Washington National Cathedral

Lloyd: Well, good morning, and welcome to the Sunday Forum, where week by week we are exploring what it means to be Christians in the 21st century, where the church is going, and exploring especially the important work of reconciliation in these very divided times.

I’m delighted to have as our guest today someone who is called by many the most significant pastor certainly in America and maybe in the world these days, Rick Warren. Time magazine calls him America’s pastor. His church is a modest church of some 80,000, Saddleback Church in California. It’s great to have him in our cozy small church this morning. But Rick Warren has preached across the world and around the world to tens of thousands of people in sports stadiums, in fact.

But he’s become one of the most thoughtful and creative leaders in the Christian church in the world, and has a lot, I think, to tell us about where the church is and where God seems to be calling the church to go. Rick, it’s just great to have you here today.

Warren: Thank you, Dean, and I love the National Cathedral. It’s a real honor to be here. So many things have happened in this place that I’ve sat out there and been a part of watching. So it’s a little unusual to be sitting here on stage, and say, “Hi everybody.”

Lloyd: Well, tell us. How did you get started? Give us a brief snapshot of your getting going in Saddleback, California.

Warren: I’m actually a fourth-generation pastor. My father, my grandfather, my great-grandfather was converted to Christianity under Charles Spurgeon in London, England, was sent to the United States as a pastor. So I grew up in the church. When I was finishing up my doctorate, I was back in Texas, and I was finishing seminary. And I decided to do a study of the largest churches in America. And I personally wrote to the one hundred largest churches of all different denominations. And I asked them a series of questions. One of the things I discovered was that churches that tend to be healthy, tend to be strong, tend to make an impact in the community, the pastor stays put for an extended period of time. A church that changes pastors every two or three years is like a family that gets a new daddy every couple years, and the kids would be schizophrenic. So as a young kid, a 24-, 25-year-old, I said, “Lord, I’m willing to go anywhere in the world if you let me spend my entire life in one parish, in one congregation.”

And to make a long story short, we prayed about a number of areas. In January, actually this week, 28 years ago, we started Saddleback Church in southern California. We moved to southern California with no money, no members, no building. I didn’t know a single person in the area we were moving to. I just felt like this was where I was supposed to go.

I remember telling my wife, Kay, I said, “I think, honey, we’re supposed to start a church in southern California, with no money, no members, no building, no anything. What do you think about that?” She did what you just did. She laughed. She said, “Well, it scares me to death, but I trust God and I trust you. I believe in you, so let’s go.”

And we arrived at four o’clock in the afternoon in the LA basin, right in the middle of rush hour traffic, wall-to-wall traffic. Now you need to realize I’m a country boy. I was raised in a little village of less than five hundred people. And when I saw all that traffic in LA I said, “God, you got the wrong guy. What am I doing here?”

We pulled off an off ramp into a real estate office. I walked in. Had a realtor named Don Dale. I said, “I’m 25 years old. My name is Rick Warren. I’m here to start a church. I don’t have any money, and I need a place to live.” And he laughed.

And to make a long story short, within two hours he found us a condo. We signed the papers on it. He got us the first month free, and that man became the first member of my church. We were going there and I said, “Hey Don, you go to church anywhere?” And he said, “No, I hate church.” I said, “Great, you’re my first member.”

And we started with seven people, and that’s how we got started.

Lloyd: And you were building a church for people who don’t like church?

Warren: Right. What I did for twelve weeks, I went door to door in Southern California, and I asked people, “Why do you think most people don’t attend church? If you were looking for a church, what kind of things would you look for? What advice would you give to me?” And I just listened for twelve weeks. Then this little group that I’d started in our home had grown to about fifteen people. We hand addressed and hand stamped, the fifteen of us, 15,000 letters, and mailed it out to the community. We started on Easter Sunday. Public service. It was 1980. So fast-forward that to Easter this year. We have a 128-acre campus. We did seventeen Christmas services. I preached twelve of them. We had about 45,000 in attendance. The rest is history.

Lloyd: Now you’re in a place where on a Sunday on your 120-acre campus you’ll have about 20,000 people. But you also say that’s the least important part of your church life. Now explain that.

Warren: One of the big myths about large churches in America is what happens on the weekend is the important part. It’s the least, actually, important part. It’s the funnel. But these “mega-churches”—actually all that gets reported is the weekend services. That’s the tip of the iceberg. Ninety-five percent of the church is under water. You don’t see it. For instance, we have over four hundred ministries to the community that go out to the poor, the sick, the needy, those in prison, the retarded, every kind of ministry you can imagine, to every age and stage of life.

Saddleback Church is built on a system of small groups. We meet in homes every week for Bible study, for prayer, for support and encouragement, and we have right now 3,600 small groups. And that’s the real church, and they’re spread out from Santa Monica to Carlsbad. It’s a hundred-mile distance. We actually have them in every city in Southern California. They meet every single week. We actually have more people that meet in small groups than come on the weekend. At a typical weekend we’ll have 20- to 22,000. Meeting in the homes during the week, we’ll have around 30,000.

I could drop dead right now and the church would keep growing because it’s not built on me. I actually only preach there half the year, 26 weeks, and the rest of the time I have other teaching pastors. Over 13,000 lay ministers in the church that are certified that make the church run.

Lloyd: What’s going on in those small groups?

Warren: In the small groups we do five things. We worship. We fellowship. We grow spiritually. We minister to each other and to the community, and we reach out and share the Good News. I call this the DNA of the church. The five purposes based on the Great Commandment and great commission: Love God with all your heart. That’s worship. Love your neighbor as yourself. That’s ministry. Go and make disciples. That’s outreach or evangelism. Teach them to do everything that I’ve commanded you. That’s discipleship. And baptize them into the body of Christ. That’s fellowship.

So we say for a cell to be healthy it has to have all the DNA of the church, and it can’t just do Bible study. It can’t just do ministry. It has to do all five things.

Lloyd: Then when you bring them together on Sunday, it won’t be for any kind of service that an Episcopalian would probably recognize? Rock band?

Warren: Actually, we have probably, I think, 22 different styles of worship in our church. We have one main auditorium, but then at the same time, across our campus we have other services. It’s the same sermon. Same Bible teaching, but the music is different. I can’t get my family to agree on music. So how could I get an entire church to agree on it? I don’t know if you’ve figured this out, but God likes variety. I once took a survey in our church. I said, “Write down the call letters of the station you listen to.” And it was all across the board. So now we have a service with gospel music, black gospel choir. We have a service with jazz. We have a service with actual island music, reggae. We have a contemporary service. We have a classical. We have a traditional hymn service. So it’s kind of like when you go to a theatre and you say, “Now showing in this theatre and this theatre...” It’s the same teaching, but it’s multiple venues. And that has allowed us to reach out to all kinds of people.

Lloyd: And you’ve produced amazing generosity. I was reading about a remarkable time when you needed to raise some money for some projects and you entered into what you called an invited and extend the vision offering. Turned up one Sunday. Said we need money. No consultants. No gimmicks. Just said, “Folks, you need to give.” Ask people to put into a plate what they could and that day, $7 million in cash was in the plate, and $53 million committed in the plate. Could you tell us your secret, please? We need just about that amount of money around here.

Warren: We do zero fundraising in our church.

Lloyd: This is on top of tithing.

Warren: We don’t do fundraising. We don’t do fund promotion. We teach stewardship education, and we teach it all the time. God has taught me how to be a giver. Actually, I’m a reverse thither. Over the years Kay and I, when we got married we began tithing ten percent of our income. At the end of the first year of our marriage we raised it to 11 percent. At the end of the second year we raised it to 12 percent. End of the third year we raised it to 13 percent… Now, this isn’t in the Bible. It’s just something we wanted to do to stretch our faith each year, and we never told anybody about this for thirty years. Today we’ve been married 32 years, and Kay and I are reverse tithers. We give away ninety percent and we live on ten. And I have played this game with God for 32 years where God says “You give to me and I’ll give you to and we’ll see who wins.” And I have lost that game for 32 years.

So I’ve taught my church to be generous. When Katrina hit, I stood up and made an announcement, “We need to help Katrina,” and they gave in the offering $1.7 million above their tithes. When the tsunami hit, I said, “We need to help the tsunami.” And they gave $1.6 million, just on the basis of an announcement. We don’t do promotion. We just teach the value of generosity in our lives.

Lloyd: And it’s had quite an impact. When you wrote A Purpose-Driven Life, you say that marked a real shift in your own life and ministry, because all of a sudden you had one of the biggest, best sellers in history on your hands, an enormous amount of financial resources. But about the same time you began to look at your ministry as something beyond just building this powerful church in Saddleback.

Warren: Right. When I started Saddleback I had three (and I still have three) personal goals for my life. One is about responsibility. One is about credibility, and one is about civility. My goal in life is to restore personal responsibility in individual lives. And this has to do with helping people find their purpose that God created them for, find their meaning in life and live life with a sense of stewardship. That it’s all God’s and we’re just managers of it. Every area of life. Our relationships, our opportunities, our planet. Everything is a gift of stewardship. Then I want to restore credibility to the church. Part of my feeling is that, for the last fifty years, the hands and the feet of the body of Christ have been cut off, and we’ve just been a big mouth. Usually we’re known more for what we talk about than about what we do. And usually we’re known more, at least evangelicals are known more, for what they’re against than what they’re for. And I’m just tired of that. And I intend to change it.

I believe that even the term evangelical, that brand of our faith—we have orthodox, we have main line and we have Catholics, and all of us are in the same faith, but our brand that has been co-opted by politics. And I’m actually opposed to that. I think, people ask me all the time, “are you left wing or right wing?” I say, “I’m for the whole bird.” I say, “‘I’m for the left wing and for the right wing; have you ever seen a bird with one wing? It can’t fly. You got one wing, you fly around in a circle.”

And the fundamental truth is Washington needs both wings. If you only have one wing you just go in a circle. And I don’t agree with either wing all the time. So I have friends who are Democrats and I have friends who are Republicans, and I’m for my friends. And I’m an American.

That leads into the civility issue. And that is, our civilization is losing its civility. We’ve just become quite rude. Just because you disagree with somebody doesn’t give you the right to demonize them. They are a human being, they’re created in the image of God. Tolerance used to mean that I respect you and I treat you with dignity as a human being even though I disagree with you. I just treat you with respect.

Today tolerance has changed to mean that all ideas are equally valid. I don’t believe that at all. I mean the person who says the sun revolves around the moon and the moon revolves around the sun; they’re both not right. There are some things that are right and there are some things that are wrong. But in America, because we believe in pluralism… I just got back from Davos, and the reason my voice is a little sore is I spoke at the World Economic Forum all this week and I did a plenary session with Tony Blair on faith and modernity. In that I told these business leaders, if you’re going to be a global business leader, you need to understand that the future of the world is not secularism. It’s religious pluralism. You may not like it, but I’m sorry, that’s it. The world is becoming more religious, not less. Christianity is growing around the world at a rapid pace to conversion, and Islam is growing at a rapid rate due to births. Both of those are growing quite fast, and we’re going to have to minister in a context where we’ve got to learn how to live together and get along and build bridges.

So this issue of civility, I mean even, Sam, this idea of a Forum is a terrific idea. I’m going to copy and steal it and call it my idea at Saddleback.

You know, by the way, how you do this is, the first time you quote me, you say, “Now Rick Warren says.” The second time you use it say, “It’s been said.” And the third time you use it you say, “You know I’ve always thought…” You see, originality is just the art of concealing your source. It’s forgetting where you got it. I heard about a guy who said he’s going to be original or nothing, and he was both.

Lloyd: You were talking about a second reformation in the church. Tell us about that.

Warren: Five hundred years ago we had of course the first Reformation, and it was about what do we believe. I think we need a second Reformation in the church about how we behave. I think the first Reformation was about creeds. I think a second Reformation needs to be about deeds. We know what we believe. The problem is we just don’t do what we believe. If Christians of all stripes—mainline, evangelical, Catholic, Orthodox, Pentecostal, whatever—if Christians of all stripes would actually practice what we know Jesus taught, what we believe, the world would be an incredibly different place.

So we need to focus not on what the church knows, but what is the church doing? That’s why I say, reattach the hands and the feet. This kind of a Reformation is actually more of a mobilization. For the last four years we’ve been working on a program called the Peace Plan at Saddleback, where we’ve been promoting reconciliation, equipping leaders, ethical leaders, assist the poor, care for the sick and educate the next generation. I’ve had these small groups. We send them out in small groups around the world. We’ve had over 7,760 of my members who have gone overseas in the last three years on their own money to serve, to promote reconciliation, to equip ethical leadership, to assist the poor, care for the sick, and educate the next generation. I’ve had them in 68 countries.

And what we’re going to do is, we’ve been testing prototypes of this, and we’ve learned a thousand ways that don’t work. But we did learn two or three dozen ways that do work. This year, 2008, we’re going to release it to any church that wants to do it.

Lloyd: You’re saying these days that the church is the most powerful force in the world in addressing the world’s biggest problems of global poverty?

Warren: Absolutely.

Lloyd: Tell us why.

Warren: That’s one of the reasons I went to Davos. I’ve gone to Davos for a number of years and I kept hearing world leaders talk about, in order to deal with these issues of poverty and disease and illiteracy the millennial goals and things like that, we need public and private partnerships. And when I hear that I say, “You’re right. But you’re not completely right. You’re two-thirds the way there but you’re missing the third leg of the stool.” A one-legged stool will fall over. A two-legged stool will fall over. In order to solve the world’s greatest problems, it takes three sectors of society, not two. Not just government and business. Not just public and private. It takes public, private, and faith. It takes government. It takes businesses. It takes churches. I call it “public, profit, and parish.” That all three legs of the stool work together.

And here’s the reason why. Government has a role that only government can play. And there are a lot of good things that government should do. Government sets agenda. Government sets priorities. It gives national direction. It does a lot of good things. There’s a role for government. Business has a role attacking world’s problems. Business brings expertise. It brings capitalization. It brings investment. And very important, it brings management skills. Because most businesses, most government, and most churches are poorly managed.

But the church brings four things to the table that government and business will never have. And we will never solve these big problems without these four things. Number one, the church has universal distribution. I could take you to ten million villages around the world and the only thing in it is a church. They don’t have a school. They don’t have a clinic. They don’t have a government. They don’t have a post office. They don’t have a business. But they’ve got a church. The church is the most widely distributed organization in the world. I told them at Davos the church was global two hundred years before anybody started talking about globalization. It is the only truly global organization in the world.

The church is in more countries than the United Nations. We speak more languages than the United Nations. We’re in at least two thousand more people-groups, more than the United Nations. Nothing compares to the distribution size of the church.

There are six hundred million Buddhists in the world. There are eight hundred million Hindus in the world. There are a billion Muslims in the world. But there are 2.3 billion Christians in the world. That means if you take people of faith out of the equation you’ve ruled out most of the world. The actual number of seculars in the world is actually quite small outside of Europe and Manhattan. Most people have some kind of faith. And they’re very dear about that faith.

Not only do we have the greatest distribution as the church. We have the most manpower. Nobody can compare the volunteer manpower army of the church. Hundreds of millions of people serve their community through their church on a weekly basis. If here in America we were to cut out all the social service that the church provides in America, I have no doubt that within three months America would go bankrupt. All the soup kitchens. All the recovery programs. All the hospitals. All the things that the church brings to the table. We jut don’t realize how much they bring to society.

So we have the most distribution. We have the most manpower. The third thing we have is we have local credibility. When you got into a village, the people trust that pastor, that priest, or for that matter, if it’s a Muslim country, an imam and a rabbi, they trust that pastor/priest more than they trust any government, any business leader, or even me as a pastor coming in from the outside. Because that guy is there, or that woman is there, caring for the sick, helping the poor, they’re marrying, they’re burying, at every stage of life. In Africa they say the priest, the pastor, sleeps with the same blankets as the villagers.

In Rwanda where I’ve been working, one of the many countries where we’ve been working, when the genocide hit, all the NGOs left, all the governments left, but the church stayed during that period. Because you can’t talk about community development without talking about the church. Because the church is the community in most places around the world. Outside the capital, there isn’t any government in most countries.

And then the fourth thing we have is the church actually has the longest track record. We’ve been doing this for two thousand years, caring for the sick, helping the poor, dealing with the issues of life, educating the next generation. It is not an accident the first hospital and the first school in practically every country in the world were started by missionaries. Why? We have a preaching, teaching, and healing faith.

Microsoft has been around fifty years. America has been around two hundred years. The church has been around two thousand years. We have a track record that says, “We can do this.”

So I’ve been telling business and government and churches… Last year my team traveled around the world, we did 45,000 miles in 46 days. And in every country I met with the business leaders. I met with the government leaders and usually the presidents, and religious leaders. And I was saying, “Can we not follow that great theologian Rodney King? Can’t we all just get along?”

Lloyd: AIDS has been a very important part of your and your wife’s ministry. Could you give us just a word about how that became so central for you too?

Warren: The ministry to people with AIDS actually became because of my wife. I give her one hundred percent credit. As evangelicals, we say, “The husband is the head of the house, but the wife turns the head.” And boy, that’s true in my house. I say the most powerful language is pillow talk. The kind of language when you and your wife are laying there at night and you’re just talking between the two of you.

One of the things that happened to me about four years ago that really was a turning point for me was my wife got cancer. She had breast cancer. And one day while she was lying on the couch, she was reading a copy of either Time or Newsweek, and it said, “Fourteen million children orphaned by AIDS in Africa.” And it shocked my wife so much that she said, “I dropped the magazine on the ground.” And she said, “I have to admit first, I couldn’t imagine fourteen million kids being orphaned by anything, much less just one disease.” We now know there are 150 million orphans in the world. But she also said, “I have to admit I didn’t know a single orphan.”

And in that moment God spoke to my wife in her mind, and she said, “I think God is calling me to be a spokesman for people with HIV/AIDS.” And as she came to me and she talked to me she said, “I think this is what I am being called to do.” My first reaction was, “That’s great, babe. I’m happy for you. I support you one hundred percent. It’s not my calling. My calling is to build a model church and to train leaders.”

I’ve been training leaders for 27 years. I’ve trained over a half million pastors, a half million pastors from 162 countries. So I’ve been training leaders all my life, and I said, “This is what I do. You’re going to do this in AIDS.” But the more she talked about it, the more it grabbed my heart.

So about four years ago she was going to Africa to study how the churches minister to people with AIDS, because they know about it far more than we do here in America. So I went with her. And while I was there I did what I do. I train leaders. In Johannesburg I taught a seminar on leadership, and we simulcast to four hundred sites across the continent of Africa. And we had about eighty thousand lay leaders go through that particular training. And after it was over I thought, “Okay, I did what I do and Kay did what she did, and that’s it.”

But sometimes God is sneaky. Sometimes you think you’re going for one reason and God has another thing in mind. And what happened to me was I said, “Take me out to a village. I want to see a typical church.” So we got on a Jeep and we’re in South Africa and we went out in the middle of nowhere. We came upon this little village, and we came upon this little church that was just meeting in a tent. That’s all it was: it was a tent. And it was fifty adults and 25 kids orphaned by AIDS. Fifty adults caring for their own kids and 25 orphans who had lost their mommies and their daddies. And these kids are sleeping in the tent at night, in the church tent. They’re growing a garden and trying to feed the kids. They have a few schoolbooks. They’re trying to school the kids. And I thought, “This church is doing more to help the poor than my mega-church.” And that was like a knife in my heart.

And I said, “Something is going to change.”

And I got out of the car, and the young pastor walked around, a young African pastor, and looked at me and he said, “I know who you are.”

And I’m in the middle of nowhere.” I said, “How do you know who I am?” I had decided when I started Saddleback that I was never going to put Saddleback services on television because I didn’t want to be a televangelist. It’s just my style. It’s not my style. I don’t happen to like that. I said we’re just going to keep a low profile. And I did have a low profile until the book. Kinda blew my cover.

I said, “How do you know me?” I said, “I get your sermons every week. I download your sermons every week.” I said, “Wait a minute. How do you do that? You’re in a village with no water and no electricity. How are you downloading my sermons here in the middle of the jungle?” He said, “They’re putting the Internet in every post office in South Africa.” They’re called PITs, Public Information Terminal. So he said, “Once a week I walk an hour and a half to the nearest post office. I download your free sermon. I walk an hour and a half back, and I teach it to my people.” He said, “You know, Rick, you’re the only training I’ve ever had.”

When he said that, my heart broke.

And I said, I will give the rest of my life, whatever affluence or influence that God gives me, to help people like that. And I went out and I sat out under the African skies there in South Africa. And I said, Lord, what are the biggest problems in the world? What are—I call them the global giants, the global Goliaths. What are the biggest problems? The problems that affect not millions of people, but billions of people. And a lot of problems affect millions. And I started thinking of these 162 countries I had trained leaders in. And I kept seeing the same five problems over and over: Spiritual emptiness, egocentric leadership or corruption, poverty, disease, and illiteracy.

I call these the five global Goliaths. Spiritual emptiness. People don’t know their life matters. They don’t know they were made by God and for God, and until they understand their purpose in life, life doesn’t make sense. They don’t know there is more to life than here and now, that they’re made to last forever, that this life is a test. They don’t know the spiritual truths taught in God’s Word, the Bible. So they’re unfulfilled, even when they’re successful they’re unfulfilled.

Lloyd: Go through those quickly because I want to ask a question and then bounce…

Warren: Okay. Egocentric leadership is the hardest one. What I say about that is there are little Saddams everywhere. They’re in every academic setting. They’re in every church. They’re in every business. They’re in every government. Shoot, they’re in every homeowners’ association. You give a guy a little bit of power, and he turns into Stalin. “No, you can’t cut your grass that way.”

What I discovered is that most people do not have the spiritual maturity, and they do not have the character and the competence, to handle power. Most people begin in government and ministry and business generally wanting to serve other people. But somehow over time service turns into “serve us.” And all this stuff becomes about getting reelected. It becomes about feathering my nest. How many people can I get to serve me? And I kind of lose why I got into this in the first place.

And when you have those two—spiritual emptiness and a lack of ethical servant leadership in the world—we have all these other diseases, poverty, disease and illiteracy.

Lloyd: Very good, You got out of that. I want to ask one question and then we’re going to go to the questions from the floor. I’m struck by the vitality in your ministry, and the vitality that’s happening in a lot of mega-churches around the country at the same time that the mainline churches are struggling. They’re losing members; they’re involved in battles within themselves, but trying to figure out what kind of new thing God wants to create in their world. If you had just a brief insight into what it is you think that is so powerful at the heart of the ministry you’re involved in, it might be something the mainliners need to consider a little bit more. What would that be?

Lloyd: That’s a great question, Sam, and I would love to see a reformation in all of our mainline churches that they would just thrive again with great growth. We had a tragic split a hundred years ago. A hundred years ago when the first phrase “social gospel” came out, some people took that to mean we only need to reform the social structures of society and we don’t really need the personal faith in Christ anymore. If we just make the world a better place, we don’t need atonement and redemption and things like that. And sadly, Protestants split. Catholics never went through this split. But as Protestants, we went through this split. And the mainline churches went one way and the evangelical churches went another way. Today, they both need each other. There are things the evangelicals need from mainline, and I’ll talk about that in just a second. And there are things that the mainline need from evangelicals.

What happened is when they split it was almost like—this is an oversimplification—I admit it—but it’s almost like the mainline said, we’re going to take society and the body, and it’s like evangelicals said, we’re going to take personal salvation and the family. That’s an oversimplification. But in many ways, it was the mainline churches said, we’re going to focus on a social morality, racism, economic justice, poverty issues, equality, and all of these things—social morality. And the evangelicals said, we’re going to take personal morality and we’re going to deal with pornography and personal salvation and building up strong families and faith in Christ and things like that. Well, who’s right?

The fact is, I believe they both were. And I think it was a detriment to the church that somehow we got divided, as if Jesus didn’t care about society or as if, if you had a great society it didn’t need Jesus. I believe, personally, you need both. And I would love to see bridges built together. And I love this Forum where you’re bringing in people from different kinds of backgrounds looking at reconciliation. The reconciliation is the fact that in a pluralistic world, where we now have many other major religions vying for attention, Christians certainly, of all people, don’t need to be divided. We need to be on the same team because we share the same Savior, and Jesus said, “Love God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.” They’re both important. You can’t just love your neighbor. You got to love God. And you can’t just love God. You’ve got to love your neighbor.

And mainline Protestants and evangelical Protestants need to learn that we need both wheels.

Lloyd: Question from the floor.

While people are coming, here’s another quick question that came in over the Internet. Question from Alan T. Baker here in Washington, which is: Which Old Testament person and New Testament person, apart from Jesus, do you most respect and strive to imitate?

Warren: Well, New Testament, no doubt bout it, it’s Paul. Because he had this commitment to the whole world. When I started Saddleback Church at 25 and I committed to give forty years there, I thought, how do I divide up forty years of ministry without getting bored? And so really the first ten years, the eighties, were kind of our local decade. I focused on building a strong, healthy church in the southern California area that reached out and ministered to all areas of the community. So the 80s were our local decade.

The 90s were our national decade. So now we’re going to go national. We began starting training pastors. I’ve trained over two hundred thousand pastors here in America during the 90s through the Purpose-Driven Church Book, Purpose-Driven Church Seminar, Purpose-Driven Life. We have a number of campaigns. Forty Days of Purpose. Forty Days of Community. We’ve developed resources to help churches, congregations. It doesn’t matter what denomination.

And now in the 21st century we’ve been going global, basically since the year 2000. And most of my ministry really, if I’m not at my church, I’m pretty much overseas working with third world countries. There are about 2.1 million pastors in third world developing countries; 1.9 million of them have had no training at all. So we need to help those people. So Paul would be a good example.

In the Old Testament, I’d just have to say Elijah because the guy was fearless. He was courageous.

Lloyd: Here we go.

Q: Good morning, Mr. Warren. And thank for you coming to the National Cathedral. My name is Reeve Scott. I’m a student at Georgetown University and a member of the Carroll Fellows Initiative, a three-and-a-half-year seminar to teach us leadership skills, to Georgetown students. As a prominent leader of the faith-based community, how do you measure your own impact on that community and the world to which it speaks?

Warren: Well, leadership first. I was just at Georgetown a couple weeks ago. I was with Jack DiGioia in Davos, and about a month ago we brought into Georgetown three leading imams, we brought in three leading rabbis, we brought in three leading Catholic priests, and we brought in three evangelical pastors and sat around a round table and said, “Now what can we do about AIDS? Okay, we’re never going to agree on all the details and different things, but what why don’t we work where we work?”

I’m not so much interested in interfaith dialogue. I’m interested in interfaith projects. Let’s stop talking. Let’s do something together. And so I said, “Now look, all of our faiths, whether you’re Muslim or you’re Catholic or you’re Jewish or your evangelical, or whatever you are,” I said, “We all agree, for instance, adultery is wrong. You ought to be faithful to your spouse. And we all agree that it would be best if you saved sex for marriage. That would cut out about eighty percent of AIDS in the world. So about if we start with that?” And we began to work on issues.

I believe in the separation of church and state, completely. I do not believe in the separation of religion and politics. You can’t separate them. I believe in the separation of church and state because I believe wherever you have state-sponsored religion, it dies. And a good example of that is where I just was, in Europe. In many places, the church has died because of the government sponsorship. I do not believe in a theocracy. I believe in pluralism. I believe in free market society. And I believe in a free market, may the best idea win. I do not believe in coercion, but I do believe in persuasion.

So what is the role of the faith community in the world? Those things I just talked about. Doing the things that government and business cannot do, but working together.

Now here’s the problem in working together. I have found the faith community more willing to work with businesses and more willing to work with government than the government and business is wanting to work with them. And there is this fear that, “Well, what is your motivation for doing good? Don’t you want to just convert people?”

Everybody has a motivation. I don’t care what your motivation is as long as you do good.

For instance, you might have a political motivation for doing good. I happen to be a member of the Council of Foreign Relations. We know, for instance, it’s good foreign policy to do health care in other countries. When you help other countries get well, they tend to like you. If somebody is sick in another country and you help them get well, they tend to go, “We like America.” There’s a political motivation for health care. It’s not my motivation, but it’s not a wrong one. It’s a good motivation.

Then some people do good for profit motivations. Businesses say, “We’re going to make drugs and make a lot of money at the same time—save lives and make money.” Fine with me. In fact, I wish more companies would do that. I wish more companies would make a lot of money and do good at the same time. That’s not a bad motivation. Profit motivation. Nothing is sustainable unless it makes a profit. It’s not my motivation, but it’s a good one.

You might have a personal motivation for helping people. You might say, “I have cancer, so I want to help people with cancer.” Or “I had a brother who died of AIDS, so I want to help people who are dying of AIDS.” Fine. It’s not my motivation, but it’s a good one.

My motivation is, I have a Savior who said, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus Christ said, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” That’s my motivation, but it doesn’t have to be yours for me to work with you.

Q: Bless you, Rick Warren. I love what you say about respect and dignity in ministry and building bridges. Here in Washington, DC, we have a Unity Walk where we have leaders of all the different faiths come together and go down Embassy Row. It’s broadcast around the world. Some of the people who speak at it are right in the front row. But what struck me so much is moving beyond religious dialogue and interfaith dialogue into works. I’d like to talk to you later about the Unity Walk, but I’d like to examine…

Lloyd: We need a question.

Q: Sure. What are the ways we can come together in service, people of different religions, so as to avert, God forbid any religious wars in the future?

Warren: Well, I would just say any of the five things I just mentioned in what we call the Peace Plan that we’ve been working on promoting reconciliation, we can certainly work on that one. We’re trying to do some of that right now. Okay? Equipping servant leaders, empowering ethical leadership. We can work on that together. We can work on assisting the poor, caring for the sick, educating the next generation. Last year, one of the countries I was in was Syria. I met with the grand mufti, the leading imam of Syria, and I explained the peace plan to him, and he stuck out his hand and he said, “I’m in. Count me in.” That’s stuff we can work on.

Lloyd: Thank you. Next question.

Q: Yes, my name is Hosiah Huggins, Jr. I’m a local business person, and I wanted to take a moment and have you share a story with me because I have, and that is I really got to understand you when you told the story about your father. Would you take a moment and let this audience know that story. I am my father’s child. That’s my best weapon and secret in life. And when you told that story, that was very awesome.

Warren: My father was a pastor for fifty years. He never pastored a church of more than about 150 people. He was an average speaker, but he was an excellent man of character. Taught me more about life than anybody. He was a man of generosity, and in his lifetime he built over 150 church buildings all around the world at his expense. Took volunteer teams.

When Saddam pushed the Kurds into the northern Iraq area and the refugees were there, it was my father who took volunteers in and built the eight wells that kept those Kurds alive. When a church was fire bombed in Jerusalem, it was my father who went and rebuilt it. He’s been in Siberia, the North Pole and every continent. He died of cancer a few years ago.

The last week of my father’s life, he was delirious. He went into a delirious state. We had him in our home and he was lying in a bed, and he began to dream aloud, almost 24 hours a day. Now you can learn a lot about a man if you listen to his dreams. And I listened to my father talk aloud for an entire week, not once did he ever talk about the fact that he was a hero in World War II in the South Pacific. Not once did he ever talk about the books he’d read, the movies he’d gone to. Not once did he ever talk about going fishing, which he dearly loved. But he talked about the thing of his heart, which was building churches, natural church buildings for the poor all around the world.

On the night before my father died, I was sitting in the room with my niece and my wife and I. And my father became very agitated. He was in this dreamlike state, and he started trying to get out of bed. And my wife said, “Jimmy, you can’t get out of bed. You’re sick. You’re ill. You must stay in bed.” He was very frail. And he got very agitated. He kept trying to get out of bed, and my wife kept putting him down, and finally she said, “Jimmy, what do you want? What is it you need?” And he said, “I got to save one more for Jesus. I got to save one more for Jesus.” And he began to say this over and over, “Save one more for Jesus, save one more for Jesus. One more.”

I’m not making this up. I’m not exaggerating. He probably said it over a hundred times in the next hour. “Save one more for Jesus. One more. One more.”

And I’m sitting by my father’s bedside and tears are rolling down my face and I’m thanking God for that kind of spiritual heritage. And I put my head down, and my father lifted up his frail hand and he put it on my head like a blessing, like a Jewish or Christian blessing. And he said to me, “Save one more for Jesus. Save one more for Jesus.”

I intend for that to be the theme of the rest of my life. Because of Jesus Christ I have my past forgiven, I have a purpose for living, and I have a home in heaven. If I don’t share that, that’s criminal. If I knew the cure for AIDS or cancer and I don’t share it, I should be put in prison. But if I know how to help have their past forgiven, have a purpose for living and have a home in heaven, I am obligated to share it. I don’t share the Good News out of duty, but I do share it out of gratitude.

And if you want to understand Rick Warren, and there are a lot of things written about me that are simply absolutely false, they are simply lies. And if I spent all my time answering my detractors, I wouldn’t get anything done. But they’re just not true. But if you want to understand Rick Warren, you need to understand I am addicted to changed lives. And I have seen them over and over. At Saddleback Church we have baptized over twenty thousand new adult believers in the last ten years. The vast majority of people in our church had no religious background at all before they came. And I have seen lives transformed and marriages put back together. And that is at the root of everything I do.

Lloyd: One last, very brief, question.

Q: Thank you. I’m so glad, Rick, that you’re speaking about the need for a new reformation. I couldn’t agree with you more on that subject. In fact, I wrote an essay on that theme in particular using those words a year ago, a portion of which was read by the prominent and popular Christian author…

Lloyd: We need a question…

Q: Yes, I’m getting to it. The question is: You’ve outlined five basic problems in the world. I also h