Just Your Regular Purpose-Driven Guy

I felt compelled to share this "small" write-up with you guys, following Pastor Dom's sermon message yesterday on 'God's Vision For Your Life'. I remembered Rick who visited our church early July this year, had embraced a similar vision in 1979 to build a house for God.

When Mel Gibson began looking for influential ministers to endorse his film, The Passion of
the Christ, high on his list was Rick Warren, founding pastor of the Saddleback Church in Lake
Forest, Calif. Warren loved the movie, reserved blocks of seats at local cinemas for his members
and on two weekends delivered sermons on the Passion.

When the White House wanted advice on how to observe the first anniversary of the Sept. 11
attacks, aides called Warren to meet with the President and West Wing staff, many of whom have dog-eared copies of his best-selling book The Purpose-Driven Life.

Movie stars and political leaders aren't the only ones turning to Warren for spiritual guidance.
Rick Warren's 2002 book, The Purpose-Driven Life, had in a matter of months skyrocketed into national bestseller status. Selling at up to 1 million copies per month, it has been the best-selling new book in the world since 2003, together with his earlier book 'The Purpose Driven Church' hit a combined total of 26 million copes sold worldwide.Meanwhile, over 300,000 ministers from 50 states and 120 nationshave participated in Warren's pastor-training seminars and more than 15,000 churches of various denominations have offered his 40 Days of Purpose study course. Beyond churches, millions ofpeople — from the LPGA tour members to Coca-Cola executives to high school students to prison inmates — meet regularly to discuss Warren's teachings that the only way to discover who you are and what you're living for is to understand God's purpose for your life.

The first line of the first chapter of The Purpose-Driven Life puts it bluntly: "It's not about you!" Explains Warren: "Looking within yourself for your purpose doesn't work. If it did, we'd know it by now. As with any complex invention, to figure out your purpose, you need to talk to the inventor and read the owner's manual — in this case, God and the Bible."

The widespread appeal of this philosophy suggests that Warren just might be, as Christianity
Today has declared, America's most influential pastor. The reverend himself takes a slightly less exalted view of his role. Says Warren: "I'm just translating the truth into 21st century language,
and evidently a lot of people are listening." Warren is convinced that the nation is on the verge of a spiritual awakening, as people seek the fulfillment they don't get from fast-track jobs and can't buy with gold cards. "The culture is asking, 'How do I fill this hole in my heart?'" he says. "I think God is the answer."

Warren found his on purpose at the end of 1980, when he was the young minister of a 150-
member congregation that had no building and held services in whatever high school gym he
could rent. Burned out from trying to keep his flock together, Warren collapsed in the middle of his sermon one Sunday and fell into a depression. He spent the next year soul-searching for a way to help people without getting overwhelmed again. "I needed to figure out what mattered most and not worry about the rest," says Warren, 50. "I wanted to be guided by purpose and not by pressure." Through prayer and Bible study, he rediscovered the Christian doctrines that formed his blueprint for living a life of purpose and meaning.

The Purpose-Driven philosophy offers instruction for both individuals and churches. Warren
writes that God has five purposes for people's lives: to bring enjoyment to him, to be a part of his family, to become like him, to serve him, and to share him with others. The payoff for abiding by these precepts, Warren promises, is reduced stress, sharper focus, simplified decisions, greater meaning, and better preparation for eternity.

His critics say Warren's plan may not be the best prescription for every person's spiritual
growth. "The Purpose-Driven ministry is a marketing strategy," says Dennis Costella, pastor of
the Fundamental Bible Church in Los Osos, Calif. What his detractors call marketing, Warren
calls evangelism. "I believe we have the key to the meaning and purpose of life, and I'm trying to share it with as many people as possible," he says.

Remarkably, Warren has managed to spread his approach to the gospel without a TV
ministry or extensive national media coverage. He turned down an invitation from Oprah to be on her show, though he says he'd like to meet her someday. "Too many ministers start out as servants and end up as celebrities," he says. "I want to use my influence to do some good, and I feel I can get more done out of the limelight."

Saddleback has become a bustling megachurch, with an annual operating budget of more
than $21 million, and now sits on an immaculate 120-acre campus (equivalent to 25 football fields), designed by some of the folks who planned Disney's theme parks, in the placid Orange County community of Lake Forest, 65 miles south of Los Angeles. On weekends 20,000 members and attenders choose from services at 6 different times and 10 different venues around the campus — some with live speakers, some on closed-circuit TV — offering a variety of worship and music styles ranging from quiet hymns in an intimate “unplugged” setting to a tent gathering that offers roof-raising gospel singing.

The hub is Saddleback’s cavernous Worship Center. Take away the 3,200 seats, the live
band and orchestra, the suspended wooden cross, and the giant video screens, and it could be a
747 airplane hangar. In booths outside, ministry leaders promote church workshops on marriage enhancement, parenting, budget planning and addiction recovery. At the state-of-the-art Children's Center, Sunday school meets Fantasyland with a biblical-themed playground. Teens hang out at the student zone's beach cafe. It's all managed at a two-story building resembling a corporate office, where 400 paid staff members and 5,000 volunteers handle the church's farflung missions, ministries and programs.

Before the Purpose-Driven philosophy came along, says the Rev. Chris Nelson of Bethlehem
Lutheran Church in Minneapolis, Minn., "the idea was for ministers to proclaim the gospel and let people figure out what to do with it in their daily lives. Now we are far more application oriented."

When Bethlehem Lutheran member Jean Westberg lost her job as a marketing executive three
years ago, she found inspiration in Warren's teaching that people who want to be servants of God should "think more about others than about themselves," and she accepted a job as interim
executive director for the Episcopal ministry at the University of Minnesota, where she supervised the construction of a new worship center. "What's more important now is service to others rather than service to myself," says Westberg.

What people know about Saddleback is that it's seeker-sensitive, big, suburban, and Southern Californian, "which are the very things we care least about," says Warren, who started the church 22 years ago. Indeed, nobody cares much about them. The seeker-sensitive approach is old stuff, and Saddleback started it years after Willow Creek Community Church, outside Chicago, did. Few congregations wish their pastor preached without tie and socks, as Warren does to match his casual community. And who wants to attend a behemoth? As Warren points out, "The only people who like big churches are pastors."

In person, Warren, an affable, bespectacled bear of a man, is as unadorned and low-key as
the plainspoken prose of his books. He receives visitors to his office in the same casual attire he
wears at the pulpit — khaki pants, floral cotton shirt and rubber-soled shoes. That suits his
members just fine.

"From the beginning, I was impressed by his humility," says Patricia Miller, who has attended
Saddleback since 1998. "When I joined, he asked all the new members to form a circle and lay
our hands on one another's shoulders. Then he stood in the middle and, while choked with
emotion, he prayed that he would be capable of the task of leading us." Says fellow parishioner
William Nared: "At most churches they just preach and preach about how I ought to be a good
Christian man. But what's so powerful about the Purpose-Driven ministry is that it teaches me
how to do it." All Saddleback members must abide by covenants to tithe, to serve others locally,
to do mission work abroad, and to live by Christian principles. "You can't just be a consumer or
spectator here," Warren says. "You have to participate and contribute."

All of this means that Saddleback's profile is big, but not particularly distinctive. To most people, it's just another megachurch. Only one population definitely pays attention to Saddleback: pastors. Thousands of pastors flock to the church's annual Purpose-Driven Ministries conference—3,800 in May 2005. They made The Purpose-Driven Church a bestseller. Warren apparently has little interest in fame, but he cares about reaching pastors. That's his stealth strategy. Through pastors he intends to change the world.

Warren lives unostentatiously. His home, purchased for $360,000 in an upscale market, is no mansion. He drives an SUV. Colleagues say Rick Warren is generous to a fault, an unpretentious, fun-loving man without boat or beach house. They say he is in private exactly what he seems in public: a Regular Guy.

Warren preaches with the voice of a Regular Guy, making light of his partiality to Krispy Kreme donuts, stuttering a little, stepping on his own lines. In the pulpit or out of it, he drapes a Hawaiian shirt over a shapeless middle-aged body. His personal sense of style, he jokes, is clothes that don't itch. With the face of a friendly butcher, Warren is to preaching what John Madden is to football. You don't listen for oratorical skill—though he does have a great sense of comic timing. You listen because he doesn't seem all that different from you. Pastors who hear him have got to think, I can do that.

Warren says he doesn't wake up in the night with a detailed vision in his head. He started out 22 years ago, loaded with ideas for Saddleback, but many of them—like building a school and a recreation center—never took shape. He's needed years of experimentation to develop Saddleback's approach, which is called, in shorthand, Purpose-Driven. When a pastor says, "We've decided to go 100% Purpose-Driven," this means the church has adopted the outline of ministry Warren now teaches at pastors' training conferences.

Small-town Principles
Warren's own story inspires pastors. He grew up in rural Northern California, son of a Southern Baptist minister who launched and pastored tiny churches. Warren remains a small-town personality, a class president and class clown rolled together. "He's not sophisticated in any way," his wife Kay says. "This is a man who will come out in an Elvis costume. He's a ham. He's a goofball."

They met when they were both 16, at a Baptist training meeting for evangelism. "He was imitating Billy Graham at a talent contest," she says. "He was way too brash, way too loud, way too everything I wasn't interested in." At the height of the Jesus movement, Warren helped lead a school revival that got written up in church papers. Skinny, long-haired, aggressively evangelistic, he was invited all over the West Coast to speak on how to build a Christian club at your high school.

While attending California Baptist College in Riverside, Warren directed a youth group at a nearby Baptist church. He talked church leaders into buying $18,000 worth of weightlifting equipment, then used it to build a youth group with 10,000 students on its mailing list. His last year in college, the school administration asked him to help teach a course in evangelism.
Warren chose Fort Worth's Southwestern Seminary because he wanted exposure to big Southern Baptist churches. Fascinated by size, he wrote to the 100 largest churches in America asking for the secrets of their growth. By then he was married, but he and Kay had "descended into marital hell," as she puts it. With no money, they nonetheless pursued extensive marriage counseling. Rick jokes that he could make a TV ad: "MasterCard saved my marriage." His freedom in describing marital difficulties from the pulpit is another part of Warren's Regular-Guy appeal.

Big Dreams
Warren says he was offered the pulpit of a 5,000-member Texas church upon graduation from seminary. He had larger plans in mind. In December 1979, he and Kay arrived in Southern California with a U-Haul truck, a baby daughter, no place to stay, and no money. It's a classic story that Warren loves to tell: how he walked into a real estate office, announced his plight to the agent, and then recruited him as the first member of his new church.

When Warren tells the story, it sounds as though he was the ultimate lonely pioneer. It probably felt that way, but many Southern Baptists closely watched his efforts. Five churches supported him financially, several churches sent volunteers to help canvass neighborhoods, and 15 students visited from Southwestern Seminary to pitch in. California Southern Baptist put the Warrens on its cover after the new church had held only three services. Within a year the national convention's Mission USA featured Saddleback in a five-page feature article. Southern Baptists knew Warren as a talent, if an unconventional one.

Warren walked the (then unincorporated but fast-growing) town of Lake Forest, asking what kept people from going to church. He recruited a Bible study group that met at the Warrens' condominium; its members helped stamp and address letters to 15,000 households. "At last!" the letter began. "A new church for those who've given up on traditional church services!" More than 200 people showed up for an Easter service at Laguna Hills High School. Watching them stream in, Warren marveled, "This is really going to work!"

His unearthly self-confidence showed at that very first service. To a straggling crowd of strangers, he announced his dream of building a church with 20,000 members, located on 50 acres of land, sending out hundreds of career missionaries, and starting at least one daughter church a year. "I stand before you today and state in confident assurance that these dreams will become reality. Why? Because they are inspired by God!"

Warren aimed to reach unchurched young families in the fast-growing, upscale area. He hit his target, baptizing 13,000 new believers and building a vital church from a crowd that initially felt, he says, like "a Kiwanis Club." The Saddleback Valley filled up with new, planned communities, bringing a flood of upper middle class arrivals. It was a mobile, consumerist culture that adapted easily to a new approach to church. By emphasizing small groups and recovery, Saddleback connected people in a community that had no community. Warren's dreams are well on the way to coming true: Today the church, located on 120 acres, has 15,000 members and 15,000 attendees.

That makes it sound easy, but Saddleback did not always do it the easy way. While developing itself, Saddleback has launched more than 30 new churches, the majority composed of Latinos. For years the church worshiped in local high schools, renting a total of 79 different buildings for various Sunday and midweek meetings. (Warren jokes that you could join the church if you could find it; that explains why all its members are so intelligent.) Buying a large piece of property involved years of financial stress, environmental battles, and zoning woes. When the church at last purchased 120 acres, it could afford to put up only a large, modernized tent that lacked heating and cooling. The church had regular weekend attendance of more than 10,000 before it finally built a worship center. Only in 2005 is the Sunday school moving out of portables into a children's education wing.

The son of a minister and a high school librarian, Warren was drawn to political activism and,
growing up in Northern California, thought about running for public office. But he ultimately
decided he would be more effective to follow in his father's footsteps "and change one heart at a
time." After graduating from Southwestern Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, Warren moved to California with his wife Kay and started Saddleback in their rented apartment in 1980.
Mindful of the checkered history of high-profile evangelists, Warren and his wife seem
determined to be the anti — Jim and Tammy Faye. "I want to live above reproach," says the man whose role model is Billy Graham, explaining why he avoids being alone with women other than his wife. The Warrens, who have three grown children, live comfortably but relatively modestly in a $360,000 tract home and the reverend drives a Ford SUV. In 2003, with royalties from the bestseller pouring in, Warren stopped taking his $110,000 annual salary from Saddleback and refunded all of the salary the church had paid him over 24 years. The Warrens keep only 10% of the book royalties and give the rest away to Saddleback and to the charitable foundations they established to support the church's mission projects, which include fighting poverty, illiteracy, and disease — especially AIDS — here and abroad.

Progress on Warren’s “global PEACE plan” was slowed by his wife's struggle with breast
cancer late in 2003. Warren had not preached since his wife began treatment November 2003,
turning his duties over to his staff of ministers. When her chemotherapy was completed, he
returned to the pulpit in late February 2004 , and moved forward with renewed purpose. He wants each of Saddleback's 2,000 small groups to adopt a village in a developing country, make mission trips there, and send educational and medical supplies, along with spiritual and financial support, to its residents.

Warren palpably loves leading a congregation. He's turned down powerful jobs in Southern Baptist institutions and in parachurch organizations because he can't imagine wielding influence that's primarily organizational and not congregational. One reason he doesn't do TV or radio is that such ministries take on a life of their own, overshadowing the life of the congregation. "The spotlight blinds you," he says. Warren loves trading ideas with his staff. He's such an idea person that he depends utterly on such long-term pastors as Glen Kreun—who joined Saddleback in its infancy—to work out the details of his visions.

"I'm a toolmaker," Warren says. "I believe that tools change the world. When Bill Bright [founder of Campus Crusade for Christ] dies, Bill Bright is going to leave the Four Spiritual Laws, Ten Transferable Concepts, and the Jesus film. That's pretty good work. When Dawson Trotman [founder of Navigators] died, he left the hand and the wheel. When Rick Warren dies, he's going to leave the circles and the diamond."

Even Warren's Sunday-morning sermons are like training seminars. He uses printed outlines and asks his audiences to fill in blanks, read Scripture passages out loud together, and circle important words. His style is pitched toward simplicity, based on his confidence that the material doesn't require rhetorical flourishes so much as it needs to be thoroughly understood. It's not just knowledge he's passing on. It's knowledge to change your life. It's knowledge to change the world.

That's the stealth. Warren's target audience of pastors hardly appears on the list of powerful influences in the 21st century. A couple of diagrams, so simple that people say, "I already knew that," appear unlikely to transform the world. But Rick Warren believes in pastors, he believes in churches, and he believes that those simple diagrams are God's, not his. He is delighted that a church member somewhere in China may know the diamond, may know the purposes, and not know the names Saddleback or Rick Warren.

P.E.A.C.E Plan to Defeat Poverty
In 2002, God dropped a pebble into the pond of Kay Warren's life in the form of a magazine article about HIV/AIDS in Africa. Three years later, the ripple effect has reached all the way from her home in Orange County, California, to Africa. Kay told Christianity Today seeing that article was "an appointment with God … he intended to grab my attention." The news photos were so graphic that she covered her eyes and peeked through just enough to read the words. There was a quote box in the middle of the article that read: "12 million children orphaned in Africa due to AIDS."

"It was as if I fell off the donkey on the Damascus road because I had no clue. I didn't know one single orphan." For days afterward, she was haunted by that fact: 12 million orphans.
Unable to block it from her mind, Kay began to get mad at God, praying, "Leave me alone. Even if it is true, what can I do about it? I'm a white, suburban soccer mom. There is nothing I can do." But that did no good.

After weeks, then months of anguish, she realized she faced a fateful choice. She could either pretend she did not know about the HIV/AIDS pandemic or she could become personally involved.

"I made a conscious choice to say, 'Yes.' I had a pretty good suspicion that I was saying yes to a bucket load of pain. In that moment, God shattered my heart. He just took my heart and put it through a woodchip machine. My heart came out on the other side in more pieces than I could gather back up in my arms.

"It changed the direction of my life. I will never be the same. Never. I can never go back. I became a seriously disturbed woman."

Through this period, Kay said nothing to her husband. Warren's 2002 book, The Purpose-Driven Life, had in a matter of months skyrocketed into national bestseller status. Selling at up to 1 million copies per month, it has been the best-selling new book in the world since 2003. With that title and his earlier one, The Purpose-Driven Church, Warren has sold 26 million books.

Warren says when his wife finally told him God was calling her to the front lines of ministry against HIV/AIDS in Africa, he responded, saying, "That's great, honey. I'm going to support you. It's not my vision."

"But nothing is as strong as pillow talk," he added. "God used my wife to grab my heart."

In 2003, Bruce Wilkinson, The Prayer of Jabez author now ministering in Johannesburg, South Africa, invited the Warrens to help lead an HIV/AIDS conference with his own wife, Darlene. The Warrens agreed to go. He led a Purpose Driven conference for 90,000 African pastors, using digital satellite downlinks.

After it was over, Warren said to his hosts, "Take me out to a village. I want to meet some pastors." They took him to Tembisa, a huge and desperately poor township outside Johannesburg. Local evangelists there often plant new congregations, using large blue-and-white striped tents. In many instances, homeless widows and orphans live in the tent during the week and also worship there on Sundays.

When Warren arrived, the tent church pastor boldly walked up to him, saying, "I know who you are. You're Pastor Rick."

"How in the world do you know who I am!" Warren exclaimed.

"I get your sermons every week."

The pastor told Warren that once a week he walks 90 minutes to a post office with an internet connection. He downloads Warren's sermons from Pastors.com and preaches them on Sundays.

"You are the only training I have ever had."

Cut to the heart, Warren says, "I burst into tears. I thought, I will give the rest of my life for guys like that—the real heroes out in the bush." That night, Warren sat under the African sky and prayed, "God, what are the other problems that you want to tackle?" Warren told CT, "God gets the most glory when you tackle the biggest giants. When David takes on Goliath, God gets glory. What are the problems so big that no one can solve them?"

Around this time, Warren says he was driven to reexamine Scripture with "new eyes." What he found humbled him. "I found those 2,000 verses on the poor. How did I miss that? I went to Bible college, two seminaries, and I got a doctorate. How did I miss God's compassion for the poor? I was not seeing all the purposes of God.

"The church is the body of Christ. The hands and feet have been amputated and we're just a big mouth, known more for what we're against." Warren found himself praying, "God, would you use me to reattach the hands and the feet to the body of Christ, so that the whole church cares about the whole gospel in a whole new way—through the local church?"

Warren had 18 pages of notes from his trip and began further developing a conceptual framework for his emerging vision. He described the problems that harm billions of people around the world as the "global giants."

Warren labeled the five giants:
1) Spiritual emptiness. "[People] don't know God made them for a purpose."
2) Egocentric leadership. "The world is full of little Saddams. Most people cannot handle power.
It goes to their heads."
3) Poverty. "Half the world lives on less than $2 per day."
4) Disease. "We have billions of people dying from preventable disease. That's unconscionable."
5) Illiteracy. "Half the world is functionally illiterate."

Next, Warren, an incurable lover of slogans and acrostics, wrote out an acrostic, peace, to match up against each of the five global giants:
1) Plant new churches, or partner with existing ones.
2) Equip leaders.
3) Assist the poor.
4) Care for the sick.
5) Educate the next generation.

Finally, Warren, whose Purpose Driven curriculum has trained 400,000 pastors from 162 nations, decided to put at the heart of the PEACE plan the local church and its members. "Every revival and spiritual awakening in history starts with the peasants, not with the kings. It starts with average, ordinary people," Warren says. "There are not enough superstars to win the world. It has to be done by average people."

"There are millions and millions of local churches around the world and now we have the technology to network them." This mobilization strategy, Warren says, also incorporates two ideas from Luke 10. Individuals would be sent out in teams, and on entering a village, they would seek "a man of peace."

"Find the man of peace. Bless him. He blesses you back. Who is the man of peace? He's influential and he's open. He doesn't have to be a Christian. Find a non-Christian who's influential and open—a Muslim or an atheist."

Eventually, Warren hopes to expand the PEACE plan to the more than 37,,000 otherPurpose-Driven churches around the nation. "I believe God gets the most glory when you tacklethe biggest problems," says Warren, "so I've decided to use the influence and affluence from mybook to help the poor and oppressed. Kay and I intend to spend the rest of our lives doing that."He is a man who, having discovered the purpose of his life, has made a success out of givingpurpose to thousands of others.

Rwanda: A Country abandoned by the World, adopted by the Church
Foreign Policy magazine put together a failed-states index, focusing on 60 nations. In the top 20, there were 11 African countries at the highest risk, including Rwanda. Eleven years after the genocide, Rwandans are still burying victims and putting suspects on trial. Deaths from HIV/AIDS and the genocide have created within Rwanda one of the world's greatest concentrations of orphaned children. Rebels cluster on Rwanda's western edge, maiming and killing civilians. Democracy is limited and economic growth is spread unevenly.

But something unexpectedly spiritual is happening in Rwanda. William Beasley, a Chicago-area Anglican pastor, has been working with Rwandan Anglicans since 1998 and sees leaders converging their resources in new ways. "A country that was abandoned by the world has been adopted by the church," he says.

Mark Amstutz, an international relations professor at Wheaton College in Illinois, visited Rwanda this summer to study the gacaca village tribunals. He says something spiritual is happening globally as well as in Rwanda. "Social scientists have it wrong. The world is not becoming more secular. It is becoming more religious.

"If there is going to be peace, it is going to be because religious people are contributing to moderation, tolerance, and conflict resolution."

After Rwanda's President Kagame read The Purpose-Driven Life, he wrote Warren saying, "I am a purpose-driven man." He invited Warren and others to the capital, Kigali. "I fell in love with the country,"

Warren says. "I say, 'Lord, help me find out what you are blessing and help me get in on it.' I think God is blessing Rwanda."

Warren and Rwanda's leaders jointly came up with the idea of Rwanda becoming the "world's first purpose-driven nation."

For six days in mid-July, American evangelicals were dispatched nationwide via military helicopters and suvs. Warren christened this effort as launch: Listen and learn. Assess the biggest needs. Uncover and utilize the "man of peace." Nurture a coalition. Conduct leadership training. Hold a national rally.

During the day, Americans visited genocide sites, child-headed households, classrooms, medical clinics, schools, and churches. Each evening, Rwandans, including Anglican Archbishop Emmanuel Kolini, sponsored lavish dinners, and American evangelicals got their first exposure to roasted goat and traditional Rwandan dance with Christian lyrics.

"Rwanda touches something very deep inside of me," Kay Warren says. "There's just something about this bruised and battered country that's gotten under my skin."

Rwandan Christians were sorting out their feelings and discovered their enthusiasm was mixed with worry. One well-educated Rwandan leader told me, "One reality that we have to face here is when a leader speaks, we follow even if we are not convinced." Public support for the PEACE plan may not translate well long term to the grassroots, he said.

Others are more skeptical still. As Wolfe put it, "It has taken centuries for Rwandans to descend into the hell in which they exist. Not even becoming a purpose-driven nation is likely to bring them to heaven anytime soon."

But Warren, in a reference to the genocide, told Rwandan pastors, "If the Devil gives you problems about your past, you remind him of his future." Anglican Bishop John Rucyahana, who has probably worked more closely with Americans than any other Rwandan Christian, says, "I praised the Lord having the PEACE plan come from Saddleback. You know God is doing something when people in different places get the same idea before they are connected. It's not just our idea. It's our vision."

Kay Warren, during a follow-up phone interview from her home in Orange County, said she had first come to Rwanda looking for the "monster" killers responsible for the genocide. But everyone looked average to her.

"Average people became monsters and let evil reign in their lives for a while. That means that I, too, could become a monster given the right circumstances." She says it's a lesson she could only have learned in Rwanda.

She also told me she's searched diligently for that life-changing 2002 magazine article, but has failed to find it. The pebble disappeared, but the ripples live on. Later this year and in 2006, Saddleback expects to send out other PEACE plan teams to Rwanda and elsewhere worldwide, as their prototype is further tested in the field.

Stewardship of Affluence & Influence Seminar held at TCC, 7 July 2006
"To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some. I do all this for the sake of the gospel, that I may share in its blessings. Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only 1 gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize. Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training. They do it to get a crown that will not last; but we do it to get a crown that will last forever. Therefore I do not run like a man running aimlessly; I do not fight like a man beating the air. No, I beat my body and make it my slave so that after I have preached to others, I myself will not be qualified for the prize." 1 Cor 9:22-27

The purpose of influence and affluence is to stick out for others who enjoys little or none of these blessings.

Rick Warren's 2002 book, The Purpose-Driven Life, had in a matter of months skyrocketed into national bestseller status. Selling at up to 1 million copies per month, it has been the best-selling new book in the world since 2003, together with his earlier book 'The Purpose Driven Church' hit a combined total of 26 million copes sold worldwide.

Because of the millions in book sales, the Warrens all of a sudden had become wealthy. Warren's celebrity status also catapulted almost overnight, and he is ranked as the second most influential evangelical after evangelist Billy Graham among surveyed pastors.

With this newfound affluence and influence, the couple says they made five decisions: They did not upgrade their lifestyle. Warren stopped taking a paycheck from Saddleback. He repaid 25 years of his salary to the church he founded in 1980. They created three charitable foundations. They started "reverse tithing," meaning they live on 10 percent of their income and give away 90 percent.

"Giving" said the big American in his sermon service at TCC that evening, "is the only antidote to materialism. Giving, breaks the grips of materialism; of being attached to the physical things of this world." For the past 31 years, Rick has been contesting with God in the area of giving. And you know what, Rick was defeated again, and again and again. Everytime, Rick was outgiven by the One calls Himself the Provider.

"It's gratitude for what He has done for me that carries me forward." Rick continued. "Not out of duty, fear, fame or other people's praises."

From Scriptures, we see God uses small, insignificant and imperfect men and women to accomplish great things. If God can use those grumbling, doubtful bunch of folks who disappointed and sinned and then asked for forgiveness, He can certainly use YOU too. Becoz Rick volunteered and want to be a part of God's blessings, he expected God to use him. According to your faith, it will be done unto you too.