Rick Warren's Global PEACE Plan
I know that when I post on church or theological matters, half the readership here tunes out. That’s fine; there are many posts on other subjects here and a million other blogs out there. But Rev. Rick Warren’s beliefs are impacting the church in profound ways, so it’s important to examine what he says and what he believes and test him against the standard all churches should be using, the scripture. When tested against scripture, Warren comes up short.
Case in point, Warren discussed his Global PEACE plan with Beliefnet.com a week or two ago. I’ve already posted a short piece on it, but it’s worth taking a second look at this interview. It’s very illuminating as to where Warren thinks God wants him to lead the world’s Christians. Make no mistake—when Warren talks about leading a “second reformation,” he is talking about leading all Christians, or at least as many as he can get to listen to him. Well, Warren is a bit humble—he only thinks he might lead half the world’s Christians. So his second reformation might end up including 1 billion ground troops.
Where will Warren lead them? Into social work, evidently, and that by itself isn’t a bad thing. I question his justifications, though. Here’s how he justifies his Global PEACE plan, which is the next step churches under his sway are supposed to take to continue following Warren’s church model:
What are the problems that are so big in this world that don’t seem solvable? The UN has failed at them. America has failed at them. Business has failed at them. Governments have failed at them. I came to the conclusion that there are several big problems—the global Goliaths.Number one is spiritual emptiness. Most people don’t know that they’re not an accident. That they were made by God and for God, they were made for a purpose, this life is not all there is, they’re made to last forever. This life is preparation for the next. Jesus came to earth so that their past can be forgiven, they have a purpose for living, and a home in heaven.
The second biggest problem is egocentric leadership. Poor leadership is the cause of poverty and disease and illiteracy. They tried to solve these problems without the church which is the only thing big enough. The only thing growing faster than the AIDS pandemic is the church. I went to the scriptures and I said, “God, what is the plan?” That is where I came up with this PEACE plan, the antidote to these global giants.
P - Plant a church or partner with a church if there is one there. It always starts with a church… in, through, and to the church.
It’s the five things Jesus did when he was here on earth. The first thing he did was he planted a church. The second thing he did was equip leaders. He spent three years training these disciples. The third thing he did was he cared for the poor. In fact, in his very first sermon, he says, “I am here to preach the good news to the poor.” He cared for the poor. Fourth, he healed the sick. One-third of his ministry was a health ministry. The fifth thing is he taught. Particularly he cared about the next generation.
E - Equip servant leaders.
A - Assist the poor.
C - Care for the sick.
E - Educate the next generation.
Leaving aside Warren’s debatable and fairly banal views on foreign policy, I’d like to focus on the PEACE Plan and Warren’s justification of it. He identifies five things the PEACE Plan will do, and then justifies them based on his understanding of Christ’s earthly ministry. It shouldn’t take a theologian to see that there’s something missing from Warren’s list of “the five things Jesus did when he was here on earth.” Namely, Warren leaves out the primary reason Christ came to earth and the most important thing He did, which was dying for our sins and being resurrected on the third day. Leaving the atonement sacrifice out belittles Jesus’ ministry to the point that He is a run of the mill teacher, albeit a very successful one. In doing this, Warren very nearly equates his own ministry and tactics with those of Jesus — in essence, holding himself up as Jesus’ equal. Or the closest thing to it. I don’t think Warren means to do that, but his flippancy with scripture frequently leads him into the theological ditch.
To look at this another way, if he attributed the five points to, say, Paul or Peter, Warren would be more right than wrong. Paul and Peter did plant churches, they did equip leaders, they did all of the PEACE Plan bullet points. They did other things as well, but they did do those five things. Why not hold them up as the standard, then, especially when Jesus’ ministry was utterly unique? Only Warren can answer that question.
As for the five things Warren claims Jesus did, the first just isn’t true. Jesus did not “plant a church” in the sense Warren means it and the way we understand it today. Church planters take an existing faith and movement and plant it and its ideas in places where the church doesn’t currently reach. Christ’s ministry is so much more than that. He fulfilled prophecy, calling leaders to His side to carry on the work that He knew they would have to do with the Holy Spirit’s help after the ascension. He fulfilled the Old Testament and died to atone for humanity’s sins so that we might have a personal relationship with God. That is not “church planting.” Secondly, Jesus didn’t merely “equip leaders.” He hand chose apostles and gave them Himself as the living example of following God. He said things that they often didn’t understand until years later. He often offended them, and they once thought He was insane. He spent three years, yes, training them in a sense, but in a much deeper sense than Warren indicates. This is the problem with Warren’s tactic of boiling the Bible down to bullet points — these five things, those four things — as he does 168 times in The Purpose Driven Life. He peels away the real depth and meaning of scripture in order to make his own superficial point, very often distorting the Bible’s actual teaching in the process. Warren is being, as he quotes Paul admonishing Christians not to be on page 148 of the book, “flip with God.” He is far too careless in interpreting scripture to be considered reliable.
Warren goes on in the PEACE Plan quote above to assert that Jesus came “to preach the good news to the poor.” Which is…? Warren doesn’t say, and his audience on Beliefnet, a religious smorgasbord site so crass it has a Belief-O-Matic that can tell you based on answering a few questions what religion you should follow, isn’t likely to know either. He fails here to proclaim the Gospel clearly, turning it instead into a call for social work. Social work is fine but it’s not the prime driver of the Gospel. If it were, ours would be a works-based faith and we would be earning our ticket to heaven. Since Warren left out the central purpose of Jesus’ ministry — the death and resurrection — and since Warren emphasizes a kind of social work gospel, he ends up treading up to the edge of saying to the poor that the good news that Jesus came to preach is that a Purpose Driven Church in their neighborhood has some canned food for them. That would be good news, but not the Good News.
Warren further describes Jesus’ healing work as a “health ministry.” In doing so, he buries the purpose of Christ’s healings. The Gospel of John describes the healings as “signs,” which is a major clue to their purpose. If the point of healing was the healing itself, Jesus must be judged a failure since he never built a hospital and didn’t stay on earth long enough to heal everybody everywhere. He didn’t even heal everyone in His own city. As God, Jesus clearly had the power to do all of that and eradicate disease itself if He intended on running a “health ministry.” The immediate purpose of the healings was no doubt to alleviate suffering, but the main point of Jesus’ healing ministry was to prove who He was, and that same purpose extends to nearly all of Jesus’ other recorded miracles as well. They were proof that when He said “I am the way, the truth and the life,” He was right. Equating Jesus’ healing miracles with a “health ministry” again belittles what Jesus was actually doing, while elevating Warren’s PEACE Plan. When Warren asserts that one third of Jesus’ ministry was about health, Warren is just flat wrong. John’s gospel says that there were too many miracles to record. Therefore we don’t know what percentage of Jesus’ ministry involved healing. It may be 90 percent, it may be 60 percent, or less, or even more. We just don’t know. And Warren knows his scripture well enough to know that his assertion can’t be supported scripturally.
I will grant Warren’s final point, that Jesus taught. But Jesus taught hard truths as well as light ones, and was so controversial with the worldly authority of His day that they plotted to kill Him. Jesus did not teach primarily about the value of social work. He wasn’t about saving lives so much as saving souls. And it’s hard to argue, with all of the obscure parables and the public battles with the Pharisees, that Jesus’ ministry was “seeker-sensitive” as Warren and current megachurch thinkers insist our churches should be.