If We`re Rick Warren`s Friends, I`d Hate To Meet His Enemies
By Benjamin Cole, Pastor
Parkview Baptist Church, Arlington, TX
Rick Warren is an evangelical anomaly, and some people think that`s a good thing.
In seminary, I heard countless slams on his preaching style. I was lectured in cheap, pithy platitudes that "seeker services" were an oxymoron, if not "Satan-friendly." Saddleback Sam, the name Dr. Warren gives to the "target audience" to whom he ministers, was a joke, a marketing ploy to reach a certain kind of person who could bankroll a certain kind of ministry.
In my home church, there is a lady who is convinced Rick Warren is the antichrist. He`s compromising the Gospel. He`s a wolf in sheep`s clothes.
And then there are those who think he`s sold out on the abortion issue by hosting U.S. Sen. Barak Obama, D-Ill., at an AIDS conference, or that he`s compromised U.S. foreign policy by visiting Syria and North Korea. Some Southern Baptists have their briefs in a bunch because he still supports the Baptist World Alliance, which the Southern Baptist Convention stopped funding a few years ago. I have good friends who refuse to read his books, and I have former professors who take regular potshots at his publishing prowess.
But Rick Warren presses on. Perhaps more than any minister today, he takes the high road.
When his critics are slopping up a third helping of pot roast and potatoes at the Golden Corral, he`s serving up a truckload of grain to an African village. When they`re ranting and foaming about his preaching style, Rick Warren is uploading his sermons to the Web for them to plagiarize. When they`re hammering the church growth movement, Rick Warren is growing a church.
I may not do everything the way Rick Warren would, but I know that I couldn`t do a fraction of what he does. People in my church read his books and find his insight helpful. My taxes are lower because he took a case to the highest levels of justice, not to protect his own income-which he gives away at a Bill Gates pace-but to protect the housing allowance exemption of pastors in hamlets like Whitesboro and Wolf City. My sermon illustrations are more diverse because his ministry team sends out helpful tools for finding fresh and creative ways to explain the principles of Holy Writ.
While Baptists bicker about booze, or whine about worship style, or cry over Calvinism, or tilt over tongues, Rick Warren is doing what he can to make a difference in his lifetime.
Dr. Warren doesn`t need the platform of the Southern Baptist Convention to be heard. He doesn`t need our committees, seminaries, or publishing house. He doesn`t need political activists to get him on the White House guest list. He doesn`t need a mission board to plant churches, and he certainly doesn`t need a room half-full of ballot-waving messengers to hear him preach when he has entire continents clamoring to hear him talk about Jesus pure and simple.
Rick Warren doesn`t need us. I wonder why he sticks with us.
His harshest critics, it seems are those who dwell in the house of his friends. It`s not hard to understand why he`s busy building his own house and not ours.
This article is reprinted by the author`s permission from his blog, found at baptistblog.wordpress.com, and it was also printed in the Dallas Morning News.
