As you may already know from my previous posting that I studied The Purpose-Driven Life by Rick Warren in my bible-study group. It was a great book, has lots of practical advice for practicing Christians.
As you may also know, I’m a big fan of Malcolm Gladwell. He was the author of The Tipping Point and Blink, two of my favorite books.
Now I just found out that Malcolm Gladwell wrote a New Yorker article about Rick Warren and his church. You can find the article on Malcolm Gladwell’s site, it’s called The Cellular Church
This articles digs deep into three main areas:
- Rick Warren the person and pastor
- The Purpose Driven Life
- The Saddleback Church – the cellular church
From what Gladwell has written, I gathered Rick Warren is a fascinating pastor. He leads one of the largest churches in the US, likes to give hugs, dress casually for his sermons, learned a great deal from Peter Drucker, follows and improves upon Charles Spurgeon, and sometimes borders on audacity.
The extraordinary success of the Purpose Driven Life is not coincidental. It’s Rick’s conviction, his ingenious way of marketing it to the other churches through his prior-established relationships, and the way the book is designed to be studies in small groups. It’s both surprising and inevitable that the books has sold 23 million copies. The new story of how Ashlee Smith was able to convince Nicols – a convict to let her go after sharing the Purpose Driven Life with him was also mentioned in the article.
The Saddleback church today has twenty thousand members and occupies a campus of 120 acres. That is a huge church, compared to my church, which has around 300 people with couple of acres of land. The amazing size and growth of the church was the main focus of the article. The idea of having small tightly-knit cells as an unit has been done elsewhere. Rick Warren actually made it work better through his unique blend of pragmatism and understanding of management principles. He actually rented the Anaheim Agnel’s baseball stadium to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Saddleback church.
There are a lot more information in the article, mainly from academics trying to put what Rick Warren has accomplished into perspective. There are some sections that in my mind are not dubious intention, such as section 5, I did not see the relevance of Christian Smith’s study to Warren’s success.
Anyway, this article definitely makes an informative reading, especially for someone who has studied The Purpose-Driven Life, or someone who wants to know how to grow their cell group or church.
Please share your opinion under the Comments section.