I drove to Saddleback Church this morning - the Orange County megachurch home of Rick Warren, "America's pastor" and author of the megabestseller The Purpose-Driven Life. I've been up there twice before, and wondered what if anything might be at work beyond the clean-cut shopping-mall motivational-speaking "campus" with its many flavors of worship music and small groups to suit every taste and concern. I appreciated that the congregation was finding here something the cultural desert of Southern California doesn't offer: community, and a sense that you as an individual matter. The carefully controlled small group system seemed a brilliant way of shaping people's lives - but also liable eventually to empower dissent from Warren's message.Today's sermon (delivered by winsome teaching pastor Tom Holloday) was about "How to look forward to a new year," a smart topic and engagingly delivered. As ever, there was a handout with blanks for the audience to fill in (Let go of your worries; Adjust your expectations; Take a step in faith; Hold on to God's love) and Bible quotes from a variety of translations (the lilies of the field really lose their lustre in the New Living Translation!). Interestingly, many seemed to be from the books of the Bible Philips Jenkins says are more popular in the global south and generally ignored up here - Proverbs, Hebrews, James. Warren was on the vanguard of evangelical leaders reaching out to Africa - has he been affected by Southern Christianity?
The small bookstore had the thick new African Bible Commentary with a blurb on the front by Warren...And yet Warren's Christianity is attacked by other evangelicals for being feel-good and untheological, nothing like the concerns for healing and struggles against Satan and his devils of many African churches... or so I thought. Another book in the bookstore, also with a prominent blurb from Warren on the cover, opened my eyes: Restoring a nation's Foundations: Prayer Strategies and Action Plans by Jimmy and Carol Owens, published by Foursquare, a Pentecostal publisher. This book is all about the need for spiritual warfare to save America from the devil's dominion! On a page opened almost at random, co-author Jimmy describes a vision he had on the Capitol steps in Washington, DC: That dome is a symbol of the seat of government of the country I love. Then, like a bolt, the awareness hit me: it also represents the seat of the Prince of America, the very front lines of the battle for the soul of this nation. Here he and a hierarchy of persons without bodies are working tirelessly, trying to control the minds of government officials, staff workers, lobbyists, strategists, advisers and other people of influence. There are probably more demons and angels doing their work in that building than anywhere else in the country. (93) The book calls for spiritual warfare for the soul of a "country under attack, from both inside and out" whose "Christian foundations" have very nearly rotted away!
I've known that such books exist, but had not thought Rick Warren had anything to do with such thinking. Or even if he did (I wondered what was going on behind that genial façade, and noticed that Saddleback's statement of faith is considerably more conservative than their feel-good publications), I didn't think he'd go public. But here he promotes this view (Jimmy & Carol Owens' God-given message can shape the destiny of our nation and our world). The book is there in the book shop for Saddlebackers to discover. And Saddleback's current line-by-line Bible study is looking at Thessalonians and Ephesians to "[d]iscover the truth about our inheritance, being alive in Christ, and spiritual warfare [!]."
I'm not sure what to think, but I think I'm worried. Not about Satan and "persons without bodies," but about Warren and where he's leading his flocks.
