Word: saddleback
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...time, a lot of people may wish they could scatter their attention the way Warren does. He is the author of one of the world's best-selling books, The Purpose Driven Life, and the founding pastor of one of the country's largest churches, the 23,000-member Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif. And on Aug. 16, he will play the role of national inquisitor in a "civil forum" featuring (consecutively, not in debate format) the two presumptive nominees for President, who will fly to Orange County, Calif., to be civilly grilled for an hour apiece. (See pictures...
...archetypes dominated 20th century Evangelicalism: the Grahamesque evangelist, and the paladin of the religious right. Warren is neither. He has always been about churches. Networks of churches. And of pastors, the CEOs of churches. He founded Saddleback in 1980 when he was just out of Baptist seminary, with neither a building nor a congregation, and grew it relentlessly to its current size. In 1995 he shared his secrets in a book called The Purpose Driven Church: Growth Without Compromising Your Message & Mission. (The "purpose" was God's.) His knack for schematization allowed almost any minister to reconfigure his church along...
...desktop computers: if they could be infected with the virus of good works, the world could be transformed. (Put simply: if every pastor in the world taught basic water hygiene, it could significantly cut rates of dysentery, a major global killer.) Scores of short-term activists, armed with Saddleback-crafted training, would go into a foreign country, locate its most promising churches and introduce them to the best practices in areas from health care to good leadership. Those churches would train other churches until the country was saturated. Warren saw this occurring in every country in the world...
...Warren, who had been beta-testing the plan, held its "IPO." He convened 1,700 pastors from the purpose-driven network to Saddleback and urged them to send out teams as part of the "PEACE Coalition." "There was a lot of energy afterward," he says. "Guys with tears in their eyes. A guy was going, 'I'll take Mozambique,' and one was going, 'I'll take Nigeria.' They were dividing up the world...
...Dobson and his colleagues have also been stymied by a new generation of Evangelical leaders who stubbornly refuse to join the political fray. When Saddleback pastor Rick Warren welcomes Obama to his church with open arms or Mike Huckabee declares that Obama's religion and his former pastor should be irrelevant issues in the campaign, they undercut the criticisms made by their elders in the Christian Right. In 2004, there was near-universal agreement by religious conservatives that their "non-negotiable" issues were limited to abortion, stem-cell research and gay marriage. But Warren and others now insist that...