RICK WARREN AND THE NEW EVANGELICALISM

• First some background on Rick Warren.  Warren was born and raised in northern California, a fourth-generation Southern Baptist pastor.  He completed a doctorate in theology at a Southern Baptist seminary, but also studied with Peter Drucker, who helped him refine his thinking about leadership and management.  He founded Saddleback Church in 1980, shortly after his graduation from seminary.  It was a church plant that is now one of the largest megachurches in the nation.  He has written several books—the two most famous being, The Purpose Driven Church: Growth Without Compromising Your Message and Mission (1995) and The Purpose Driven Life (2002).  Both books have produced workbooks and seminars nationwide, as well as training that Saddleback offers onsite in California.  Over 500,000 pastors worldwide have taken the training on the former, while millions of Christians worldwide have taken the training on the latter.  Warren turns 90% of the royalties he receives from these books back to his church.  Nonetheless, he has become a wealthy man through his writing.  Has Warren been a prime mover in evangelical politics?  During the 2004 presidential election, Warren emailed several hundred thousand pastors in his network on several “non-negotiables” in the election:  Abortion, stem-cell research, gay marriage, euthanasia and human cloning.  During the recent Forum in 2008 a few weeks ago, Warren asked penetrating questions of each candidate on abortion, sexuality and marriage issues.  However, he has also come to represent a much broader definition of what it means to be an evangelical.  He believes that fighting poverty, HIV/AIDS and hunger are equally important issues for evangelical concern.  Indeed, Warren and Saddleback have emerged as the center of evangelical concern about poverty, opposing torture, human rights, climate change, etc.  So significant is Warren’s commitment to these broader social issues that he founded a movement called PEACE (an acronym for promote reconciliation; equip servant leaders; assist the poor; care for the sick; educate the next generation), which seeks to turn every single Christian church into a provider of local health care, literacy and economic development.  It has been called “the greatest, most comprehensive and most biblical vision for world missions I’ve ever heard or read about.”  Hence, Warren is both leading and riding an entirely new wave of evangelicalism.

• Second, where has Warren tested this new vision for evangelicals?  After study and prayerful consideration of various strategies, Rick Warren has combined two 20th century models for helping people worldwide—the World Vision model of helping Christians provide for aid and development and the volunteer missions efforts, usually in short-term formats and mostly in Third-World countries.  His PEACE initiative has as its goal to energize and mobilize “1 billion” Christians worldwide to accomplish this goal.  He has challenged the thousands of churches in his Saddleback network to send out volunteer teams to work with non-government organizations (NGOs) to accomplish the PEACE goals.  Where has it been tested?  The primary target has been the African nation of Rwanda.  The new president of that nation, Paul Kagame (who came to power in 2005), has as his declared goal, according to Warren, to have Rwanda become the first “purpose-driven nation.”  Even though Kagame is not a Christian (he says, “I cannot say I am devout, but I have a good sense of what faith is about and the usefulness of it”), he has accepted over 1,750 PEACE volunteers into Rwanda to work on health and development areas of his nation.  Has it been a success?  It would be unfair to say it has failed, for it is too early to make a significant evaluation.  However, it is possible to conclude that the Rwanda PEACE initiative demonstrates the huge logistical and, quite frankly, the human problems of managing change and care for those in need.  Only time will tell if the PEACE initiative is too ambitious, unrealistic—or a mixture of both.

• Finally, a theological evaluation of what Warren is doing.  At the very least, Warren is destroying or at best neutralizing the notion that Christianity in general and evangelicalism in particular are right-wing creeds.  As Alvin J. Schmidt has made clear in his wonderful book, Under the Influence: How Christianity Transformed Civilization, genuine biblical Christianity has been one of the primary engines for social change throughout history.  Rick Warren is in that powerful and permeating tradition.  For that reason, I applaud and affirm what he is doing.  Further, the epistle of James makes it crystal clear that genuine biblical Christianity will be concerned about matters of poverty, dysfunctional families and human need.  To do so is to be not only a “hearer of the Word” but also “a doer of the Word” (see James 1:22-27).  However, there is an enormous danger and a penetrating risk in what Warren is doing.  There must be a balance between clear, expositional proclamation of God’s Word with the emphasis on social issues such as poverty and hunger.  History is an important teacher here.  Nineteenth century Christianity began to focus on the effects of the industrial revolution in Europe and, mixed with the antisupernaturalism coming out the Enlightenment, gave birth to theological liberalism.  Today, theological liberalism is deeply rooted in and basically defines the mainline Protestant churches of the West.  Rick Warren must find a way to keep the focus on sound doctrine rooted in Scripture with the other-centeredness of Christian love for people.  I believe strongly that sound doctrine produces godly living.  It is God’s Word that changes people.  We will never see nor achieve transformational change in people without the power of God’s Word.  Our message is not a social gospel alone; it is a gospel that changes people from the inside out.  Rick Warren must walk that fine line of maintaining one foot firmly anchored in God’s Word and the clear, forceful theology that emerges from that Word, while the other is anchored in the profound message of social change that emerges from that Word.  Warren must remember that God changes people in order to change the culture—not the other way around.  You and I should pray fervently for leaders like Rick Warren.  He must maintain that deep-seated commitment to the authority of God’s Word to change people, motivate them to be other-centered and globally minded and thereby change the world.  If he is not centered on the authority of God’s Word, over time, especially among his followers, evangelical Christianity will face the danger of becoming just another expression of the social gospel.  In the 1920s, J. Gresham Machen called that “another gospel” in his powerful treatise, Christianity and Liberalism.  History cannot repeat itself!

See E.J. Dionne, Jr. in the Washington Post (19 August 2008) and David Van Biema’s helpful essay on Warren in Time (18 August 2008), pp. 36-42.

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