{"id":249,"date":"2007-12-02T21:09:10","date_gmt":"2007-12-03T01:09:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/godandculture.wordpress.com\/2007\/12\/02\/the-purpose-driven-left\/"},"modified":"2007-12-02T21:09:10","modified_gmt":"2007-12-03T01:09:10","slug":"the-purpose-driven-left","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/the-purpose-driven-left","title":{"rendered":"The Purpose Driven Left"},"content":{"rendered":"

Update: See my most recent post – Hillary’s ‘Home Run’ for The Purpose Driven Left<\/a> – for a full analysis of her speech.<\/p>\n

\"warren_hillary.jpg\"<\/a>Rick Warren\u00a0hosted Hillary Clinton at his Global Summit on AIDS and the Church\u00a0this past weekend to standing ovations<\/a>, an indication of Warren’s continued leftward\u00a0march. Last year’s keynote speaker was Barack Obama.\u00a0Melissa Rogers has the roundup of news coverage of Hillary’s speech<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Warren is becoming the new Jerry Falwell, without the passion for the same issues that motivated Jerry: abortion, same-sex marriage, etc. Warren is much more inclined to\u00a0be non-confrontational on\u00a0these clearly behaviorial issues, focusing his energies on traditional leftist causes like AIDS and the environment. He’s learned you get much more favorable media coverage when you\u00a0cover what the media favors. Rather than take a bold stand for the gospel and its clear message of repentance, Warren has opted to follow\u00a0today’s religious Left as they revive the social gospelism\u00a0of the early decades of the Twentieth Century, allowing Hillary to go unchallenged when she stated that Jesus never asked why<\/em> a person was sick, a clear slap at conservative evangelicals who proclaim a gospel of repentance calling for a change in behavior. Jesus may never have asked why a person was sick, but he did say, “Go, and sin no more<\/em>.”<\/p>\n

By allowing Hillary Rodham Clinton to steal the show at his AIDS summit Rick Warren has\u00a0solidified himself as\u00a0a\u00a0pawn for the Left while ardently swearing his allegiance to conservativism. Hillary’s speech was filled with the typical Leftist propaganda on the AIDS issue, thinly veiled in religious-speak. For Warren to give her message his defacto endorsement by giving her message a platform is evidence enough that Warren cares more about being connected politically than he does being convicted principally.<\/p>\n

The September 12, 2005 issue of The New Yorker magazine features a lengthy article on Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church,\u00a0headlined The Cellular Church: How Rick Warren’s Church Grew<\/a>.\u00a0 Written by Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference<\/a>, the\u00a0essay offers interesting insight into the mind and world of Rick Warren, and the methodogy used by Warren to build Saddleback from 200 attenders in 1975 to more than 20,000 each weekend today. From the essay:<\/p>\n

On the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Saddleback Church, Rick Warren hired the Anaheim Angels\u2019 baseball stadium. He wanted to address his entire congregation at once, and there was no way to fit everyone in at Saddleback, where the crowds are spread across services held over the course of an entire weekend. So Warren booked the stadium and printed large, silver-black-and-white tickets, and, on a sunny Sunday morning last April, the tens of thousands of congregants of one of America\u2019s largest churches began to file into the stands. They were wearing shorts and T-shirts and buying Cokes and hamburgers from the concession stands, if they had not already tailgated in the parking lot. On the field, a rock band played loudly and enthusiastically. Just after one o\u2019clock, a voice came over the public-address system\u2014\u201cRIIIICK WARRRREN<\/span>\u201d\u2014and Warren bounded onto the stage, wearing black slacks, a red linen guayabera shirt, and wraparound NASCAR<\/span> sunglasses. The congregants leaped to their feet…Not long after the Anaheim service, Warren went back to his office on the Saddleback campus. He put his feet up on the coffee table. On the wall in front of him were framed originals of the sermons of the nineteenth-century preacher Charles Spurgeon, and on the bookshelf next to him was his collection of hot sauces. \u201cI had dinner with Jack Welch last Sunday night,\u201d he said. \u201cHe came to church, and we had dinner. I\u2019ve been kind of mentoring him on his spiritual journey. And he said to me, \u2018Rick, you are the biggest thinker I have ever met in my life. The only other person I know who thinks globally like you is Rupert Murdoch.\u2019 And I said, \u2018That\u2019s interesting. I\u2019m Rupert\u2019s pastor! Rupert published my book!\u2019 \u201d Then he tilted back his head and gave one of those big Rick Warren laughs.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Can you imagine Jesus saying anything like this to a reporter? When Jesus was flattered by the politically connected, he ignored the compliment and went right for the spiritual jugular: “Truly, truly I say to you, Except a man be born again he cannot see the kingdom of God” (John 3:1-18).\u00a0Anyone interested in truly getting to know Rick Warren should consume Gladwell’s essay.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Update: See my most recent post – Hillary’s ‘Home Run’ for The Purpose Driven Left – for a full analysis of her speech. Rick Warren\u00a0hosted Hillary Clinton at his Global Summit on AIDS and the Church\u00a0this past weekend to standing … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-249","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=249"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=249"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=249"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.godandculture.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=249"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}