Purpose-Driven® Church, The

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Summary: A Church Dichotomy
Review: Rick Warren's The Purpose-Driven Church is a church model/church-help guide that I still cannot determine whether I like it or not and whether I agree with it or not. The book is an excellent 400 pages of successful tactics for outreach, church growth, and inspirational example. I must commend Warren for his mastery of understanding human nature, application of psychological techniques, and effective outreach methods. Warren has succeeded highly in creating a church that fits the keyhole of south Orange County suburbia, yet I cannot help but be turned away by the ethnocentrism and egoism that are rampant throughout this book. In reading this, I reaped more of a sense of mind and heart manipulation than of love and Jesus' example. I was also turned away by how formulated his methods and faith are. I felt like God's church and a person's spirituality were textbook materials- that I could put the right ingredients into a box and pull out a Christian. Something inside will not let me feel right about defining a person's life, pain, love, spirituality, and purpose into stepped methodology.
Warren's focus was to church the unbelievers. Why do we want to "church" unbelievers? The last thing I want to do is commit a person to an organization that defines their spirituality. Spirituality and faith should be defined only by Jesus' love, not doctrine. There exists such a consumer mentality in the Saddleback mega-church. I feel that in our society the "Church" has become an institution and not a body of God's children and Warren's church model feeds just to that. It is so important in this age where the church truly needs redemption in society that mass-produced and influential writings represent true Christian values, Jesus' love, and humility. Religion, the church- these need to be redefined in our modern society and I do not feel that this book guides the practice of Christian faith in a truly biblical and spiritual direction. This book came off as a how-to on mastering the art of Christian Evangelism in middle-class, white suburbia. There is so much more in the world than that! Where is Warren's connection to that? As an artist, I understand that great art is not simply a mastery of technique but rather the outcome of growth, expression, and learning that occur by circumstance and discovery, not by step or pre-planned psychological manipulation. Effective? Intelligent? Inspiring? Yes, Warren's art is all those; however, I cannot get by my hesitation to accept an ethnocentric, procedural view of spirituality and faith as presented by Rick Warren in his Purpose-Driven Church. Rick Warren is a blessed, faithful, intelligent man and I would like to see credit given to the Holy Spirit that is what moves our spirituality and faith, and will guide our churches where they need to go.

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Summary: A Purpose-Driven Best Buy!
Review: The Purpose Driven Church by Rick Warren is a practical explanation of how to build and maintain a healthy church that is founded on purpose. Through years of experience and hard work, Warren has created a church model that provides "a biblical and healthy alternative to traditional ways that churches have operated and organized in the past." This book shifts the focus away from church building programs and instead emphasizes people building programs in order to strengthen the "core members" as well as bring multitudes of "seekers," or "unchurched," into a saving relationship with Jesus Christ.
This is done using a multitude of practical models, such as Warren's own "5 Circles of Commitment" which is used to describe the purpose of the church to draw in new Christians. Another model is the "Life Development Process" which communicates the purpose of transforming "seekers" into committed members (Warren 1995: 130). Warren also provides countless pages of insightful advice taken from years of ministry experience. In fact, Warren admits that he waited 20 years to write this book because he did not want to write it prematurely (Warren 1995: 18).
While many readers may discount Warren's church building model, calling it "unbiblical" or "watered-down," fail to realize the underlying theme and major strength of the text which is the Christ centered attitude. Throughout every section, the author strives to makes his intentions clear by constantly looking to Jesus as the ultimate example in illustrations as well as pointing to biblical references when applicable. One obvious example of this is found in chapter 12 which is entitled "How Jesus attracted Crowds." This entire chapter uses the ministry of Jesus as the primary example for attracting large crowds of unbelievers and teaching them His saving Gospel.
However, this book is of course not without faults. I can easily understand how, by reading the book, one might get the impression that the Warren describes his church model with some semblance of arrogance because of its great success. I am not implying that he is not a Godly man, in fact one can easily see the mark of Christ in him throughout his writing and I believe that his intentions are pure and well guided. However, when Warren reminds the reader for the tenth time how he did all the research on church planting communities, he planted a church in a place that he had never visited, his church grew to 10,000 people in 15 years, and using his methods 7,000 people came to Christ in those first 15 years, one might begin to come under that impression that this kind of repetition serves as little more than a subconscious and arrogant reminder of the works of the author and his greatness, not the greatness of Jesus Christ.
Overall, I would recommend this book to Christians who need fresh ideas for reaching their community. I especially recommend this to pastors who feel that they are losing touch with their community and/ or congregation as well as Christians interested in starting a ministry of their own.


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Summary: If you want to read a history of Saddleback....
Review: There may be some valid, useful points in this book, however, to find them you have to wade through the history of Saddleback. While Saddleback may be a very good example of a growing church, and a very good example of successful redemption of non-believers, there are very few, if any, examples given of things that didn't work and why they didn't work. Reading this book it makes it look like Saddleback has never had any failures, that the way that Saddleback has been organized and is operated is the best way to operate a church today. There are few examples of options of doing things other than the way Saddleback has developed. If you would like to have yet another Saddleback clone, read this book and follow the programming suggestions. If you would like to grow your own church, take the information given in the book, adapt it to your purposes and create your own programming.