Rick Warren, pastor of Saddleback Church, in Lake Forest, Calif., and author of
The Purpose Driven Life, which has sold 25-million copies, is perhaps
the most famous evangelical pastor in America. He writes often about church
growth, leadership, and related issues. Here's something Warren wrote for the
Mar. 16, 2004, "Leadership Journal":
"Three key responsibilities of every pastor are to discern where (and
how) God's Spirit is moving in our culture and time, prepare your congregation
for that movement, and cooperate with it to reach people Jesus died for. I
call it 'surfing spiritual waves' in The Purpose Driven Church, and
it's the reason Saddleback has grown to 23,500 on weekends in 24 years ....
You don't criticize a wave; you just ride it as best you can. When Mel Gibson
showed me his film, The Passion of The Christ, last year, I ... knew a huge
wave -- a spiritual tsunami -- would hit when the film debuted on February 25
[2004], and we began praying and preparing to surf it."
When I read this passage, I was taken aback. The celebrity name dropping,
the appeal to size as an indication of God's blessing, the propagation of an
extra-biblical theory ("spiritual waves") as a sign of God's working,
the pre-emptive strike against critics -- these are heresies and logical
fallacies pervasive in the evangelical church today, all rolled into a single
paragraph.
Warren continues:
"We booked 47 theater screens for members to take their lost friends to.
Kay [Warren, Rick's wife] and I personally invited over a thousand lost
community leaders of Orange County to a VIP premiere showing, including every
mayor, congressman, superintendent of schools, other community leaders, and
four billionaires. The results? Over 600 unchurched community leaders attended
our VIP showing; 892 friends of members were saved during the two-week sermon
series. Over 600 new small groups were formed, and our average attendance
increased by 3,000. That's catching a wave!"
When I read this, I wondered: Even setting aside the theological and
philosophical problems, how could these numbers possibly be true? There was
something about them that just didn't make sense. So I turned to Outreach magazine,
which each year publishes lists of the largest and fastest growing churches.
The 2005 list (which covered the period about which Warren writes) had
Saddleback's weekly attendance at 23,194. The 2006 "Outreach" list
had Saddleback at 20,595. That's a drop of nearly 3,000. And -- at least
according to these numbers, which were reported to Outreach by the
church itself -- at no time did Saddleback have the 23,500 that Warren
asserted.
|
