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Wings of the Evangelical Vanguard
In a handful of years, Jim Wallis has become a best-selling author, a sought-after pundit and preacher, and a high-profile spiritual adviser to powerful people. But for over three decades, he has been in the vanguard of social justice evangelicalism. He's been a kind of bulldog figure in leftist and recently more "progressive" centrist Christian social activism — annoyingly ideological to some, heroically prophetic to others. And he always insisted on being known as an Evangelical even when the Rev. Jerry Falwell, in his moment as the reigning Evangelical in America, disagreed.

I've resisted interviewing Wallis as he's risen to a new kind of fame, in part because he has had so much exposure in major media, from Hardball to Fresh Air. But now I've come to see in Jim Wallis' rise not just a story of individual activist becoming a leader, but of the world changing around us.

To know who Jim Wallis is, this year, is to have some insight into the spiritual and religious strategies of leading presidential candidates and the Democratic majority in Congress. It also provides insight into a new generation of world leaders who Wallis knows well — Prime Minister Gordon Brown of the UK, for example, and the newly elected Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. Jim Wallis has their ears, and this week he also has mine.

Listeners may notice that I often begin my conversations by drawing out stories from a person's childhood and youth — even if we're aiming to talk about quantum physics — because those stories do shape our passions and identities our whole lives long. I enjoy the authenticity and passion in Jim Wallis' voice as he tells how he was shaped in the first instance by his devout Plymouth Brethren parents, who took their Bibles and their loving God seriously. As he grew older he was also captured by the Civil Rights gospel of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the vibrant Black Church in his native Detroit.

Jim Wallis left the church for a time and became a student civil rights and anti-war activist, seeing in the great social struggles of the 1960s an indictment of the Christianity of his youth. But the leader he is today was formed precisely by that tension. Quoting his Bible like a revival preacher, he has long proclaimed that Evangelicals and other Christians are not following Jesus Christ if what they are proclaiming is not "Good News for the poor."

There is plentiful evidence that younger people, including younger Evangelical Christians, share Jim Wallis's concern for the poor and the dispossessed, for inequities in global economy and ecology. Half of his audiences across the country these days, as he tells it, are under 30. He does not claim to represent a majority of American Evangelicals in his views and positions, but he does draw packed crowds of young Evangelicals at Christian colleges. He urges them to emulate the 19th-century Evangelicals who inspire him, some of whom founded today's Christian colleges — abolitionists and social reformers who took their Bibles and their God with the utmost seriousness.

After the rise of the Religious Right in the early 1980s, and again after the 2000 and 2004 elections, some prophesied that the U.S. was headed for "theocracy" — a takeover by conservative religious ruling elites. What is happening instead is what Time magazine has called the leveling of "the praying field." Conservative Christianity hasn't disappeared but it is increasingly met, and measured, by progressive and liberal religious voices in politics and beyond.

There are also conservative Evangelicals with a broadened political and social agenda and a willingness to form coalitions with diverse religious and secular others to combat urgent human crises. My guests next week, Rick and Kay Warren, in another leading wing of the new Evangelical vanguard, are more or less sidestepping politics as a response to the world's deepest problems and confusions.

Rick Warren is best known as pastor of Saddleback Church, one of the largest churches in the U.S., and author The Purpose Driven Life, one of the world's best-selling books. Kay Warren is the executive director of Saddleback's HIV/AIDS Initiative. They are increasingly watched by a new generation of Christian and secular leaders who want to move beyond the partisan and cultural divides of recent years to fight poverty and AIDS.

Changing the World Regardless of Politics
Sometime last year I had in interesting informal conversation with Richard Mouw, the president of Fuller Theological Seminary, a respected center of Evangelical scholarship and learning. Mouw has spoken on this program in the past about his path from a fundamentalist childhood to life as an Evangelical intellectual and Christian philosopher. As he describes it, this faith of 25-40 percent of the U.S. population, depending on how you count it, has no single central authority, no ultimate hierarchy, nothing like a pope. But it does have what Mouw calls a "magisterium" — guiding figures in every generation. I'm intrigued by what seems a changing of the guard in that magisterium. Figures like Billy Graham and Chuck Colson, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, James Dobson and Ted Haggard, have passed or are passing from center stage. Of those who are emerging, Rick Warren is the biggest surprise to many.

I've not interviewed Rick Warren up to now in part because, like Jim Wallis, Warren has received a huge amount of media coverage in recent years. He burst into popular imagination largely by way of his 2002 book, The Purpose Driven Life, which Publisher's Weekly has called "the best-selling non-fiction book in American history," now approaching sales of 30 million. But for a time even that phenomenon was easy to miss. It was not immediately noted by major media and bestseller lists — it did not appear on The New York Times non-fiction bestseller list, for example — because it sold mostly through Christian bookstores and via Warren's global online networks of pastors. He created this book with the same pragmatic strategic vision that launched his 100,000-member Saddleback Church in Orange County, California, one of the original megachurches.

"Megachurch", I know, is a suspect concept to some. But understanding what the Warrens have created at Saddleback is key to understanding who they are and what kind of influence they've begun to exert beyond it.

As they describe in our interview, Rick and Kay Warren pitched their tent, almost literally, in this nearly empty valley near Los Angeles in the mid-1970s, ready to build a church and stay for their lifetimes. Rick Warren had studied the 100 most successful churches in the world. He also sought out the great organizational management guru Peter Drucker as a mentor; Drucker later called Saddleback Church "the R & D department of Christianity." So Rick and Kay Warren knocked on doors and asked people what alienated them about traditional churches, and what might bring them back. They designed their church with this input and waited for the area to fill up with houses and families, which it did. Behind a comfortable, easy welcome to worship, they invited members into layers of study, community, commitment, and service. Rick Warren originally conceived The Purpose Driven Life as one such study course for his congregation. Now congregations all over the world have embarked on a "Forty Days of Purpose" course that corresponds to the book, Rick Warren's curriculum towards deepened individual and communal faith and calling — Christian purpose.

Some criticize Saddleback and The Purpose Driven Life as "Christianity lite”… Whatever your take on it, he is a force to be reckoned with. Again, like Jim Wallis… he has become a spiritual advisor to powerful people — in his case including Rupert Murdoch, George W. Bush, and Paul Kagame, the president of Rwanda.

Rwanda is the focal point of the latest chapter of Rick Warren's ministry — a turning point, and his own reevaluation of the meaning of "Christian purpose," largely due to Kay Warren's influence. This is why I wanted to interview them together.

As Kay Warren tells it, in the wake of the wealth and fame that followed the success of The Purpose Driven Life, she had a life-changing "awakening" to the pandemic of AIDS and the attendant ills of poverty. This transformed her understanding of the essence of Christian faith and that of her husband. The Warrens have now launched an ambitious global initiative to address global crises such as poverty, illness, and illiteracy. It's based on the simple idea that local churches are everywhere. Networks of "purpose-driven" Christians are in position to knowledgeably and practically address global crises, one neighborhood at a time, where governments or NGOs (non-governmental organizations) might not reach. Unlike the Evangelical leaders of previous years — and unlike a Jim Wallis, for example — Rick Warren is essentially uninterested in politics per se. He's interested instead in the galvanizing churches themselves as forces for social change.

Still, in the zeal of their new-found social awareness, Rick and Kay Warren sound very much like Jim Wallis, and Richard Cizik, and Shane Claiborne — other new Evangelical forces we've had on the show in recent years. They speak of their sense of urgency to repair an artificial and counterproductive split that modern Evangelicals inherited — defining personal morality and social justice as competing priorities. Kay Warren has publicly urged her congregation and others to "repent" for a past indifference to the AIDS crisis and for contributing to the stigmatization of people with AIDS.

We have yet to see whether visions and strategies that built an American megachurch, and even a mega-bestselling book, can succeed in alleviating poverty and AIDS. I for one am fascinated by the attempt and will keep following the bridge-building appeal Rick and Kay Warren have achieved…

PRAY for the end of war in the Middle East – that peace may come soon and in our time. Protect and heal our men and women who serve, have served, and will serve in this war.

PRAY and give THANKS for our Prayer Circle who diligently pray for our loved ones – sometimes even when we forget to.

PRAY for our church and church family: that we may grow in Christ and be his light to the world as we begin a new church year.

PRAY that our nation and the other nations of the world may share their wealth and eradicate extreme poverty in the world by the year 2015.

THANKS for the blessing of our families as we keep a Holy Lent.

[The following readings are from the Revised Common Lectionary. For the complete Sunday lectionary throughout the year (we are now in Year “A”) see: http://www.library.vanderbilt.edu/divinity/lectionary/

Last Sunday after the Epiphany, February 3

First Lesson: Exodus 24:12-18

Psalm 2

Second Lesson: 2 Peter 1:16-21

Gospel: Matthew 17:1-9

Ash Wednesday, February 6 -- THE BEGINNING OF LENT

Joel 2:1-2, 12-17

Psalm 103

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This site was last updated 01/30/08