My friend Ben Reed, a fellow small group pastor (Grace Community Church in Clarksville, Tennessee), writer, and the Small Groups Network marketing director, sent me an email earlier today that contains a letter from Rick Warren to his church staff at Saddleback Church and an interview Warren did in response to some misinformation about him and Saddleback. I thought it was worth sharing here. One of the things I hope you will notice is how Warren discusses the evangelistic role of small groups. Good stuff.
Dear staff,
A few days ago, an article appeared in the Orange County Register that included
some outrageous statements about Saddleback that were incorrect. Of
course, the media rarely gets everything right, and there’s no way we could
respond to every false statement made about us. But I felt this article
created so many misperceptions that I agreed to do an interview in
response. Here is it below. Please read it all, then forward it to
everyone you know would be interested.
Thanks!
Pastor Rick
QUESTION: Do people of other religions worship the same
God as Christians?
WARREN: Of course not. Christians have a view of God
that is unique. We believe Jesus is God! We believe God is a Trinity: Father,
Son, and Holy Spirit. Not 3 separate gods but one God. No other faith believes
Jesus is God. My God is Jesus. The belief in God as a Trinity is the
foundational difference between Christians and everyone else. There are 2.1 billion
people who call themselves Christians… whether Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant,
Pentecostal, or Evangelical…and they all have the doctrine of the Trinity in
common.
QUESTION: A recent newspaper article claimed you believe
Christians and Muslims worship the same God, that you are “in partnership” with
a mosque, and that you both agreed to “not evangelize each other.” You
immediately posted a brief refutation online. Can you expand on
that?
WARREN: Sure. All three of those statements are flat
out wrong. Those statements were made by a reporter, not by me. I did not say
them ... I do not believe them... I completely disagree with them ... and
no one even talked to me about that article! So let me address each
one individually: First, as I’ve already said, Christians have a
fundamentally different view of God than Muslims. We worship Jesus as God.
Muslims don’t. Our God is Jesus, not Allah. Colossians 2:9 “For in Christ
dwells all the fullness of the Godhead bodily.” Second, while we
urge our members to build friendships with everyone in our community, including
Muslims and other faiths, (“Love your neighbor as yourself”), our church has
never had any partnership with a mosque. Friendship and partnership are
two very different levels of commitment. Some of our members have hosted a
Bible study with Muslim friends, which I applaud, but I’ve never been to it,
and a Bible study certainly isn’t any kind of partnership or merger! It’s just
crazy that a simple Bible Study where people explore Scripture with
non-Christians would be reported as a partnership and others would interpret
that as a plan for a new compromised religion. Just crazy! Third, as both
an Evangelical and as an evangelist, anyone who knows me and my 40 year track
record of ministry knows that I would never agree to “not evangelizing”
anyone! I am commanded by my Savior to share the Good News with all
people everywhere, all the time, in every way possible! Anyone who’s heard me
teach knows that my heart beats for bringing others to Jesus.
QUESTION: That same article mentioned that you ate an
Iftar dinner with Orange County Muslims. What is that all about?
WARREN: It’s called being polite and a good neighbor.
For years, we have invited Muslim friends to attend our Easter and Christmas services
and they have graciously attended year after year. Some have even celebrated
our family’s personal Christmas service in our home. So when they have a
potluck when their month of fasting ends, we go to their party. It’s a Jesus
thing. The Pharisees criticized him as “the friend of sinners” because
Jesus ate dinner with people they disapproved of. By the way, one of my dear
friends is a Jewish Rabbi and my family has celebrated Passover at his home,
and he attends our Christmas and Easter services. I wish more Christians
would reach out in love like Jesus.
QUESTION: Why do you think people who call themselves
Christians sometimes say the most hateful things about Muslims?
WARREN: Well, some of those folks probably aren’t
really Christians. 1 John 4:20 says, “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ yet hates
his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he
has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen.” And 1 John 2:9 says “Anyone
who claims to be in the light but hates his brother is still in the
darkness.” I am not allowed by Jesus to hate anyone. Our culture
has accepted two huge lies: The first is that if you disagree with someone’s
lifestyle, you must fear them or hate them. The second is that to love someone
means you agree with everything they believe or do. Both are nonsense. You
don’t have to compromise convictions to be compassionate.
QUESTION: Let's talk about evangelism. In the past 10 years,
Saddleback Church has baptized over 24,000 new believers. No other church comes
close to that record. You are likely the most evangelistic church in America.
What's the key?
WARREN: We are willing to do what many other churches
are unwilling to do. We are willing to go beyond our comfort zone.
QUESTION: For instance?
WARREN: Because Jesus commanded us to take the Gospel
to everyone, I spend much of my time with groups of people who completely
disagree with what I believe. I’m constantly trying to build a bridge of love
to nonbelievers, to atheists, to gays, to those I disagree with politically,
and to those of other faiths. We don't wait for these people to come to church;
we go to them and share with them on their turf, not ours. Every member is a
minister and a missionary. Saddleback was a missional church
30 years before the term became popular. We just called it being “purpose
driven”.
QUESTION: “Building a bridge” sounds like compromise to many
people.
WARREN: Building a bridge has nothing to do with
compromising your beliefs. It's all about your behavior and your attitude
toward them. It's about genuinely loving people. People don't care how much you
know until they know how much you care. Before people ask, “Is Jesus credible?”
they want to know if you are credible. Before people trust
Jesus they must trust you. You cannot win your enemies to Christ, only your
friends. It's part of what Paul calls “the ministry of reconciliation.” It is
Christ-like to treat people with dignity and listen to them with respect.
QUESTION: Why are most Christians so ineffective at
sharing their faith?
WARREN: I have a whole seminar on that! First, they
don't really have any unbelieving friends. They spend all their time with other
Christians. As a result, they are afraid to share their faith because it feels
unnatural to them. For most people to come to Christ, you must build a
relationship with them first. You must love them. The truth is, most Christians
love everything else more than the people around them that Jesus died for.
Second, many don't really believe that people are lost without Christ. Third,
many Christians are afraid of the criticism they will receive from other
Christians if they hang out with unbelievers. It was the religious people who
hated Jesus the most. They criticized him for associating with tax collectors
and lepers and prostitutes and politicians and going to parties. Lost people
loved Jesus but the religious folks saw his associations as dangerous
compromise. The same is true today. Modern Pharisees still use guilt by
association as a weapon. Just read the blogs. They'd rather hunker in a bunker
and attack those courageous enough to reach out to non-Christians. I do not
fear the disapproval of others. I fear the disapproval of God on my
disobedience to what he has clearly commanded us to do.
QUESTION: What is the P.E.A.C.E. plan?
WARREN: It is a biblical strategy of ministry based on five
activities Jesus modeled in his ministry. Saddleback members have been beta
testing it for the past nine years all around the world. Each letter of
P.E.A.C.E. represents one of five things Jesus taught his disciples to do: P
stands for Plant churches. E stands for Equip leaders. A stands for Assist the
poor. C stands for Care for the sick. E stands for Educate the next generation.
The PEACE plan is accomplished by local churches through local churches. It is
based on three passages of Scripture and the specific instructions Jesus gave
to his teams that he sent out. There are at least a dozen major differences
between the PEACE Plan and the traditional, typical mission program of NGOs and
parachurch organizations of the past 100 years. It is a return to the missional
strategy.
QUESTION: What is the PEACE Center?
WARREN: Based on Jesus’ instructions in Acts 1:8, we
practice the PEACE Plan in three dimensions: PERSONALPEACE –
my ministry to those closest to me; LOCAL PEACE -our congregation’s
ministry to our community; andGLOBAL PEACE - serving other local
churches around the world as those congregations do their own local
PEACE. The PEACE Center is the building on our church campus that houses
about three dozen of our 300 ministries to the community. It offers our food
bank, job training, family counseling, legal aid, car repair, tutoring, English
as a second language, legal immigration assistance, and many other ministries.
QUESTION: I read an article that claimed you were
building a PEACE Center to bring Muslims and Christians together in peace.
WARREN: It was the writer’s mistake. He got two different
stories confused. Our recently opened PEACE Center, on the Saddleback
Church campus has NOTHING ...zero... to do with our Muslim friends.
This is an example of why I always doubt what I read in newspapers
and blogs about ministries. Secular reporters trying to cover churches and
theological issues often get it wrong. But then Christian bloggers,
instead of contacting the ministry, blindly believe, quote and repost the
errors made by secular reporters. Then those errors become permanent,
searchable, and global on the Internet. I couldn’t count the number of times a
secular reporter has gotten a story about Saddleback wrong but then it is
perpetuated by Christians who never fact-check. And the three factors I
mentioned about the Internet make it impossible to correct all the
misperceptions, and outright lies that get repeated over and over.
QUESTION: You mentioned legal immigration services. How many
languages do Saddleback members speak?
WARREN: At last count, I heard we speak 76 languages in
our church family. One of our 10 values, the “A” in our S.A.D.D.L.E.B.A.C.K.
strategy, is that we are an ALL-nation congregation. We are a multi-ethnic
church. We want our congregation to look like heaven will look – with every
age, race, tribe, and economic background represented.
QUESTION: What is the goal of your ministry?
WARREN: To know Christ and make Him known! To live out
Jesus’ Great Commandment and Great Commission! In fact, this has been the motto
of Saddleback Church since we started it in 1980: “A great commitment
to the Great Commandment and the Great Commission will grow a great church.” Everything
we do comes out of these two great texts. God's five eternal purposes for both
our lives and the church proceed from these verses. The
Purpose Driven Church and The Purpose Driven Life explain
this in detail.
QUESTION: Through the PEACE Plan, Saddleback
became the first local congregation in 2000 years of Christian history to send
its members to literally “every nation” as Jesus commanded.
WARREN: That's correct.
QUESTION: How did you accomplish that?
WARREN: By taking Jesus’ command seriously. When Jesus
said, “Go to EVERY nation” we asked ourselves as a church family, “Has any
local church in 2000 years ever actually done that? If not, why don't we be the
first!” So we set a goal to send our members to every nation of the world to do
the five tasks of the P.E.A.C.E. Plan by the end of 2010. Of course I
know that the Greek ta ethne refers to people groups or tribes
not political nations, but you have to start somewhere! So we decided that we
would send our members on mission to all 197 nations in the world. (There are
195 nations in the United Nations. The only two nations not in the United
Nations are Taiwan and Serbia.) On November 18, 2010, a Saddleback team went to
the last nation, #197, a small island in the Caribbean called, St. Kitts. Now,
our goal for the next decade, which we call our Decade of Destiny is to
mobilize a network of churches who will commit to planting new churches in the
final 3,600 unengaged people groups that still do not have a Christian church.
QUESTION: How many members did you send out to complete
your church’s goal of taking the gospel to every nation?
WARREN: 15,867 members were sent out. Of course, we’ve
gone way past that in the last year.
QUESTION: What is your mission goal this year?
WARREN: Within a year from this Easter, we intend to plant
new churches in 12 strategic cities around the world as resource centers and
base camps for the greater goal of planting churches in the 3600 unengaged
people groups.
QUESTION: What are those 12 cities?
WARREN: Tokyo, Berlin, Johannesburg, Bangalore, Buenos
Aires, Hong Kong, London, Freetown, Moscow, Mexico City, Amman, and
Manila. Anyone who’d like to be a part of the team should contact me at
PastorRick@saddleback.com or
on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.
QUESTION: Are you promoting Chrislam?
WARREN: Of course not. It's the lie that won't die. No
matter how many times we refute it and correct that lie, people keep passing it
on as truth. Jesus is the only way to salvation. Period. If I
didn’t believe that, I’d get into a much easier line of work! But I do believe
that everybody needs Jesus and I am willing to put up with
false statements and misunderstandings in order to get the Gospel out.
QUESTION: What are your greatest frustrations
about evangelism?
WARREN: That Christians would rather argue than
evangelize. That people are more interested in winning arguments that in
winning people. That people are more interested in making a point than in
making a difference. That people put politics above the souls of people. That
people are more afraid of guilt by association than allowing others to go to
hell.
QUESTION: If anyone wants to learn or teach their
church how to be more effective in evangelism and missions what should they do?
WARREN: Write to me at
PastorRick@saddleback.com and
ask me for an invitation to the group of leaders I train each week through a
private webcast.
QUESTION: Any last word?
WARREN: Reach one more for Jesus! Anyone who’s
read Purpose Driven Life knows those were my father’s last
words and deathbed instructions to me. It is the theme of my life and I invite
you to make it yours. Nothing is more important than the eternal destiny
of those around us.
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