Prophet of Purpose: The Life of Rick Warren

Book by Sheler Jeffery L

Chapter One
  
America's Pastor     

            They began arriving at Angel Stadium in Anaheim early in the morning in a steady stream of shiny SUVs and sport sedans that lined up in neat rows and quickly disgorged their passengers--a decidedly upscale mix of young families, middle-aged couples, andsingles of all ages, most of them appropriately attired for a balmy spring day in colorful shorts and T-shirts or tan-revealing sundresses, flip-flops, baseball caps, and sunglasses. Some hurried inside to stake out the better seats next to the dugouts andbehind home plate. Others lingered in the parking lot and clustered around barbeque grills and coolers or tossed Frisbees or lounged in beach chairs and sipped sodas in the warm Southern California sun.   
            It was a picture perfect day for the ballpark, and the Orange County suburbanites were out in force. But it was not to see their hometown Angels, who happened to be playing in Oakland that afternoon. On this particular Sunday--April 17, 2005--baseball was giving way to worship and to the twenty-fifth anniversary celebration of probably the largest, easily the fastest-growing, and arguably the most influential evangelical congregation in the country, Saddleback Church in nearby Lake Forest.   
            Renting Angel Stadium had been the idea of Saddleback's fifty-one-year-old founder and senior pastor, Rick Warren, a man well-known for thinking big. It was Warren, after all, who in 1980, fresh out of a Southern Baptist seminary, audaciously announced to a handful of worshipers that the church they were starting from scratch in his tiny apartment would one day number 20,000 and would occupy a 50-acre campus. In 2004 they surpassed that goal. What began with two families as "a church for people who hate church" had grown to a congregation of more than 22,000 regular attenders on a 120-acre campus with an annual operating budget of more than $30 million.   
            It was Warren, too, who, thinking that other pastors might benefit from the lessons he had learned about church growth, began conducting training seminars in the late 1980s to promote a biblical model of ministry based on what he saw as "God's purposes." In 1995, he explained that model in a book for pastors entitled The Purpose-Driven Church. It sold over a million copies and helped launch the Purpose-Driven Network, a global alliance of now more than 10,000 congregations in 162 countries. Seven years laterhe wrote a spin-off, a book intended for laypeople called The Purpose-Driven Life. It became the best-selling nonfiction hardcover of all time--more than 25 million copies sold in the first three years alone.   
            The resulting fame and fortune catapulted Warren onto the national and international stage. Suddenly he found himself deluged with media interview requests and with calls from leaders in government, business, academia, the sports world, and the entertainment industry--even from foreign heads of state--seeking personal spiritual guidance or offering speaking invitations. At a time when many evangelical leaders were enlisting in the culture wars and aligning themselves with narrow partisan causes, Warren used his new public platform to call attention to the plight of the poor and the powerless, especially to AIDS victims in Africa.   
            At the same time, Warren and his wife, Kay, were determined that their sudden wealth would not alter their lifestyle. They became "reverse tithers," giving away 90 percent of their income and keeping just 10 percent. Most of the proceeds from The Purpose-Driven Life went to establish nonprofit foundations for AIDS relief and for pastoral training. Warren gave back the salary that his church had paid him over twenty-five years and began working for free. The Warrens stayed in the same unpretentious house in a hillside subdivision and continued driving the same Ford SUV. There would be no yachts, no vacation homes, no expensive wardrobes.   
            All of this, of course, was seriously abnormal behavior, and the world soon took notice. Here was an evangelical leader--a Southern Baptist, no less--who simply did not fit the stereotype of the dour Religious Right activist or of the money-grubbing TV preacher that so often seemed to dominate media portraits of evangelical Christians and their leaders. Instead Warren represented a new and more winsome breed of evangelical: theologically and socially conservative, yes, but far less political and far more positive in engaging the broader culture. Suddenly Warren was on the media's radar screen and he quickly became a familiar face on Larry King Live, Good Morning America, and other national TV news and public-affairs talk shows where he affably offered a fresh evangelical perspective on topics ranging from euthanasia and the Terri Schiavo case to the meaning of Christmas and the role of faith in the aftermath of 9/11. Warren was on his way to becoming, as Fortune magazine would describe him, "secular America's favorite evangelical Christian."   
            Perhaps more important was Warren's growing stature among his fellow evangelicals. The evangelical movement--some 50 million Americans who describe themselves as "born again" and espouse biblical values--had emerged as a potent political and cultural force in the final quarter of the twentieth century. Now it stood at a crossroads with the aging and passing of an older generation of leaders and no shortage of competing younger voices vying to succeed them. Warren stepped ahead of the pack in 2002 when the evangelicalflagship magazine Christianity Today declared him "America's most influential pastor"--a reflection of the broad reach of his Purpose-Driven Network and of the tens of thousands of church leaders who looked to him for guidance. Two years later, a nationwide survey of pastors found that only the legendary evangelist Billy Graham, long the most revered figure in American Protestantism, was regarded as having greater influence on evangelical churches and church leaders. In the minds of preachers and pundits alike there appeared to be little doubt that if anyone was capable of succeeding the aging Graham in the honorific role of "America's Pastor," it was Rick Warren.   
            And yet Warren was not without detractors. Vocal critics within the movement questioned his "seeker-sensitive" approach to ministry, accusing him of promoting "feel-good" religion over the often rigorous demands of traditional Christianity. His therapeutic message and market-driven techniques, they argued, emphasized church growth over true discipleship. And in his eagerness to address international social ills such as AIDS and poverty, said his more conservative critics, Warren had become a fellow traveler with political and theological liberals--sworn enemies of the Religious Right. In many respects, Warren had emerged as a pivotal figure in a struggle for the soul of American evangelicalism.       

     Yet evidence of such controversy was nowhere in sight on this sunny Sunday afternoon. On this day Warren was fully immersed in the only role he had ever really aspired to in his twenty-five years of ministry--that of a local-church pastor. For this special celebration he wanted his entire Saddleback flock, which normally attends services spread over a weekend in multiple venues, to gather together in one place for the very first time, and Angel Stadium was the only facility in Orange County large enough to accommodate them.   
            A few minutes after 1 p.m. the 45,000-seat stadium was nearly full, and it was rocking. From a wide, elevated stage built over second base, an ensemble of guitars, drums, and assorted wind instruments cranked out the opening bars of an upbeat praise song and the crowd came to its feet, clapping, swaying, and singing along. The lead singer and Saddleback's worship director, Rick Muchow, a fiftyish-looking man with a shaved head and wire-rimmed glasses, danced and bobbed about the stage while a video cameraman scurried around the edges, capturing the energetic performance from various angles and flashing it to the stadium's JumboTron screens. Over the stage, a long banner formed a proscenium arch in big block letters--God's Purposes. God's Church. God's Plan.   
            After a few more songs, the crowd settled into their seats and Muchow moved to center stage to make an introduction. "To the rest of the planet he's the best-selling author in the world... and this week Time magazine named him one of the hundred mostinfluential people in the world. But to us and to me he is our pastor. Let's give a warm Saddleback welcome to Pastor Rick!"   
            The crowd jumped to its feet as Warren loped onto the stage big and bear-like, looking his usual laid-back self in an untucked rose-colored sport shirt, black slacks, wraparound sunglasses, spiky hair, and signature goatee. His fleshy and slightly sun-burned face--a face once famously compared in its ordinariness to that of a "friendly butcher"--filled the giant screens in right and left fields. Warren acknowledged the ovation with a broad smile and a spirited "Woo-hoo!"   
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