Washington National Cathedral

Deryl Davis: I’m Deryl Davis, producer of the Forum, and I’m sitting in this morning as guest host for Cathedral Dean Sam Lloyd, who’s away this week. Please join me as we welcome our special guest this morning, Ms. Kay Warren. (applause)

Kay describes herself as “seriously disturbed”—that is her own words, and you’re going to find out more about that in a few minutes. She said she got that way eight years ago by waking up to the global AIDS crisis and the suffering of millions of people living with or affected by AIDS in our country and around the world. Kay and her husband Rick Warren founded California Saddleback Church in 1980 out of their condominium, and it has since become one of the largest churches and most influential churches in America, and indeed in the world, but for the past eight or nine years Kay’s own ministry has focused on this AIDS crisis and how the global church can and must address it.

In 2004 she founded the HIV/AIDS Initiative at Saddleback Church, and a year later she launched the global summit on AIDS in the church, which draws religious leaders from around the world to discuss the AIDS crisis. Kay’s work with AIDS, with leprosy, poverty, and human trafficking has taken her to Africa, Southeast Asia, India, and many other countries, and in 2006 she was among eight women honored at the CNN Inspire Summit for these humanitarian efforts. She details these experiences in her most recent book, which is Say Yes To God, of which there are copies in our bookstore and will be copies after the Forum out in our west end, where Kay will be signing this morning. It’s about responding to God’s call wherever it may lead. Kay, thank you so much for joining us.

Kay Warren: Thank you. It’s a privilege.

Davis: I want to start by asking you to recount a story that you have told many times before, but it’s an important one, about how you and Rick had started this amazingly successful church, international ministry… Everything seemed to be going just right and suddenly you feel this strong sense that there’s something else I really should be doing. How did that come about?

Warren: Totally unexpected. I was reading a news magazine article in my living room one morning, drinking a cup of tea, just catching up on national events in this magazine, and I saw that there was this story on AIDS in Africa. I didn’t care at that moment about AIDS in Africa. I didn’t care about AIDS anywhere. I didn’t even know anything about AIDS.

But for some reason I was just compelled to read this article, and when I started reading it, it was accompanied by these graphic, horrible pictures. You know the kind of pictures that you just want to cover your eyes, or turn the channel… They’re just emaciated men and women, little children, and I couldn’t look at the pictures, but I just was determined to get through this article.

So what I did was I actually covered my eyes. I covered my eyes so that I didn’t have to look at the pictures, but could just focus on the words, and in the middle of this article was this box that said “twelve million children orphaned in Africa due to AIDS.” I have to tell you, Deryl, that rocked my world, because as I sat there in my very comfortable living room, I realized I didn’t know a single person who was HIV positive, and here was this pandemic that this magazine article said there was, and I didn’t know the name of a single orphaned child.

And I thought, how could there be twelve million children orphaned in one place due to one illness, and it not touch my life in the slightest?

I was horrified, and I went to bed that night and all I could think of were the faces of those little children, and the cries of those children who were orphaned, and I got up the next morning and that’s all I could hear.

It began to haunt me. It was like I couldn’t get away from it. I’d turn on the TV and there would be some story about AIDS. It was just like I can’t escape it. It started this internal dialogue between me and God, in which I said, God leave me alone. I have a very comfortable life. I am a good mom. I am a good wife. I am a good neighbor. I’m a Bible teacher. I’ve got my life all planned out. Leave me alone. In case you hadn’t noticed, I am a white suburban mom with a minivan. I don’t know anything about a disease in Africa. I wouldn’t have the faintest clue as to how to help that many orphans. Just leave me alone.

And after about a month of this very intense wrestling, I felt like I came to that proverbial fork in the road, you know, where you truly, you make a turn one way or the other, and what I felt like for me was…

The fork in the road was this: stay with my very comfortable life, pretend that I’d never read that article, or kind of turn and go this other direction and jump off a cliff into the unknown. And I chose to jump off the cliff. I call it saying yes to God. I had no plan. I had no agenda.

I was ignorant, uninformed, ill equipped, but I knew that God was saying to me, You cannot call yourself mine and ignore what I’ve just shown you.

Davis: I know there’s been a lot of feeling that the Church—and I mean the Church with a big “C”—came late to dealing with the AIDS crisis, addressing it, and recognizing, and indeed embracing everyone involved in any aspect of HIV and AIDS, the global crisis. Where do you see this standing now in terms of the church addressing this? I know that this has been a big emphasis through your effort primarily at Saddleback Church.

Warren: Definitely. I feel that the church has made some strides in even the years since I’ve become an advocate, but I have to say the church should have been the engine driving the response to the HIV/AIDS Pandemic and the church in many ways has been the caboose.

The church has been the one dragging along behind.

That’s not true universally, but it’s more true than not, and for me it was just recognizing that it was a personal responsibility as a Christ follower, and therefore it was a responsibility of my church and every church to care for people who are HIV positive. I have seen tremendous growth in that, but the stigma still remains.

HIV is still one of the most stigmatizing diseases on the planet, probably next to leprosy. I’ve been in leprosariums. I’ve been with people who have leprosy, very similar in the way that people respond.

I had breast cancer about seven or eight years ago, and I didn’t have to worry when I came home to tell my husband that I had breast cancer, that he would divorce me, or beat me, or make me leave our house. I didn’t have to worry that our neighbors would decide they didn’t ever want to ever speak to me again. I didn’t have to decide that at church somebody would move because they didn’t want to sit next to me. I didn’t have to worry that my children weren’t going to be played with, with other kids in the neighborhood—but all of that is still true for people when they receive an HIV diagnosis. And not just around the world, that’s still true here, today.

So, while I’d say there have been great strides, and people are more aware and more willing to engage, there’s so much further to go, because the stigma still remains.

Davis: With the HIV/AIDS initiatives at Saddleback Church, what are you primarily trying to do? Is it to address that stigma? Is it to help get anti-retroviral drugs out to folks who need them? What is the focus?

Warren: We try to think of what is something really practical. If we really believe that the church should be active, which we do, and we believe every church, not just our church. Sometimes people look at Saddleback and they say, well you’re this huge church. Of course you have an HIV Ministry, but we’re a church of three hundred people, or we’re a church of fifty people, there’s really nothing we can do”, and that just isn’t so.

Every church can do something and can do exactly what we have done. It doesn’t cost any money. What it costs is a decision and a commitment to care. But we believe that every church can care for people who are HIV positive.

That doesn’t cost any money.

How much money does it cost to open your heart to somebody? Nothing.

We believe that every church can encourage people to get HIV testing. We happen to offer testing at our church, but there are so many sites in every city where people can get tested for free and know their HIV status.

We believe that every church can unleash volunteers. It doesn’t cost money; that’s why they’re called volunteers.

We believe that every church can remove the stigma. It doesn’t cost money to have an accepting heart.

We believe that every church can champion healthy behavior. HIV is almost a hundred percent behavior driven and almost a hundred percent preventable, and those are messages that the church can share with everyone. It’s not a mystery how HIV is transmitted, and then every church can encourage people to take their medication.

Very few people will ever have the ability to provide those drugs that people need. That’s a function of government. We certainly don’t have that ability to provide drugs for people, but we can encourage them to take their drugs.

I know that sounds really simple and cheesy, but with HIV, if you don’t take your drugs, the medication at the right time every day, you’re going to get sicker, and so if somebody calls up and says hey did you remember to take your medication this morning? I don’t know about you, but sometimes I don’t finish an entire round of antibiotics, let alone take a medication that I have to take every day.

It’s a simple thing like a phone call. So, there are things that are within the reach of every church, no matter what size, no matter what country, that can be done to help people who are positive.

Davis: I know a lot of your experience has come out of trips that you took in the early part of the last decade to Africa. I’d like you to talk a little bit about that transformed your vision, and how Saddleback is reaching out, specifically to create this global network of churches, particularly reaching out to small churches in Africa.

Warren: For me, because I started from this place of extreme ignorance, not knowing anyone who was positive, not knowing anything about the disease. I just began to read and educate myself. Watch videos. Download information. Read books. Talk to health care professionals.

But after about a year of that it just wasn’t enough. I had to see it for myself, and at that time, because I still didn’t really understand… I didn’t realize that if I wanted to find out about HIV, I could find it here in my own country. I really didn’t understand that. Just as a kind of a side note here, Washington, D.C., has the highest prevalence rate of people who are HIV positive in the United States.

Three percent of all the people in Washington, D.C. have HIV.

That doesn’t sound like a whole lot, but if you understand around the rest of the world a country that has one percent is considered to have a severe problem, so the city of Washington, D.C., has a very high rate of HIV infection. I didn’t know that. And so I thought I had to go to Africa, so I did, and while I was there… if I came to Africa seriously disturbed about HIV, I left gloriously ruined, because I met people. I have to tell you about a woman who… I took a picture of her and she is on my wall. I look at her every day and she is the reminder to me of why I’m doing what I’m doing.

Her name was Joana and she was in Mozambique, and I was going to visit people that were HIV positive, because like I said, I didn’t know anybody who was positive, so I thought I was going to be going to somebody’s house.

We got in this old beat-up Land Rover and we’re bumping along, along these roads and we get to this grove of trees, and we get out of the car, and I’m still looking for a house, and I don’t see a house, but I do see under a large tree, a pile of rags.

But as we got closer to that tree I saw that that pile of rags was an emaciated woman. And her story was that when she and her husband found out that they were HIV positive, their village was fearful, and kicked them out. Made them leave. But she had an aunt in another town, in another little village, who was willing to take care of her and her husband, so they moved to this other little village and had a little tiny stick house that was not much bigger than this area between the two of us here, and as soon as the village found out that she and her husband were positive, this little house mysteriously burned.

So that when I met Joana she was about a week away from death, homeless, under this tree, unrelenting diarrhea, nothing to her name but the faded cloth on her body and a little piece of plastic that she was sitting on. And as she saw us coming, she tried to get up to greet us, but she was so near death she couldn’t walk.

And so what she ended up doing was crawling towards us on her elbows and her knees and she couldn’t even do that, and she fell, and her aunt came and scooped her up and kind of carried her over to this little piece of plastic that she’d laid out in front of us.

And this dying woman, this homeless dying woman raises herself up with all the dignity that she can muster and welcomes me to her home.

I was so unprepared for that. Nothing in my faith had prepared me for that. I was a pastor’s daughter. I went to Bible School. I married a minister. I’d been a pastor’s wife for years. I was a Bible Teacher and nothing in my faith had prepared me to talk to a dying, homeless woman under a tree.

And in my head I’m going, God, excuse me, get me out of here, I told you I didn’t know how to do this. I don’t know what to do here. What does the good news of the gospel mean to somebody dying under a tree?

Fortunately the people I was with—they showed me how… I got down on the mat with her, put my arms around her. They showed me how to wipe the tears from her face. To tell her that I was there, that God had sent me. That he had not forgotten her. That she mattered to him. And that even though this life had held so much pain and sorrow for her, that God had not forgotten, and that Jesus was with her, and that there was a home for her in heaven where all of her tears would be wiped away, where her body would be healed, where there would be wholeness, where there would be acceptance and that he had sent us to tell her that she was not forgotten.

I look at her every day because she was just one of millions, and millions, and millions, and millions of people in our world who are dying alone, who are dying rejected, who are dying because no one sees that they are valuable, and because of that it ruined me. I can’t look at life the same way. How do I come back and walk through the shelves of the grocery store where I live—I mean every shelf… there’s three aisles dedicated to dog food. How can I get excited about that when I’ve been with people who are dying under trees.

Life is different. I am ruined, but I’m gloriously ruined. It’s the most amazing thing to know that God has… My heart’s beating like God’s heart is beating. That his heart beats for the least, and the last, and the lost, and I want my heart to be like his. It’s changed me.

Davis: I know you divide your life into… you write this in the book… between before AIDS, I guess the BA and the after that experience, before AIDS, after AIDS, the encounter with these people and I know the kind of crux of some of your encounters, especially in Africa have been encounters with orphaned children, who are AIDS orphans, and that seems to be an ongoing theme. I know very recently you’ve been addressing different conferences talking about a kind of fact that Christians should be impelled to be addressing the orphan issue at large. Can you talk a bit about that?

Warren: I can, and I’m going to start frothing at the mouth here in a second. Sorry. I’m very passionate about this. So it’s good that those of you aren’t right here up too close, or I might spit on you or something.

For me, when I was also meeting people who are HIV positive, you can’t talk about HIV without talking about orphans, because HIV creates orphans.

Davis: And this is primarily happening in Africa, where we have the orphans?

Warren: It’s happening around the rest of everyplace, everyplace where people are HIV positive. If they don’t have the medication, they will die within a few years and they will leave children who some are HIV positive themselves, but they will definitely leave…

The greatest preponderance is in Southern Africa, but it’s around the world. There are 163 million children in our world today without moms and dads. Fifteen million of them in Africa just due to HIV, but 163 million children without moms or dads in our world.

For me it came down to, it’s not just what I think or what I feel, it’s got to be my life is based on the word. And in James 1:27 it says that pure religion, the religion that God counts, is the religion that takes care of widows and orphans in their distress. So for me it’s not what do I, Kay Warren, do, but it’s what does God call those who are Christ followers to do?

When I was in Africa, again, the first time seeing things through a whole new set of eyes, I visited a woman named Flora who was HIV positive and Flora’s life was just so unlike my life, I just couldn’t even believe it.

Her story was her husband had an affair, and he had an affair with a woman who was HIV positive. He didn’t know it, but she was HIV positive, and that infected Flora’s husband and so he became HIV positive and then the woman that he had a relationship with became pregnant and that baby was born HIV positive, but he had then come back to their home and brought HIV into their home and Flora became HIV positive.

And then he added insult to injury by saying he wanted that mistress and her baby to live in the house with them.

So Flora is a mom of three children, now is HIV positive because her husband’s been unfaithful to her. He’s HIV positive and dying. The mistress is in the house and is HIV positive is dying. And the new little baby that they have is HIV positive and dying, and I looked at her and said Flora, what can I say to my friends? I’m going back to my country, what do I tell them to pray for, for you?

And to me it would have been very reasonable for her to say something like you pray that that rat of a husband of mine dies quickly and gets out of my life because he has ruined my life, or something like, would you pray that I have access to medication. But she didn’t.

She looked at me and she said, “Would you pray for my children? Who will take care of my children when I die. Our neighbors are going to know that I died of AIDS and they’re not going to want to take care of my children. What will become of my children?”

And Flora was the first person, the first woman that I’ve heard say those words, but I’ve heard those words repeated around the world and in my community with some of the Hispanic women whose husbands who are there illegally, and their husbands have had affairs and brought HIV into their home, and now they’re in this position of they’re here illegally, but they’re dying of HIV and what is going to happen with their children?

It’s not just in Africa. It is in our communities where people—women—are asking what will happen to my children when I die? And so if I take the scripture of James 1:27 and know that God is evaluating my walk with him based on my compassion for widows and orphans and how I take care of them, and I look then at the practical situations where I’ve met these women and these children who are alone, how can I do anything but say, I must do something about the fact that there are 163 million children who are orphaned in our world.

So at our church we’ve started not only the HIV/AIDS Initiative, but an orphan care initiative.

Let me tell you this. Let me bring it just even a little closer to home. In the United States there are 500,000 children in the foster care system: 500,000 American children are in the foster care system; 118,000 of those are available to be adopted.

If one family in every four churches in the United States adopted one of those 118,000 children, we would have no orphans in the United States.

That’s doable.

That’s not 163 million. That’s 118,000, one family out of every four churches; there’s something practical we can do.

The foster care adoption system in the United States is amazing. It’s free. It doesn’t cost you to foster adopt. There’s no excuses, but the thing that I tell people is I don’t believe that everyone is supposed to adopt, but everyone is, according to James 1:27, to do something for these little ones.

If you’re not going to adopt, make sure that you’re helping a family who is. If you’re not going to be feeling like God’s lead you to be a foster adoptive parent, then you get involved with the children who are vulnerable. There’s something that everybody can do.

Sorry, I told you I get kind of passionate on this.

Davis: There’s significance in what your proposing is a significant difference individual churches can make if they could focus on attempting to find a family in the church who could adopt one child and that would even be among four churches in the U.S.

Warren: Absolutely. We would have no orphans. We would have no orphans in the United States.

It’s shameful that a country like the United States has orphans. We can look at other places around the world and say, oh, extreme poverty and war, and hardship, and of course there’s going to be orphans, but in the United States? Orphans? No. It should not be here. It should not be.

Davis: You do address the issue of affluence in America. Two things that were coming to my mind… one is you talk about compassion being something that needs to be practiced.

It’s something that, like learning to ride, or ride a bicycle is something that you get better at as you practice it, as God works through you through that practice.

Another piece of that is how we kind of can focus ourselves on the human need, but too often in America we’re affluent, we are kind of mired in sort of stasis and in pursuit of the American dream, and that can blind us to taking action in our own country or elsewhere. Talk for a second if you would about… because we hear a lot about the American dream now in the recession, we’ve got to recapture the American dream. Are there dangers there as well?

Warren: There are tremendous dangers in pursuing the American dream in and of itself.

The American dream of health, wealth, and happiness just in and of itself will ruin you. I speak a lot to college students because they’re right on the cusp of life. They haven’t necessarily made some tremendous mistakes yet. They’re right at that point of heading into marriage and career and into where their lives are going to be, so they’re poised on the edge of adulthood and very adult decisions they need to make.

So when I talk to them, I ask them, Girls, how many pairs of shoes does it take before it all starts to feel just a little bit hollow? Guys, how many electronic gidgets and gadgets can you own before it just starts to become a little empty?

That pursuit of things and possessions and wealth and happiness and climbing the ladder, all of that by itself will ruin you. It will dull your heart to the things that really matter. It will blunt your appetite for God. It will blind you to the needs of the world around us.

But so will following Jesus Christ ruin you. Following Jesus Christ to the end, as he says in Mark 8:35: if you want to be mine, he said, you must deny yourself. Take up your cross and follow me. Anybody who does that is a disciple. I want to be a disciple, and if I want to be a Disciple it’s going to ruin me. I won’t look at life the same. I don’t look at my daily life the same. I don’t look at world events the same. I don’t look at my neighborhood the same.

I believe that’s what God is calling us as disciples, that we take seriously his call to deny ourselves and say yes to him. To take up a cross, to be willing… I say to college students, What is it that so disturbs you, that you think I can’t let this go another day? There’s something in my world that is so disturbing that I can’t live with it. For me it was the HIV/AIDS pandemic and the fact that there are orphans. I can’t live with that and not do something about it, and if I’m going to do that and it leads me to, maybe I give my life in that process, that’s what he’s asked.

I’m going to follow him to the end. Well, that ruins you. It ruins you, but it gloriously ruins you.

It leads to a place of intimacy and a walk with God, like I said I feel like my heart is beating with his and the suffering that I have seen, and the tears that I’ve wept as I’ve watched other people suffer sometimes can be overwhelming. But that’s what I think the Bible means when it talks about sharing in the fellowship of his sufferings.

Any tears that are in my eyes I say fell from God’s face. Any tears I cry for an orphan, any tears I cry for a man or woman HIV positive. Any tears I cry for a person who’s been in a sex-trade, any tears that I cry for people in extreme poverty… They didn’t originate with me. It originated with the heart of God and it came from his face and they fell on mine. So that has brought a depth in my relationship with him that I never had before.

Davis: Well you write about how your own suffering… you experienced two different rounds of experience with cancer over the last decade, and that somehow made you more empathetic, perhaps, with others’ suffering, but forced you to wrestle in a very personal way with why the old question of theodicy, why is there suffering in a world where’s there’s a good God who’s created everything, why do we have such suffering? You’ve seen so much personally and through your contact with those dealing with AIDS, how did you answer that question?

Warren: There’s nothing like suffering to thrust you into the very deepest questions that any of us ever ask, those middle-of-the-night wrestling with God. There’s nothing like suffering that strips away all the superfluous stuff in your life, all the stuff that’s on the periphery, all the stuff that’s on the edges and takes you right to the core of God, if you’re there why is there suffering in this world? Why am I suffering? Why are those children suffering?

And those wrestlings are profound and deep, and some of it remains a mystery. I don’t have a three-point sermon that says here’s why there’s suffering and here’s what to do about it. What it has done, it has caused me, though, to run to God and not away from him, because I do believe that in the end he is the one who will make it all right.

If I didn’t believe that God was a God of justice. If I didn’t believe that he was a God of righteousness who would someday right all the wrongs, punish all the evil, make everything the way it was supposed to be, I couldn’t serve him. But I do believe that he is the God who he says, he is the God of justice, he is a God of mercy, he is a God of righteousness, and he has asked me to be his hands and feet in this world until the day that he comes… in his timing, which I have no idea when it is, but when he comes back he will make it all right.

Until them I’m to fight evil and to push back the darkness with everything I have. I’m to make sure that I’m living in the light and that I’m doing what I can to bring others into the light, and I cling to him and that mysterious place of not knowing why or what or how… There’s nowhere else to go. There’s nowhere else to go, but to God. I don’t understand it all. He, is some ways remains more of a mystery than ever. I don’t have it figured out. I just know there is nowhere else to go, and so I’m going to stay right there.

Davis: You write a lot about what you call a ministry of presence, as you say representing kind of God in your personal actions with others, and I know you’ve especially learned about that, and explored a ministry of presence when you were working with lepers in part of Mother Teresa’s operations in India.

Warren: The leprosy colonies in the Philippines, but in Mother Teresa’s Home for the Dying in Calcutta, you know I just have to be really honest. I thought I was doing a good thing. In my own mind I was kind of patting myself on the back for going and volunteering for a day to serve in the Home for the Dying.

I had no idea of what to expect and when we got there, there was just a flurry of activity. They have a very rigid routine of what you do every day for the people who are in the Home for the Dying, and there were some volunteers like me who had grabbed gloves, some had grabbed masks.

When I got there and figured out that’s what I was supposed to do there were no gloves left and the only mask was one that would have fit a six-foot-five football player so if it hung on one ear it would have wrapped around my head. There was no mask that would fit my face.

And so I just went into where there were fifty women. There were fifty men on one side and fifty women on the other, and on the men’s side I could hear screaming. On the women’s side it was a little more quiet, but we had the routine of taking these women who were very close to dying, taking them to a stone shower area, pouring cold water over them—there was no hot water. Bathing them, to putting clean sheets on their beds, feeding them—those that could eat a little bit of mashed banana and some tea, and then they lay down on their beds and they waited, and they wait to die.

And I, within a few minutes, was sick to my stomach. The smells. The screams that I could hear on the men’s side. The women who were too close to death and really shouldn’t have been trying to eat because their bodies wouldn’t handle it, and they were vomiting it up. It was just beyond what I was used to, and I didn’t know what to do with it, again, and I really wanted out.

And so someone asked me to clean a bed, and I saw that there was diarrhea on it, and I’m like, what do I clean it with?

The sister said, well there’s some disinfectant in the kitchen. So in the kitchen I found a big bucket with the most gross-smelling disinfectant, a little shred of a cloth and with that, and no gloves, I came back and scrubbed the mattress and all the time not going Jesus this is for you, Jesus this is for you, but all the time going. Jesus get me out of here, I’m going to puke. I can’t stand this. And [I] kind of escaped off to a corner to try to just recover my equilibrium.

And as I did I looked up and there was a woman on a bed and she motioned to me and I’m like, oh no, no, no, no… and I kind of just put my head back down, looking down, and I raised my eyes again and she was like this. I’m like no and realized what am I going to tell her, no? I got up and went over to her and she began to sob the minute I sat down on her bed, sob and speak to me in Bengali and I had no idea what she was saying, because she’s just chattering in Bengali. I don’t speak Bengali. I have no idea what she’s saying, but she’s pouring out her heart.

And in an instant it’s like my heart was filled with compassion for her, not revulsion. I didn’t smell the smells anymore. I didn’t see… all I saw was a fellow human being in agony pouring out her heart to another human being that she knew didn’t understand her words. And as I sat there thinking no, God I do know what she’s saying. She’s telling me in her way, her life story. She’s telling me how she ended up in Mother Teresa’s Home for the Dying. She’s telling me either about the family that abandoned her or the family that was too poor to take care of her. God, she’s telling me she’s afraid. She’s telling me she’s going to die and she doesn’t know what to do, and she’s telling me that she’s so lonely, and God, I get this.

And so I reached out to her and I put my arms around her and I drew her face very close to mine and I took my hands and I began to wipe the tears from her face, and I spoke in English because I don’t speak Bengali. I just prayed that God would translate my words to her, the way that I felt like he had translated hers to mine, and I just said you are not alone.

I learned this lesson of presence and I learned to say it to her. First I had watched others do it, now I knew how to enter into her pain, and I said you are not alone. God has brought me here to be with you today. To tell you and he weeps for you and my heart weeps for you too, and these hands that are wiping the tears from your face, these are the hands of Jesus. These arms that are holding you close, these are God’s arms to remind you that you are not alone. He is here with you. He sent me to do so.

And I couldn’t promise her that she was ever going to get well and go back to her family. I couldn’t give her even medication, but what I could offer her was what I had, and it’s what all of us have, and I’m so glad you asked that, Deryl, because most of us think of the world’s problems and the problems even in the city where we live, and we think they’re too big. I can’t do anything about them. They’re way beyond… We say what I did: leave me alone, God. Some of the people listening right now are saying, God leave me alone. I don’t want to hear what she has to say because there is nothing I can do. What you have in your hands is you have yourself, and you bring yourself into a presence.

If you have Jesus Christ inside your heart, you are a believer in Jesus Christ, you bring God with you into a room, and so you bring his presence and you bring your presence, and that doesn’t cost money.

It doesn’t take anything but a commitment to love, and it makes a profound difference in the lives of those who suffer.

Davis: I know you also address… This is a quite different topic but you address the reality of evil, that you feel like you experienced in some engagements in Rwanda and also in Southeast Asia. That’s not something that we hear talked about very much today, but I’d be curious to have you explore with us a little bit more about why it’s significant, you feel, to recognize that there is evil in the world. Suffering may be a variety of that, may be a kind of—

Warren: I was devastated by the evil that I saw. I’ve been in two countries where genocide, that have been robbed by genocide, Cambodia in the ’80s and Rwanda in the ’90s, and both places completely torn apart by internal killings of neighbor turning on neighbor, and the images are indelibly in my mind.

In Tuol Sleng, the prison in Cambodia where so many Cambodians were imprisoned and they took pictures of everyone. Everyone that was taken prisoner. And so the walls are lined with pictures of men and women, and boys and girls, that all ended up dead, and the jail cells have been left just as they were.

There’s blood splatters on the wall and the instruments of torture and death are there. I was devastated by it. I had never seen anything like it and then a few years later went to Rwanda and the genocide museum there, and it’s so fresh there. It’s still so fresh…

Everyone’s lost a neighbor, or father, or mother, whole families, or a husband or wife. Neighbors betraying each other, husbands betraying wives, of different tribes. Just the most hideous things I’ve ever encountered and it about destroyed me for a while. I just couldn’t look at it and then I got so angry and I wanted to hurt the people who had hurt each other.

Davis: You met… am I correct, you met some people… kind of had an acquaintance with there, and later on found out that they had been involved in some of the killings.

Warren: Yes, I did. I met a man in Rwanda who had been in sort of a low-level part of the genocide, but he said that those above him realized that he had just gotten caught up and they gave him a second chance.

And I looked at this man and where I had greeted him when I first walked up, big handshake, how are you, it’s nice to meet you—all the things that we do. And then as I’m sitting closer than I am to you, he’s telling me his story of his part in the genocide, and on the outside I’m still smiling and trying to interact with him. On the inside I’m just going God, this man’s a monster. This man’s a monster. How can I sit next to him. I can’t do this. This is incredible.

And then, as I began to just think about it more and more, I realized that given the same circumstance, we are all capable of anything.

That’s probably one of the hardest truths that I’ve had to learn the past few years, and the truth that I find many people still find very repugnant and will push away and say that is absolutely not true, I would never do this, I would never do that. You would never find me doing X, Y, Z.

And I really believe that inside of ourselves is the capacity for tremendous evil. If we are not controlled by the spirit of God, if we don’t have Jesus Christ in our hearts and under the control of the spirit of God, every one of us is capable of anything. And when I began to understand that and then took a look at my own heart and saw places where I had secrets, where there are parts of my life that I didn’t want other people to know about, where there were places where evil had been done to me, and where I had participated in evil in myself, it suddenly became very crucial that I understand the evil in my own heart, so that I could find a place of compassion for those who actually perpetrate evil that might go further than any evil that I had done.

See, I think what we do is, we’re comfortable with our own sin. We’re comfortable with the evil that we do because it’s ours.

We’re not so comfortable with… I’m not comfortable with yours. I’m comfortable with mine. I’m not comfortable with your sin.

I want judgment for you.

I want mercy for me.

But you, hey buddy, I’m throwing the book at you, you know you’ve sinned, you’ve blown it, you’re evil, you’re mean, wicked, nasty, all that. I don’t want anything to do with you.

Me? I’m a sinner, but I need mercy.

But when we understand that we really are all the same in our need for grace, in our need for forgiveness, in our need for a savior. It takes us from this place of well I’m here, and you’re over here. I, from this place of health and perfection, can look over here at you and help you.

Well, nobody wants that kind of help. The only kind of help that I’ve discovered that really means anything to other people is when two people, who recognize that they are sinners, are able to react to each other. One, because they have experienced grace, and long to share it with the other, and the other who recognizes the grace in the other person and is able to receive it.

So dealing with evil and dealing with our own personal sinfulness… I think it’s critical to being able to help anyone else.

Henry Nouwen says that care only comes out of understanding our own sinfulness. Care comes out of that place. You can’t help anybody until you have realized who you are yourself.

Davis: But when you meet someone like the Rwandan gentleman that you’re speaking of, that you later find out has been involved in the former genocide there, how do you forgive someone like that? Is it possible?

Warren: It is possible and I’ve heard the most incredible stories of forgiveness. I didn’t personally have to forgive that because it wasn’t done to me. But I have heard the stories of hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds of Rwandans who tell the stories that are just beyond belief and so I know that it is possible, and in fact it’s the only way that reconciliation can happen. I think that the reason—one reason, not the only reason—but one of the reasons that Rwanda is actually joining the world again, from a Third World status to a First World status, is because of the fact that they have decided they’re going to work on reconciliation, whereas Cambodia has not.

Cambodia is still a very bruised and broken place where there is deep suspicion, deep hostility of each other, and it remains in that place sort of locked in. Rwanda went through exactly the same thing, and yet Rwanda is a completely different place. To me it’s the power of forgiveness.

Davis: There’s much more we can talk about. I recognize… I see where we are time wise. I would like to be able to entertain several quick questions, and it will have to be quick, I think, given that we’re closing in on eleven o’clock, but if you have a question for Kay Warren, if you would pass it to the center aisle now, as an usher comes through.

And while we’re collecting those let me ask you, if you would Kay, tell us where things stand with Saddleback Church’s universal PEACE Plan, is this kind of global attempt to align churches around the world to deliver different kinds of services, and including Discipleship. If you would tell us about this.

Warren: PEACE stands for Promote reconciliation, Equip servant leaders, Assist the poor, Care for the sick, and Educate the next generation.

Based on a lot of our travels that Rick and I went on, we saw that traditional mission programs maybe had missed the mark a little bit, or that there was a way to expand it and make it even more effective: that God cares not just about people’s souls, but he cares about their bodies. He cares. We are body and soul.

And so in the PEACE Plan, as we try to encourage churches or church planting around the world and then to equip leaders who are servants, not just egocentric leaders in it for themselves to find very practical ways to assist with extreme poverty. To care for the sick, as I said, particularly HIV, and then to educate the next generation.

We believe that this can be done in churches as opposed to a church in America’s mission board sending missionaries to another country and it be us who do for somebody else. It is much more about empowering the local indigenous church to become responsible for its people. It’s Acts 1:8, Jesus said, I’m going to send you out into Jerusalem and Judea and to some area in the uttermost parts of the world.

Well, for you, your Jerusalem is Washington, D.C. My Jerusalem is Orange County, California, but Kigali, Rwanda’s Jerusalem is Kigali, Rwanda. And we’re all responsible for our Jerusalem. And so to be able to equip churches to take on poverty, and disease, and servant leadership within their own community is our goal.

As opposed to us coming and doing, it’s a lot about helping people learn to do for themselves.

Davis: We’ve got time for maybe a couple of very quick questions here. A couple of people are asking about the situation that we’ve seen recently in Uganda with anti-gay, anti-homosexuality laws. At Saddleback Church have you addressed that or have you been engaged in that whole question?

Warren: Definitely, Rick released a video statement to the church leaders in Uganda soon after we heard about it. We didn’t even hear about it for quite awhile and then, when we did, he released a video that was sent to all the pastors that we knew of in Uganda, and Rick, unequivocally said this law is wrong, it’s immoral. It is against God to treat people this way and we don’t support that in the slightest. So it was very clear about that.

Davis: Another person asked… This is from a fellow minister’s wife, how do you and your husband find time for one another in the midst of so much activity and caring for others?

Warren: That is about a ten-hour conversation. (laughter) I do have a lot of CDs and tapes. Two Minister’s wives on my website kwarren.com, there is a section for ministers’ wives. That’s a continual challenge, but we decided we’re empty nesters now, and we’ve decided that we want… we’re going to grow old together, we are going to be better friends at the end. We’ve been married 35 years. We’re going to get better friends as the years go by, so we have to be very intentional.

We have weathered some very difficult storms. Every marriage weathers storms of just stuff that comes into your life. The stress of a very high-octane, high-visible life, but we have decided that we are going to invest in each other and it is something intentional. It doesn’t just happen. In fact it won’t happen unless you make deliberate attempts to grow closer to each other, to spend time together.

Davis: We have several questions here as well as this will probably need to be our last question. Dealing with the whole question of sexuality is roiling within the church issues over sexuality. How does Saddleback Church wrestle with some of these issues?

Warren: Well we wrestle like everybody else. We try to interpret scripture the best that we can, try to be true to what we understand scripture to say. For us the war against HIV…

You can’t talk about HIV without talking about sex, that’s absolutely true, but we’ve always tried to focus on HIV and people who are in need… I look at the New Testament and you know the Pharisees tried to trip Jesus up with the blind man saying how come… why is this man blind and Jesus just said, you know what? I’m not