5 Principles of a Purpose- Driven Church

Bible Study 5 Principles of a Purpose- Driven Church

Rick Warren’s genius is in helping pastors see the obvious.

alifornia megachurch pastor Rick Warren is the master of the obvious, according to Christianity Today’s senior writer Tim Stafford. But if his principles for ministry are so self-evident, Cwhy aren’t more churches already practicing them? In this study, we will explore two biblical texts Warren cites as foundational to his thriving ministry. We will also compare his principles to local church practices in the first century and the twenty-first century.

Scripture: Mark 12:28-34; Matthew 28:16-20; Acts 2:42-47 Based on: The article “A Regular Purpose-Driven Guy,” by Tim Stafford, Christianity Today, November 2002

1 ©2011 Christianity Today International ChristianBibleStudies.com Christianity Today Bible Study 5 Principles of a Purpose-Driven Church How to use this resource for a group study How to use this resource for a group study

This Bible study can be used for an individual or a group. If you intend to lead a group study, follow these simple suggestions.

Make enough copies of the article for everyone 1 in the group. If you would like your group to have more information, feel free to copy the leader’s guide for them as well. Don’t feel that you have to use all the material in the study. Almost all of 2 our studies have more information than you can get through in one session, so feel free to pick and choose the teaching information and questions that will meet the needs of your group. Use the teaching content of the study in any of these ways: for your own background and information; to read aloud (or summarize) to the group; for the group to read silently. Make sure your group agrees to complete confidentiality. This is essential 3 to getting people to open up. When working through the questions, be willing to make yourself 4 vulnerable. It’s important for your group to know that others share their experiences. Make honesty and openness a priority in your group.

5 Begin and end the session in prayer.

Part 1 Identify the Current Issue Note to leader: Provide each person with the article “A Regular Purpose- Driven Guy” from Christianity Today, included at the end of this study.

As you begin the session, give each person several post-it notes. Multiple answers are allowed, but write each answer on a separate sticky note. Ask group members to write responses to the following questions. (1) What is our church doing well?

(2) What does our church need to do better?

Don’t discuss the answers yet. Set them aside for later.

Discussion Starters:

[Q] What do you think God had in mind when he created what we have come to call the church?

[Q] Do you think local churches turned out the way God planned? If not, how are they missing their purpose?

[Q] Stafford says Rick Warren’s “purpose-driven” principles are obvious. Do you think they are obvious? Are any of the terms foreign to your congregation?

[Q] On Warren’s baseball diagram, the home plate is maturity that results in magnification (worship) of God. In your estimation, what is the sign of a mature believer?

• How do you think a Christian grows to that point? Is maturity a constant state that one arrives at?

[Q] Rick Warren said most people don’t want to go to a megachurch. So why do they go?

Part 2 Discover the Eternal Principles

Note to Leader: For the teaching time, make a chart of five columns with five rows. (You may wish to prepare one large chart for the group, or provide individual charts for the members to complete.) Across the top, label the columns “Purpose,” “Commandment,” “Commission,” “Jerusalem Church,” “Our Church.”

Write the five purposes in the first column. At Saddleback, the purposes all begin with the letter “m,” but for our study, we will use the words that more clearly define the functions. They are “Fellowship,” “Discipleship,” “Service,” “Evangelism,” and “Worship.” Warren places them on his diamond diagram in that order, but as the author of the article points out, the order can be debated. None of the purposes happens independently of the others, and, while a person generally becomes a Christian prior to leading others to faith in Christ, evangelism is not limited to people who have first mastered discipleship or service. We should be growing in all the areas all the time. But by identifying the principles and giving them order, Warren has developed a system for assuring that all the members of his church receive teaching and ministry opportunities in all the areas.

(As you write the purposes in the first column, give a brief definition for each, and ask, “Is that clear, or is there a term that communicates this better for our congregation/small group?”)

Fellowship is a connection to and interaction with the body of believers. For Warren’s congregation, fellowship begins with the steps leading to membership. In the New Testament, the root for the Greek word koinonia literally means “partner.” Paul wrote about the partnership his church plants shared with him in spreading the gospel. Believers are in partnership with Christ in his sufferings. In the local congregation today, fellowship is often equated with the quality of relationship among the believers, or sometimes it means the chatter over a potluck dinner. But fellowship is much richer than sharing Jell-O recipes.

Discipleship is growing in the likeness and knowledge of one’s teacher. A disciple is a “learner” in New Testament terminology. The disciples of Jesus were shaped in faith, character, and actions as they spent three years following him around the countryside. Some churches today use the term discipleship to indicate a special program of Christian education. The term spiritual formation has growing use among Protestants to describe the believer’s ongoing, personal faith development.

Service is ministry to and within the church, according to Warren’s definition. Warren uses a series of studies, spiritual gifts inventories, and personal interviews to determine where a church member may be best suited to serve. Volunteer church jobs, such as deacon ministry, music leadership, and teaching Sunday school fall under this heading. There may be some overlap with the other principles, but the defining characteristic, according to Warren, is that this ministry is done within the church body.

Evangelism is ministry done (generally) outside the local church body with the intent of leading people to faith in Christ. Some churches are overtly evangelistic; others choose

to represent Christ by their actions and plant seeds for a later faith harvest. The tendency may be to justify every church ministry as evangelism. The defining characteristic of evangelism may be intent. While ministering in laid-back Southern California, Warren and Saddleback are very intentional in their evangelism ministries: through recovery ministries and service in their community, they want to lead people to faith in Christ.

Worship, or as Warren calls it, “magnification,” is glorifying God through a variety of means. Worship is not limited to the Sunday morning sanctuary experience. It is not defined by musical style. Worship is a whole-life experience, in which God is honored intentionally and purposefully by individuals and groups. By placing worship at the center of his diagram, Warren indicates that that’s where all of the Christian life begins and ends.

Those are the purposes of the church as Warren identifies them. He cites two passages of Scripture, the Great Commandment and the Great Commission, as the foundation of his purpose-driven principles. Let’s look at those passages and also compare two churches to Warren’s standard. Teaching Point One: What do Great Commandment Christians do?

Read Mark 12:28–34.

[Q] How does this passage show the key vertical and horizontal relationships in the believer’s life? Leader’s Note: Jesus tells the scribe that God is to have first place in every aspect of our lives. He quotes, in part, the Shema (Deut. 6:4–5), Israel’s statement of faith that God was not one of the panoply of pagan gods, but that he was One, above any others. Yahweh alone, in his unique relationship with Israel, was to be worshiped with heart, soul, mind, and strength. What Jesus did do, however, was to take the application out of the family setting and place it in a broader laboratory among all who are our neighbors. Here Jesus gave his followers a new ethical challenge: our love relationship with God is not played out just between us and him; if we love God, it will show up in our relationship with our neighbors. The quality of our vertical relationship is tested and attested on the horizontal plane.

[Q] How do the purposes of the church line up with this passage? Leader’s Note: Invite the group members to look at the chart. In the column labeled “Commandment,” write the words from this Scripture next to the purpose to which they are most closely related. Use the words “heart,” “soul,” “mind,” “strength,” and “neighbor.” (You may wish to give the group members a minute to consider this,

then discuss it as a group as you place the words on the chart. For example, if someone suggested that “fellowship” is an activity of the “heart,” ask how. In what ways does fellowship involve the heart?) There is room for debate, but try to assign each word to one purpose.

Teaching Point Two: What do Great Commission churches do?

Read Matthew 28:16–20.

This is Jesus’ famous instruction to his disciples, their marching orders for ministry. In our time, whole denominations calling themselves “New Testament churches” have adopted the Great Commission as their job description.

Those who espouse the five-fold purpose of the church, like Warren, say their principles are drawn largely from the Great Commission. Let’s see how the purposes line up with this passage. Leader’s Note: Give participants a minute to find connections between the purposes and the words worship, doubt, authority, go, make disciples, baptize, teach, obey. Again, there may be overlap. Try to assign each word to one purpose. Some purposes may have more than one Great Commission word.

[Q] The Great Commandment was given to individuals, while the Great Commission was given to a group. Do you think that has any bearing on their application to the church? (For example, is loving a personal activity while going is better supported by groups?)

Teaching Point Three: What did the first-century church do?

Let’s look in on the believers in Jerusalem, just a few days after the church was birthed by the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Read Acts 2:42–47.

[Q] Why would Luke record the daily activity of the early Christians? Was there something suddenly unique about their lifestyle?

• Do you think their activity is descriptive or prescriptive? Leader’s Note: Give participants a minute to consider the relationship between the purposes and the activities of the church at Jerusalem, then discuss them as a group. Match these words to the purposes: “devoted to teaching,” “fellowship,” “breaking bread,” “prayer,” “giving,” “meeting together,” “praising God.” Then ask: Are

there other activities in the passage you would add to the chart? What did you discover in doing this exercise?

[Q] Are Warren’s principles biblical? Why or why not?

[Q] There are purposes for the church that are better fulfilled by the church body rather than by individuals. And a believer cannot fulfill the purposes of the church alone. What does that tell us about the importance of the local church in the spiritual growth of the individual?

[Q] Did you discover anything about the interconnectedness of the purposes?

[Q] Rick Warren says it’s important to keep the purposes in balance. On his diagram, they are on a level playing field. Warren’s counterpart in Chicagoland, megachurch pastor Bill Hybels of Willow Creek Community Church, says he places a higher priority on one of the purposes: evangelism. Willow Creek teaches essentially the same list of purposes (theirs all begin with G, evangelism is “grace”), but Hybels says if evangelism is not emphasized over the others, it will be drowned out. A church’s natural gravitation is to internal fellowship and the needs of its members, he says. Do you agree with Hybels or Warren?

• If your church were used as evidence, which side of the debate would it support?

Part 3 Apply Your Findings

Action Point: Now it’s time to apply what we’ve learned to our church.

A. Give each person several post-it notes. Multiple answers are allowed, but write each answer on a separate sticky note. Ask group members to write responses to the following questions, which are a continuation of the questions from the opening section.

(3) Which ministry of our church seems to have the most potential?

(4) What area, neighborhood, people group, or need does our church seem best positioned to minister to?

B. Designate a section of the wall or board for each question. Have participants stick their responses under the appropriate question, numbers (1) through (4).

C. On a separate wall, prepare a section for each of the five purposes. As you read the answers aloud, have the group choose to which purpose the answer applies and move the sticky note under that purpose heading.

D. Once all the answers are read and collated, ask participants to form small teams. Assign each team one of the purpose headings. Have each team consider the responses under its assigned heading. Look for duplicate answers and common themes. Based on the replies, have each team draft a short list of commendations and ministry goals for its purpose area.

E. Share your findings with the whole group. Beside each of the purposes on the original chart, in the column labeled “Our Church,” post one commendation for present ministry and one goal for future ministry.

F. To close the study, take turns praying over the goals.

— Study prepared by Eric Reed, former managing editor of Leadership Journal.

A Regular Purpose-Driven guy Rick Warren’s genius is in helping pastors see the obvious. By Tim Stafford, for the study “5 Principles of a Purpose-Driven Church”

When Rick Warren speaks of his “stealth strategy,” one is tempted to grin. Perched on a 120-acre campus in the hills of southern Orange County, California, Saddleback Church and its 15,000 weekly attendees can’t elude anybody’s radar. This is one of America’s largest and best-known churches.

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

Warren doesn’t appear on radio or TV. He rarely speaks outside his church, and avoids politics in both denomination and government. (Saddleback is Southern Baptist, but takes no part in denominational controversies.) Warren has published five books. One is on Bible study methods, written while he was in seminary. Another, The Purpose-Driven Church, contains chapters on such crowd-pleasing topics as sermon preparation and how to organize a class for people joining the church.

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

Ironically, Warren got his greatest publicity last spring as “the guy who almost messed up pastors’ housing allowances.” That’s the way one minister put it, though it’s not really fair. Warren says he took on a complicated court case to stand up for pastors against arbitrary IRS decisions. It was not his fault that a judge used the case to challenge pastors’ special exemptions. (Congress has since passed and President Bush signed a bill reaffirming the clergy’s generous housing exemptions.) In the resulting news stories, Warren’s deduction of $79,999 for his 1995 housing expenses was widely publicized.

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

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

because he doesn’t seem all that different from you. Pastors who hear him have got to think, I can do that.

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

If Rick Warren is a Regular-Guy pastor, Purpose-Driven is a regular-church approach—easy to miss because it seems so ordinary. Purpose-Driven is built around five fundamental purposes— fellowship, spiritual maturity, service, evangelism, and worship—which just about any church, large or small, Pentecostal or Episcopal, can get behind. Purpose-Driven has to do with balance: making sure none of the five purposes gets neglected, and that no one of them dominates the church. It’s a broad, middle-of-the-road appeal, yet pastors get excited about it.

At last May’s conference, pastors from all 50 states and 30 countries showed up. They came from all age groups and with all levels of experience. For example, T. L. Garrett, executive pastor of Trinity Church in Lubbock, Texas, came with seven of the sixteen pastors from his 2,000-member church. Garrett is a lean Texan of late middle age, a veteran of many years of ministry. He said his team leaders came intending to “redefine what we are doing for family ministries.”

David Nederhood, a much younger man, is pastor of a Christian Reformed church in Alameda, California. “[My] biggest challenge is to convince people that this really is Reformed.” How does he do that? “It’s pretty hard to argue with the Great Commission and the Great Commandment,” from which Warren’s five purposes are drawn.

Raymond Ng helped launch his two-year-old Chinese language church in Milpitas, California. They adapted some expectations to Chinese culture, he said, but on the whole Purpose-Driven fit. Warren’s how-to book, The Purpose-Driven Church, has been translated into 17 languages and sells well in many developing countries, notably China.

Julio Rosas, pastor of the San Martin de Porres Church in Lima, Peru, said he read The Purpose- Driven Church in 1996 and immediately began translating portions into Spanish. His church has since tripled to 1,500 members and has planted two daughter churches. Rosas was among dozens of church leaders from South America who came to the May conference.

Many pastors told of “going Purpose-Driven” and seeing their congregations grow remarkably. Frank Reynolds, a pastor for 22 years in Manchester, New Hampshire, went Purpose-Driven in 1997 and saw attendance go from 250 to 750. The pastor of a huge Evangelical Free church in Laredo, Texas—launched on Purpose-Driven principles in 1986—described 30 percent growth per year. A pastor who attended the seminar in 1995, feeling discouraged at the time, said he has seen his church increase its staff from two pastors to sixteen.

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

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

While attending California Baptist College in Riverside, Warren directed a youth group at a nearby Baptist church. He talked church leaders into buying $18,000 worth of weightlifting equipment, then used it to build a youth group with 10,000 students on its mailing list. His last year in college, the school administration asked him to help teach a course in evangelism.

Warren chose Fort Worth’s Southwestern Seminary because he wanted exposure to big Southern Baptist churches. Fascinated by size, he wrote to the 100 largest churches in America asking for the secrets of their growth. By then he was married, but he and Kay had “descended into marital hell,” as she puts it. With no money, they nonetheless pursued extensive marriage counseling. Rick jokes that he could make a TV ad: “MasterCard saved my marriage.” His freedom in describing marital difficulties from the pulpit is another part of Warren’s Regular-Guy appeal.

During his last year in seminary, he and Kay drove west to visit Robert Schuller’s Institute for Church Growth. “We had a very stony ride out to the conference,” she says, because such nontraditional ministry scared her to death. Schuller, though, won them over. “He had a profound influence on Rick,” Kay says. “We were captivated by his positive appeal to nonbelievers. I never looked back.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Purpose-Driven principles Saddleback grew partly because Rick Warren is a very attractive and talented leader, and because the area was ripe for a megachurch. But there is more than that. The foundational concept of Saddleback’s ministry, its organizational and theological architecture, is Purpose-Driven. Southern Orange County and Rick Warren cannot be duplicated; but Warren believes, and many agree, that Purpose-Driven can be.

“What pastors say when they hear the Purpose-Driven principles is, ‘It makes sense. I could have written this book,’ ” says Tom Holladay, one of Saddleback’s longtime pastors. Another pastor, Doug Slaybaugh, gave me his version of the universal reaction: “You know, that really is what I believed.”

They probably did. Purpose-Driven principles are best explained with two diagrams you can scribble on a napkin. One is the baseball diamond, used to explain the flow of church ministry in a person’s life. Vast crowds attend church, but they reach first base, Membership, only by completing Class 101 and signing a covenant of commitment to Christ and the church. Second base is Maturity, reached through another class (201) featuring a covenant of commitment to a daily quiet time, tithing, and a small group.

Third base is Ministry, in which members commit to serving actively in the church. They are interviewed and placed in one of dozens of thriving church ministries. Home base is Mission, in which Christians commit to the cause of evangelism. At the center of the diamond is Magnification, which stands for worship. How can one reach maturity before committing to mission or ministry? Chalk it up to the Baptist penchant for alliteration. Purpose-Driven churches make worship the starting point—it’s where unchurched people experience the church and decide to commit. It’s also the end, since everything centers on glorifying God.

The basic idea is that every healthy church must balance these purposes, neglecting none. All ministry programs should be organized to serve one of the purposes, with a specific target audience in mind. And different departments must work together, since they expect to “hand off” members as they go around the bases. As Warren often says, “You don’t get credit for people left on base!” That means it’s not enough to baptize new believers or place them on the rolls. It’s not even enough to get them to tithe or to volunteer. Churches need to move members on to maturity, discipleship, service, and mission.

A second diagram, concentric circles, represents target audiences for each of these bases. The widest circle is the Community, targeted by evangelism. The next circle is the Crowd, those who come to church, experience the seeker-sensitive worship service, and may be attracted to Christ. The third circle represents the Congregation, those who commit their lives to Jesus and become members of the church through Class 101. Fourth is the Committed—those whose habits suggest that they are becoming genuinely mature in faith. Inmost is the Core, those committed to do the ministry of the church.

Purpose-Driven seminars elaborate on these basic ideas. They give curriculum for classes at each of the bases and suggest a host of ways a church can organize itself around the five purposes. arrenW emphasizes, however, that every church is different. He encourages pastors to adapt the material and improve on it as they will. He is delighted when some churches change the baseball diamond into a soccer field or a bridge or a ladder. Pastors, who are not necessarily strategic thinkers, say the simple diagrams help them envision the total ministry of the church. Says Mike Balos of Bells, Tennessee, “You can get more concerned with filling the slots in the Sunday school, rather than asking, ‘Is it effective?’ The purposes take you back to your roots.”

George Rayburn, pastor of a 10-year-old charismatic church in Phoenix, says that his whole idea of church consisted of worship before the Purpose-Driven outline helped him balance worship with evangelism, discipleship, fellowship, and service. For pastor Jimmie Davidson, steeped in Southern Baptist culture, the purposes gave permission to rethink traditional church programs and committees. Asked what Purpose-Driven had added to his church in Abingdon, Virginia, Davidson was too choked up to speak. “It was death to life,” he finally said.

Warren sometimes refers to the purposes as the “Intel chip” of the church. He means that Purpose- Driven principles make an invisible architecture that churches can build on in a variety of ways. A Purpose-Driven church may worship with techno music, or it may use an organ and 18th-century hymns. Its theology may be Pentecostal or dispensationalist. Warren enjoys telling how Purpose-Driven reached Brazil and spread to illiterate congregations meeting in houseboats on the Amazon River. He acknowledges that much of Saddleback’s ministry builds on the peculiar culture of Southern California. But he believes the purposes are completely biblical and thus transferable anywhere.

Purpose-Driven may be compared to the Rule of Benedict, an organizational structure grafted onto monasteries all over Europe and the Mediterranean in the 6th century. The Rule enabled monasteries to thrive through the fall of the Roman Empire and beyond. Or to use a slightly more modern example, John Wesley’s organization of believers into small groups, and his program of itinerancy for preachers, set the stage for the dramatic spread of Methodism. “John Wesley was not so much an innovator,” writes historian Mark Noll, “as a gifted organizer who creatively exploited other people’s new ideas.”

Marshall Shelley, executive editor of Leadership Journal, sums up Purpose-Driven as a “theology and system of postconversion life.” Seeker models pay attention to the unchurched mindset, but Purpose- Driven takes up evangelism, discipleship, fellowship, service, and worship—all emphasized separately by various authors and movements—and systematically integrates them into the life of the church.

Southern Baptist core Critics say that seeker-sensitive megachurches draw their approach from business rather than the Bible. “The megachurch movement’s uncritical use of the tools of modernity is . . . a Faustian compact,” writes John Seel in The Evangelical Forfeit, “that could one day require the evangelical soul.”

It’s a fair warning, but Purpose-Driven principles seem less a result of a business-saturated mind than a Baptist-saturated mind. Warren has dropped much of Southern Baptist culture—the altar calls, the Broadman hymnal, the Sunday school. Yet Warren’s imperatives come straight from the heart of the Baptist way. He cares about the Bible. (It’s a point of pride that his new book, The Purpose-Driven Life, 13 ©2011 Christianity Today International ChristianBibleStudies.com Christianity Today Bible Study A Regular Purpose-Driven guy Article

cites over 1,000 verses of Scripture.) He cares about world missions, pouring money into making Purpose-Driven resources available in the Third World. And most of all he cares about soul-winning. Though Warren’s diamond balances evangelism with the other purposes of the church, it’s clear where his heart goes. “He lives, bleeds, sleeps, and eats evangelism,” says Kay Warren.

If Purpose-Driven falls short, it’s in its Southern Baptist mentality. Southern Baptists are highly organizational, and Purpose-Driven is an organizational and programmatic approach. For example, the diamond offers a sequence of church involvement, even though spiritual development is rarely so neatly sequential. Nor do circles and diamonds tell you how to help someone who is spiritually stuck. Purpose- Driven isn’t really pastoral so much as it’s institutional. But, then, pastors lead institutions, and for many that’s the least comfortable and most demanding part of their job.

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

Warren says we have entered a congregational era, noting that denominations have waned. Neither do evangelical parachurch ministries of the post–World War II era any longer form the edge of innovation. “Today, the sharpest guys I know are starting churches,” Warren says. He pictures Saddleback as a “teaching church,” with a responsibility to pass on its lessons to other churches. “We’ve trained more pastors than all the seminaries combined,” he says.

Even though the statement is hyperbolic—Purpose-Driven conferences last a few days, while seminary training goes for years—it’s still notable. More than 180,000 pastors worldwide have been introduced to the formula, according to Warren’s website (www.purposedriven.com). Many of them encouraged members of their congregations to participate in “40 Days of Purpose”—a collective journey through Warren’s latest book, The Purpose-Driven Life (Zondervan)—this fall. As of September, more than 500,000 people in more than 1,500 churches were intending to do it, according to Saddleback.

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

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

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

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55 Lord of the Wedding Dance LETTERS 53 WHERE WE STAND or the pro-life movement56 60 Melinda Delahoyde, Clenard H. Childress Jr., and Charmaine Yoest give Carolyn next Arendssteps f plays catch with God THE VILLAGE GREEN 58 WRESTLING WITH ANGELS CONTRA MUNDUM Chuck Colson on recovering atheists featuring Carolyn Arends, N.T. Wright, John Piper,

OPINIONS AND PERSPECTIVES ON ISSUES FACING THE CHURCH Dinesh D’Souza, Tim Keller, and many more! en to lay down the curse If we train our childr , preferences, and words of marriage—opinions oversial. rights—early marriage won’t be so contr Adrienne Michelson Rome, Ohio

stopped being a sin? Pop culture has so strengthen marriage until we encour- fanned the flames of our national libido t that we can BOOKS We Thee Wed age each other with the fac that sex is now The on Pr paedictioneerr with air to breathe ’s August cover story, TOP ’s Game 61 Christianity Today n. But who is telling What got the most human need. I Top 5: Advent resist any temptatio ’s Wilson’ 62 iage,” much responses in August as being an undeniables Bookmarks Deep Church “The Case for Early Marr at it’s not too MUSIC 64 INTERVIEW 63 Excerpt:The Meaning Is in the W unmarried Christians th reject Two this minutes utterly, with as any . .Christian . Car should. John Wigger nd and I com- olyn Ar 65 TV V 66 aiting 64 impressed me. My husba definitely? 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T YAY OR NAY theological record and pe you’ll you ng on in Christian both get your money’s describing what’s goi unger into biblical Readers’ response to rtant aspects more worth and men to guide the yo “The Case for Early transformation are impo from these pages. “weddings all Marriage” In fact, I predict culture. But his solution— , and to look for- n regarding any if you do read that manhood (Titus 2:2, 6) of worship. The questio this book, you’ll around, except for the leftover Christian ies as husbands t form does about be thinking ward to their responsibilit worship music is not, “Wha it for weeks ’t correspond to the prob- afterward, reminded women”—doesn 57% t rather, “Does this it every time of and fathers. this represent?” bu you read the newspaper lem. This is because he fails to address the headlines on the or the y. 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Whatever ) the nature of the heh game of “What hand, Bueno problem at Makes Us de Mesquita Human?”—orH weighingalternative conduct and his associates what made possibilities. extensive interviews humanh us pating what By antici- with who are changing our world and might observers, expert at some point in be, we hope—within identifying longlo our modest our the parties with evolutionary sphereof influence—to nificant stake in t a sig- history, Bruce shapewhat he outcome an so the story goes Buenode Mesquita—let is. what they say they wan d clarifying to pprovidero ide —continues that t, what their eentertainment.nter name roll off your prefer- ham’s Richard Wrang- tonguea couple ences are Catching Fire: of times—differs (how they would How Cooking from most various rank Us Human, published Made in that of us possible outcomes), earlier he makes his living and must have this year, doing who among the gladdened many what humans players might whatever a kitchen. typically do in be particularly else we But less systematic a influential are—forkedradishes, fashion. negotiation in the ing Neanderthals, sing- invites He process. political us into his The infor- on—we animals, and workshop in mation thus are also predictioneers, so The Predictioneer’s gathered is fed all of Game: Using a mathematical into a way that distingui us, in the Logic model shes us from ou of Brazen Self-Interest that he has creatures. r fellow refined over the (Prediction to See and Shape years, and based tioneer + engineer = predic- the Future on the results, .) Like chess players, (Random House) he will advise we look ★★★★★. clients his ahead, As (the cia, various the cheesy subtitle ernment other gov- bodies,corporate how to proceed. boards)

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