be known instead for the fruit produced at its hands.

“I am not a member of the religious right; I am not a fundamentalist. I am an evangelical. Some of us are very careful about the definition of those terms; we’re saying that those terms — religious right, fundamentalist, and evangelical — are not the same. If you can only work with people you agree with, then you have ruled out the entire world because no one agrees with you perfectly. And so if you want to make a difference you have to work with people you disagree with on different issues, but you can disagree without being disagreeable.”

Liz Honeyford, pastor at St. Paul’s, Leaskdale, Ont., would certainly fall into that category. “In the States you can buy The Purpose Driven Life everywhere. I was amazed. You see it in convenience stores, at gas stations, pharmacies, you name it. But I wonder about this mass media experience. You always have to give something up; you seem to lose what really matters.

“It’s different in Canada. Rick Warren doesn’t come across as well here, although I’ve seen his books in many places here. But we’re far more cynical and secular and private than Americans. Warren is really charismatic, he’s the life of the party — but that’s one culture. It’s not as relevant to our situation. The times I have handed his book out, people always say that it really helped them. I would give it to new believers or non-believers who are seeking. But I wouldn’t leave them to survive on a diet of Rick Warren. There’s lots more to hear, to read, to learn.”

Nieuwhof shares some of the same concerns: “Warren is most significant for his great gift of translating the gospel into the culture of his day and age in southern California. His situation is different from ours. The purpose-driven model reflects a modern rather than a post-modern culture. Warren did a great job at translating the gospel for rich baby boomers. I’m a Gen-Xer and he’s not so much on my wavelength. And then there’s another generation coming up right behind. It’s not on our terms anymore, if it ever was. We find that we’re always needing to learn new languages. We have to experiment. We have to be open to change.”