Christian pastor and best-selling author Rick Warren. - Reuters
IN 2002, God dropped a pebble into the pond of Kay Warren's life in the form of a magazine article about HIV/AIDS in Africa. Three years later, the ripple effect has reached all the way from her home in Orange County, California, to Africa.
It's still gaining strength through the PEACE plan, a bold ministry vision from Kay's influential husband, Saddleback Church's Rick Warren. The Warrens and 42 other American evangelicals joined 9,000 Rwandan Christians in July to launch the first 'Purpose-Driven Nation' initiative to harness business people, politicians, and pastors against the nation's biggest social problems.
Rwandans are still struggling to reconcile themselves after more than 800,000 people were killed in a genocide in 1994. Over 10 years later, the scars are still raw.
Kay told Christianity Today seeing that article was "an appointment with God ... he intended to grab my attention." The news photos were so graphic that she covered her eyes and peeked through just enough to read the words. There was a quote box in the middle of the article that read: "12 million children orphaned in Africa due to AIDS."
12 MILLION ORPHANS
"It was as if I fell off the donkey on the Damascus road because I had no clue. I didn't know one single orphan," she said. For days afterward, she was haunted by that fact: 12 million orphans.
Unable to block it from her mind, Kay began to get mad at God, praying, "Leave me alone. Even if it is true, what can I do about it? I'm a white, suburban soccer mom. There is nothing I can do." But that did no good.
After weeks, then months of anguish, she realised she faced a fateful choice. She could either pretend she did not know about the HIV/AIDS pandemic or she could become personally involved.
"I made a conscious choice to say, 'Yes.' I had a pretty good suspicion that I was saying yes to a bucket load of pain. In that moment, God shattered my heart. He just took my heart and put it through a woodchip machine. My heart came out on the other side in more pieces than I could gather back up in my arms.
"It changed the direction of my life. I will never be the same. Never. I can never go back. I became a seriously disturbed woman."
NATIONAL BEST-SELLER
Through this period, Kay said nothing to her husband. Warren's 2002 book, The Purpose-Driven Life, had in a matter of months skyrocketed into national best-seller status. Selling at up to one million copies per month, it has been the best-selling new book in the world since 2003. With that title and his earlier one, The Purpose-Driven Church, Warren has sold 26 million books.
Warren says when his wife finally told him God was calling her to the front line of ministry against HIV/AIDS in Africa, he responded, saying, "That's great, honey. I'm going to support you. It's not my vision."
"But nothing is as strong as pillow talk," he added. "God used my wife to grab my heart."
Because of the millions in book sales, the Warrens all of a sudden had become wealthy. Warren's celebrity also sprang forward, and he is ranked as the second most influential evangelical after evangelist Billy Graham among surveyed pastors.
DECISIONS
With this new-found affluence and influence, the couple says they made five decisions: They did not upgrade their lifestyle. Warren stopped taking a paycheck from Saddleback. He repaid 25 years of his salary to the church he founded in 1980. They created three charitable foundations. They started "reverse tithing," meaning they live on 10 per cent of their income and give away 90 per cent.
The Warrens returned to Southern California, still not fully understanding what lay in store for them. Kay says God handed her a Polaroid and new things kept appearing in the picture.
"There are millions and millions of local churches around the world and now we have the technology to network them." This mobilisation strategy, Warren says, also incorporates two ideas from Luke 10. Individuals would be sent out in teams, and on entering a village, they would seek "a man of peace."
"Find the man of peace. Bless him. He blesses you back. Who is the man of peace? He's influential and he's open. He doesn't have to be a Christian. Find a non-Christian who's influential and open - a Muslim or an atheist."
The Warrens began to educate themselves and their congregation intensively. At first, even HIV-positive members of Saddleback were fearful of disclosing their status. That has changed. This fall, Saddleback will host 'Disturbing Voices', its first international conference on HIV/AIDS. Kay said, "Three years later, people walk up and go, 'Hey, how's the HIV ministry going?' It's the topic of conversation. I love it. I love what God is doing."
Warren had recruited others, too. Curtis Sergeant, a prominent missions strategist at the Southern Baptist International Missions Board, also joined the PEACE plan. Along with senior staff from Warren's Purpose-Driven organisation, they all put new energy into further developing the plan.
Warren hopes to enlist one billion individuals through their congregations and small groups for mission projects. This mobilisation of church and small-group members will walk them through three steps: personal PEACE, local PEACE, and global PEACE.
He says parachurch organisations have for decades been on the leading edge, and the local church was left behind.
"In denominations, you pay, you pray, and you get out of the way. Let the professionals do it. The revolution I believe in and want to bring about reverses the role the local church on the front edge."
Warren also expects more and more congregations to adopt his Purpose-Driven model that organises churches around five key factors: fellowship, discipleship, worship, ministry, and evangelism. So far, 30,000 American churches have participated in the first programme, '40 Days of Purpose'.
Once an individual church adopts the Purpose-Driven model, there are many more moves to make. They describe those steps as moving around a baseball diamond. The goal is mission-minded disciples. Warren says, "You can't get the church to jump from total selfishness, where they want all the sermons about 'How do I avoid stress,' to caring about Angola."
WORLD-CLASS CHRISTIAN
"How do you get them to become a world-class Christian?"
That question led Warren to another developmental idea that calls for each individual Christian to have experience in four ministry venues:
Warren said all five elements of the PEACE plan are being done by great organisations. But he says, "Nobody has been able to do them through the local church together, combined. That's what makes the PEACE plan unique."
Some see Warren's focus on working through local churches as strategic and inspired, because church planting is a growth business. Right now, there are about 3.7 million congregations worldwide. By 2025, 1.2 million new churches may open, pushing the global total to 5 million, if estimates from the International Bulletin of Missionary Research (IBMR) prove accurate.
Warren also believes government-driven programmes have proven to be ineffective against HIV/AIDS, malaria, corruption, and other global social ills. These multiple crises outstrip the capacity of traditional Christian missions, individual governments, and even the United Nations. For instance, fatalities from HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa create about 100,000 new orphaned children each month. The size and complexity of such problems overwhelm almost any programme. And it's a common observation that billions of dollars in aid and development has created a dependency that has only made large sections of Africa worse.
'GIVE WISELY'
"The compassion industry isn't working," says Dwight Gibson, formerly a top leader with World Evangelical Alliance. Seeing these emerging changes, Gibson joined Geneva Global, a new-paradigm missions organisation in Pennsylvania. Its vision is to help donors 'give wisely' to projects with verifiable life-changing results. Gibson is bullish on Warren's PEACE plan, saying it's like a "disruptive technology" that will prove its value once understood and implemented.
But other parachurch leaders remain cautious and concerned. They suspect the PEACE plan will prove to be difficult to implement nationwide at the grassroots. Religion scholar Alan Wolfe, in a recent Wall Street Journal commentary, expressed the scepticism of many when he said, "A country like Rwanda faces political and social problems beyond the reach of even the most earnest and popular humanitarian efforts."
"Rwanda touches something very deep inside of me," Kay Warren says. "There's just something about this bruised and battered country that's got under my skin."
In Rwanda, Christians were sorting out their feelings and discovered their enthusiasm was mixed with worry. One well-educated Rwandan leader told me, "One reality that we have to face here is when a leader speaks, we follow even if we are not convinced."
Public support for the PEACE plan may not translate well long-term to the grass roots, he said.
Others are more sceptical still. As Wolfe put it, "It has taken centuries for Rwandans to descend into the hell in which they exist. Not even becoming a purpose-driven nation is likely to bring them to heaven anytime soon."
Anglican Bishop John Rucyahana, who has probably worked more closely with Americans than any other Rwandan Christian, says, "I praised the Lord having the PEACE plan come from Saddleback. You know God is doing something when people in different places get the same idea before they are connected. It's not just our idea. It's our vision."
Taken from christianitytoday.com
