The Global Ambition of Rick Warren
By David Van Biema
Rick Warren has Rick Warren syndrome. That's not a joke. He has a brain disorder. "I was born with it," he says. "I went to the Mayo Clinic, and the doctors said, 'We have found a dozen or so other people with this. There's no name, so maybe we'll just call it the Warren syndrome." He describes the ailment's chemistry as an inability to process his body's own adrenaline. Its symptoms are tremors, disorientation and pain, and, as he says, "it makes my brain move very fast." I ask -- since a colleague of his has asserted it -- whether Warren also has attention deficit disorder. Warren laughs heartily. "Am I ADD? Yeah, I'm probably ADD too."
At this point in 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.
A more cautious figure than Warren might have passed on the opportunity to become a political lightning rod. But he has spent the past few years positioning himself for just such a role as a suprapolitical, supracreedal arbiter of public virtues and religious responsibilities. Unlike some other conservative religious leaders during this long election season, he has remained conspicuously neutral on candidates. When he pushed to "unstick" an earlier stalled attempt to get John McCain and Barack Obama together, he did so by sending a personal "Let's do it" e-mail to each of them. The payoff is the Aug. 16 event, a kind of coronation for the 54-year-old, jovially hyperactive preacher. "It's remarkable. The candidates are according him tremendous status," says William Martin, author of the definitive biography of Billy Graham, A Prophet with Honor. "I don't see them doing it with an Episcopal bishop or a Cardinal -- or another Evangelical."
If Warren is not quite today's Graham, who presided as "America's pastor" back when the U.S. affected a kind of Protestant civil religion, he is unquestionably the U.S.'s most influential and highest-profile churchman. He is a natural leader, a pathological schmoozer, insatiably curious and often the smartest person in the room. Like Graham, he projects an authenticity that has helped him forge an exquisite set of political connections -- in the White House, on both sides of the legislative aisle and abroad. And he is both leading and riding the newest wave of change in the Evangelical community: an expansion beyond social conservatism to causes such as battling poverty, opposing torture and combating global warming. The movement has loosened the hold of religious-right leaders on ordinary Evangelicals and created an opportunity for Warren, who has lent his prominent voice to many of the new concerns.
A shift away from "sin issues" -- like abortion and gay marriage -- is reflected in Warren's approach to his coming sit-downs with the candidates. He says he is more interested in questions that he feels are "uniting," such as "poverty, HIV/AIDS, climate change and human rights," and still more in civics-class topics like the candidates' understanding of the role of the Constitution. There will be no "Christian religion test," Warren insists. "I want what's good for everybody, not just what's good for me. Who's the best for the nation right now?"
If Warren were content to be merely the most influential religious figure on the American political scene, that would be significant enough. He isn't. Five years ago, he concocted what he calls the PEACE plan, a bid to turn every single Christian church on earth into a provider of local health care, literacy and economic development, leadership training and spiritual growth. The enterprise has collected testimonials from Bono, the First Couple, Hillary Clinton, Obama, McCain and Graham, who called it "the greatest, most comprehensive and most biblical vision for world missions I've ever heard or read about." The only thing bigger than the plan's sheer nerve is the odds against its completion; there are signs that in the small country Warren has made a laboratory for the plan, PEACE is encountering as many problems as it has solved.
Having staked so much on his global initiative, Warren can't allow it to die. But the scale of his ambition does raise questions that confront the American Evangelical movement as a whole as it tries to graduate from a domestic political force into a global benefactor. In fact, it is easier to save souls than to save the world.
Big Church, Big Book Warren grew up in Northern California. He is a fourth-generation Southern Baptist pastor, intimately familiar not just with churches but also with the spreading of them: his father was a "church planter," or serial church founder. The son, who has said that from sixth grade on he was always president of something (and told TIME he led a courthouse march for the 1960s radical group Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS), received his own call to ministry at age 19. He got a conventional theology doctorate and an unconventional education from a friend, management guru Peter Drucker, who refined Warren's organizational gift and offered a secular vocabulary with which to express it.
Two 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 the lines of Saddleback. Warren says that he and his staff have given "purpose-driven training" to 500,000 eager pastors worldwide and that 1 out of 20 U.S. churches has done his "40 Days of Purpose" exercises. In all, says fellow megapastor Joel Hunter, Warren's is "easily the broadest and most influential church network in the world."
But it was not until 2002 that Warren became a mainstream megastar, following the publication of The Purpose Driven Life. Beyond its striking opening assertion -- "It's not about you" (it's about God and you) -- the book, like its predecessor, was a crystal-clear blueprint, in this case for extending Sunday spirituality to the rest of one's life. It employed the tropes of the self-help genre (A 40-day program! Exercises!) to chart a user's guide to living midstream Evangelical doctrine. (On God's wanting believers to be a "living sacrifice": "The problem with a living sacrifice is that it can crawl off the altar. We sing Onward, Christian Soldiers on Sunday, then go AWOL on Monday.") The Purpose Driven Life shipped 40 million copies worldwide, and Warren was suddenly famous and (despite turning over 90% of his profits to his church) rich. He could try his hand at just about anything.
During the 2004 presidential election, he seemed to toy with using his new influence to become the next Jerry Falwell or James Dobson. Although he did not officially endorse George W. Bush, the mega-author made no secret of his preference. Two weeks before the election, he sent an e-mail to the several hundred thousand pastors on his mailing list, enumerating "non-negotiable" issues for Christians to consider when casting their votes: abortion, stem-cell research, gay marriage, euthanasia and human cloning. Shortly after the election, two attendees of a Washington meeting of conservative religious and political heavyweights remember Warren's actively soliciting advice on how he might increase his clout with GOP politicians.
But upon exploring the role, Warren grew uncomfortable with it. "I have never been considered a part of the religious right, because I don't believe politics is the most effective way to change the world," he says now. "Although public service can be a noble profession, and I believe it is our responsibility to vote, I don't have much faith in government solutions, given the track record. It's why I am a pastor, not a politician. None of my values have changed from four years ago, but my agenda has definitely expanded."
Warren had an epiphany in 2003. His wife Kay had dedicated herself to the fight against HIV/AIDS, a brave move in a community where it was still often stigmatized. In Africa with her nine months later, he says, he heard a message from above. "God said, 'You don't care squat about the sick and the poor. And you need to change; you need to repent.'" He became fond of repeating that the Bible has 2,000 verses dedicated to the poor and that the Gospel of Matthew contains not only the Great Commission, in which Christ bids his disciples to spread his word, but also the great commandment, in which he tells the Pharisees to love thy neighbor as thyself.
For Evangelicals who came of age during the Graham generation, notes Andy Crouch, head of the Christian Vision project at the Evangelical monthly Christianity Today, charitable mission work tended to be relegated to "occasional action to keep people alive, to teach them the Gospel in a credible way." Warren, by contrast, yearned for full-scale battle with the "five global giants": spiritual emptiness, selfish leadership, hunger, sickness and illiteracy. If he could provide the proper vehicle for change, millions might jump on.
Two options were immediately available. Most Evangelical do-gooding in the past century has been accomplished through Christian aid-and-development organizations like the behemoth World Vision. They work a lot like secular NGOs, maintaining a few dozen paid employees who manage long-term aid and community projects in poor areas for decades-long stretches. More recently, another model has emerged: each year, often during school breaks, about a million short-term volunteer missionaries in gangs of about 15 briefly saturate the Third World, enthusiastic if often ill-prepared, to build houses or dig wells and/or share the Gospel for about two weeks.
Warren's insight was to combine both models in a plan aimed at energizing Third World churches. He knew they were everywhere, including backwaters unreached by government or NGOs. He started comparing them to McDonald's franchises. Or to 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.
PEACE -- an acronym for promote reconciliation; equip servant leaders; assist the poor; care for the sick; educate the next generation -- "exemplifies Rick's capacity to capture big ideas and make them simple and memorable and motivational," says Crouch. Indeed, the idea is so big, only Warren could have hatched it. Warren dismisses those who claim he is trying to "build heaven on earth." He says, "I'm not that stupid." But there is nothing in his sales pitch -- to thousands of pastors, dozens of heads of state, financiers at the Davos World Economic Forum and editorial boards -- that suggests where its limits might be. He refers repeatedly to the "1 billion" Christians he thinks the plan can mobilize. His sell combines the aid wonk's jargon of "self-sufficiency, scalability and reproducibility," the dotcommer's dream of exponential growth and something older. Says one pastor participant: "This is like the fishes-and-loaves story. People think that that kind of miracle is happening."
In May, 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."
The Rwandan Model The first nation to be so claimed -- or to claim PEACE, really -- was Rwanda. In 2005, Paul Kagame, who overthrew the genocidal regime of the small central African nation and later became its President, appeared at a celebration for Saddleback's 25th anniversary. Warren revealed that Kagame intended Rwanda to become the "first purpose-driven nation." Soon Saddleback members were commuting to and from Kigali, its capital. By the end of this year, 1,750 PEACE volunteers will have visited Rwanda. Not only have PEACE volunteers gone to work on health and development, Kagame says, but the more high-powered among them "use their contacts to draw on resources and attract investment. I can't have anything better than this." He admits that he is not a practicing Christian: "I cannot say I am devout, but I have a good sense of what faith is about and the usefulness of it." And in this case, he says, "what Saddleback is doing serves the church and serves us too."
Yet others, rather flatly, claim Warren's effort is invisible by the very terms on which he sold it. Visitors interested in the PEACE plan are still invariably flown not to a church but to the hospital in the town of Kibuye. PEACE is working with the University of Maryland to upgrade the facility and next year will give $500,000 as part of its province-wide $13 million commitment. But so far, aside from a paint job and some tidying up, there is little improvement. Laura Hoemeke, director of Twubakane, a USAID-funded Rwandan decentralization and health program, says, "Warren's people haven't done anything. For passing on information, mobilizing people, changing social norms, I think the church can be really effective. But ..." Others maintain that short-termers can't stay on top of the involved logistics of development.
PEACE representatives retort that 194 Rwandan health-care volunteers will begin making home visits in September. They also point to some working projects whose real-world performance exposes both the strengths and weaknesses of Warren's theory. In early 2006, Grant Bornzin, a Saddleback member, was in a PEACE group directed to a Presbyterian church in the village of Remera, where elders spoke of needing milk for children. The team went back to the U.S., and Bornzin admits that "the idea festered" for two years, until a team member returned to Africa and e-mailed that "they really need [a] livestock program." So Bornzin raised $14,000 from 45 Saddleback members and sent it to Remera with a detailed plan for stocking the area's neediest farmers and for the equitable distribution of the resulting calves. The effort appears to be working, and this month another missionary is back, installing water-purification units. PEACE's Rwanda field coordinator, Bob Bradberry, provides data indicating that there are 17 such church-based projects now operating in Rwanda.
The big question is, Why just 17? When Warren hears that other NGOs in Rwanda repeatedly told TIME that PEACE could offer no working examples of tangible aid-and-development projects, he laughs for 10 full seconds. "You were talking to the wrong guys," he says. Most aid-and-development experts, he claims, depend on Western-style measurements and reports. Rwandan churches, he says, have neither the time nor the obligation to produce them. Moreover, he asserts that executing a program involving spiritual goals through churches initially produces "results that tend not to be programmatic -- they tend to be life change." (For instance, PEACE has recorded 10,000 baptisms in Rwanda.) Even when classic development programs are under way, he continues, "we don't sacrifice sustainability for speed. If you go back to my very first message in 2003, I said, This is going to take 50 years." He adds, "My confidence is not that I've got it all figured out. My confidence is, Jesus said, 'Do these five things,' and we've got the people out there." He is comfortable "building the plane as we fly it."
And it's that last statement, of course, that requires faith -- in God, or in Warren. Even the pastor's harshest critics admit that he has a gift for picking good lieutenants and a near superhuman adaptability. A neat example of this is a document Warren has sent out called "PEACE 2.0," listing eight changes to his original plan. And while he once disdained working with existing Christian NGOs, he is now looking for ways to partner with some that can supplement his short-term army's wide-eyed enthusiasm with experience and cohesion. One NGO has already proposed running one of its programs through PEACE churches, a promising compromise.
The Balls-in-the-Air Question The halting progress of Warren's PEACE program raises another question: Is he oversubscribed? I ask him how many countries there are in the world. Of course, he knows: "There's 195 countries." I think, 195 countries, and so far, even one seems to be a challenge. As Warren tallies it, he is just 28 years into a 40-year commitment to pastor Saddleback. He has written a holiday book, The Purpose of Christmas. He spent much of the past six months in 20 countries doing purpose-driven training and will be traveling to New York City in November, when 350 churches will do "40 Days of Purpose." As we speak, he is in Buenos Aires; yesterday was Brazil. His networking presents escalating opportunities, but of course, opportunities eat time. "It's the most amazing thing," he says. "I've had to add a new hat: my statesman hat. I had a call the other day from a President in Africa asking me to contact a President in Asia to set up a meeting." Then there's his business hat: "I put this unbelievably big deal together. The bottom line was $300 million." How did it happen? "A guy called me and asked me, 'Would you call this person?,' and I said, 'Well, it's not my role or anything I aspire to,' but out of it came this huge deal."
Warren may not aspire to global mogulhood, but he is clearly near giddy over occupying a globetrotting-catalyst status normally reserved for ex-Presidents. If he no longer wants to be the official pastor of the Republican Party, that's in part because he needs support from both parties for his various world projects. His new willingness to embrace causes regardless of their political implications places him firmly in the movement of New Evangelicalism, which remains socially conservative but has opinions on, say, Christianity in China that don't align with either political party's.
It's possible that what drives Warren is the opportunity not just to lead American Evangelicalism but also to reshape it as a broad-based postpartisan movement, as focused on challenges abroad as Graham's was on the crisis within. But it's still unclear whether Warren's many spheres of activity, his seemingly genetic disposition to multitask will sap his energy and influence rather than enhance them. Trouble recently popped up in the form of an "Evangelical Manifesto" that expressed several New Evangelicalism principles he has come to support. Despite having helped launch the document and claiming to still agree with it, he declined to sign it, saying it was released before consensus could develop for it. Warren's retreat made it easier for old-line conservatives to dismiss it. It would indubitably have fared better had he applied his networking skills.
"The only worry one might have about Rick Warren," says Michael Cromartie, a prominent Washington Evangelical with the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, "is that he gets so many balls going up in the air that one might ask, 'Does he have enough hands to catch them?'" Warren has clearly heard this before. "God has given me the ability to manage my time pretty well," he says. "I can handle a lot of balls." Everything he does, he claims, feeds everything else. "I'm a door opener and a bridge builder," he insists. "If I weren't doing it, I'd be dead and in my grave."
An argument can be made that Warren's career has always been a California freeway, navigated at full speed with panache. But there is bound to come a moment when even a man with a racing brain can't keep up with all his options and must define himself more closely in order to do things right. Inevitably, that point will follow a great new opportunity, like the presidential forum and the possibilities it embodies. I ask Warren what Bible verse he will take into the forum, and he quotes David's words after God has secured his position as the King of Israel -- "Who am I, O Sovereign Lord, and what is my family, that you have brought me so far?" -- and David's subsequent realization that God did it for the sake of His word and according to His will. It is a humble response, one that puts Warren's elevation, like David's, in the Deity's hands. But as Warren knows and David's kingship abundantly proved, it can be after the coronation that the complications really set in.
--with reporting by Alex Perry/Kigali