Word: saddleback
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When Mel Gibson began looking for influential ministers to endorse his controversial film, The Passion of the Christ, high on his list was the Rev. Rick Warren, founding pastor of the Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif. (Warren loved the movie, reserved blocks of seats at local cinemas for his parishioners and on two weekends last month delivered sermons on the Passion and plans another one for Easter.) When the White House wanted advice on how to observe the first anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, aides called Warren to meet with the President, the First Lady and West Wing...
Wade Clark Roof, author of Spiritual Marketplace: Baby Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion, says Saddleback's megachurch ministry appeals to the notion that size equals success. "We're told that [his philosophy] not only does something for you in the sense of giving your life meaning but it also makes you happy materially, religiously and spiritually," Roof says. "What Rick is marketing is a kind of American religious ideology that conflates growth with salvation...
...Saddleback has become a bustling megachurch, with an annual operating budget of more than $19 million, and now sits on an immaculate 120-acre campus, designed by some of the folks who planned Disney's theme parks, in the placid Orange County community of Lake Forest, 65 miles south of Los Angeles. On weekends the 15,000 members and about 5,000 visitors choose from services at six different times and 10 different venues around the campus--some with live preachers, some on closed-circuit TV--offering a variety of worship and music styles ranging from quiet hymns...
...books. He receives visitors to his office in the same casual attire he wears at the pulpit--khaki pants, floral cotton shirt and rubber-soled shoes. That suits his members just fine. "From the beginning, I was impressed by his humility," says Patricia Miller, who has attended Saddleback since 1998. "When I joined, he asked all the new members to form a circle and lay our hands on one another's shoulders. Then he stood in the middle and, while choked with emotion, he prayed that he would be capable of the task of leading us." Says fellow parishioner William...
...SADDLEBACK SKI AREA...