One or two of you may be getting tired of these recent posts about Rick Warren. I know that I am. I really wasn't planning to write these but a certain someone decided to slam me with a nasty-gram on Maundy Thursday. Interestingly, my blog readership has quadrupled.
Darrell over at SouthCon posted a very telling personal experience with The Purpose Driven Life. He's been kind enough to link to me a couple of times recently and I am very happy to return the favor. I read his and his wife Wendy's blog, Tales From the Dorkside, every day w/o exception.
Here is an excerpt, but go here to read the whole post. Warren fans really need to read this.
A few years ago, my wife and I were having a hard time of it, still getting used to our new marriage, trying to work things out, grow together as a couple, grow spiritually and individually, etc. It was a desperate time for me. I was searching for meaning, looking for anything that might be a clear indication of what God had in mind for me.Sphere: Related Content
We were attending a nondenominational Fundamentalist church and the preacher there was, to his credit, doing everything in his ability to help us. Once, during a particularly tearful, confessional meeting on my part with him, I asked him to recommend a resource for me, and he suggested that I read Rick Warren's The Purpose Driven Life.
I'd never been a fan of the kinds of books that were popular with the members of our congregation, the kinds of things that they wanted to study. I didn't like Max Lucado, Bruce Wilkinson, etc. I thought of their books as silly, Halmark Card theology. Christianity-and-water, as C.S. Lewis might say. But I was willing to try Warren's book because the title seemed to speak to my problems. This might be the book, I hoped, that pointed me in the right direction.
I think I finished half of it.
Warren's book struck me as smug, superficial, self-congratulatory, and absolutely pointless. It seemed like the kind of thing that was designed to soothe rather than provoke. It seemed like the point was to avoid offending, to avoid challenging, to simply lull the reader into sleep. When I noticed that Warren also had books about the "Purpose Driven" church and "Purpose Driven" journals and devotionals, etc, it became clear to me. From what I could tell, Warren's "Purpose" was one thing and one thing alone: Marketing. Rick Warren had found his niche in the publishing world. Rick Warren was making an appeal to the pocket-books of the same "Wal-Mart Christians" who had bought so many of the "Left Behind" books and the silly, sappy greeting-cards of Lucado, Wilkinson, et al.
I was disgusted. Heart broken. Is this what Christianity was in the modern world, then? A marketing gimmick? A commercial cult? Drive-thru salvation? A large order of McDevotion and a side-order of fries?
