Rick Warren Biography Uncovers Rocky Marriage, Depression (Unauthorized Biography)

A new unauthorized biography of "America's pastor" Rick Warren uncovers a marriage with an unconventional beginning and a time of depression that later gave Warren the strength to become who he is today.

Jeffery L. Sheler, religion correspondent for U.S. News and World Report, delves into the world of Warren in his latest book, Prophet of Purpose: The Life of Rick Warren. The book portrays the affable yet confident megachurch pastor who calls presidents and billionaires his friends in a much more vulnerable light.

In a live Web discussion with Christianity Today editor-in-chief David Neff on Wednesday, Sheler talked about the book and his personal thoughts on the man he interviewed and researched for months.

“He (Rick Warren) is probably at this point the most prominent evangelical in terms of the news media,” said Sheler during the Web seminar. The biographer noted that examining Warren’s media appearances would suggest that he is considered the most valid spokesperson for the evangelical movement.

“To that extent and to the extent that he is not identified as part of the old line religious right demonstrates the fact that he has succeeded, certainly to a point, in softening the image of evangelicalism.”

Sheler talked about the “purpose driven” pastor’s childhood hobby of collecting items – such as rocks, shells and coins – that offer a glimpse into how the influential pastor’s mind works. More than collecting, Warren is interested in categorizing the items, Sheler said.

“He now looks back at that part of his life and says, ‘Now as an adult, as a pastor, and a writer, I do the same thing, only now I do it with ideas,’” the journalist recalled Warren saying. “He is always looking at the relationship between things that may not seem obviously related to each other.”

This way of thinking has helped Warren as a communicator to take complex ideas and put them in simpler terms that people can understand. Warren’s bestselling book ,The Purpose Driven Life, Sheler noted, does not present any new ideas but rather takes old, difficult principles and makes them understandable to modern people.

Perhaps one of the most interesting parts of the biography, however, is the section about Warren’s marriage. By all appearance and comments from people who know the couple, Rick and Kay Warren have a happy and satisfying marriage. However, this was far from the truth in the beginning of the relationship.

Through interviews with Sheler, Rick and Kay Warren disclosed that they were not attracted to each other nor had feelings for each other when they agreed to be married. Instead, they believed that God had spoken to each of them saying this is the person they should marry.

Rick recalled the day when he was invited to speak at the church where Kay’s father was a pastor. As he ascended the steps to the stage to speak he looked over and recognized Kay, who was then dating his best friend, playing the piano. He said he heard God clearly tell him that this is who he will marry. At the time he had a hard time believing that because he didn’t love Kay and she was madly in love with his best friend. But still he kept the revelation in mind.

After his best friend broke up with Kay, Rick asked her on a date. On their second date, Rick asked Kay to marry him. At the time, Kay didn’t love Rick but felt that God was leading her to say yes. She recalled hearing God say, “I’ll bring the feelings.”

“To many people, understandably, it (seeking or listening to God’s voice) sounds very mystical and a little bit strange,” Sheler acknowledges during the Web seminar. “But in the evangelical world, that kind of language is quite common, where someone will say, ‘I’ve been hearing from the Lord lately that I should do such and such.’”

On their wedding day, the two were “virtual strangers,” Sheler writes. They also had a horrible honeymoon and suffered intensely from misunderstandings and other marital problems in the beginning of their marriage. The stress from the marriage problems coupled with Rick’s workload was so bad that he ended up in the hospital. Meanwhile, Kay said that she didn’t believe in divorce so she felt that she was sentenced to a life of suffering.

The couple eventually got marriage counseling even though they couldn’t afford it at the time. Rick racked up a bill of $1,500 on his credit card for the therapy and now jokes, “MasterCard saved my marriage!” The couple now have a successful and loving marriage and say, without embarrassment, that they still go to Christian marriage counseling once in a while to tune up their relationship.

At another point in Wednesday’s discussion, Sheler talked about Warren’s time of depression and how he literally went to the desert to take refuge. When Warren was in seminary, he had the vision of building a church for people who don’t go to church. He felt God told him that the church would one day have 20,000 people and be on a 100-acre property.

During his first year at Saddleback Church, the congregation already grew to 200 regular attendees and the number was increasing. But Warren, after giving a Christmas service that year, fled to the Arizona desert and described himself as falling into a depression. His depression, Warren said, stems from feeling that the success that he was already experiencing as a pastor was undeserved and from feeling that he was not equipped to pastor a 200-member church let alone a 20,000-member church as God had promised.

“He felt even that he wasn’t all that great a Christian and ‘maybe I shouldn’t even be a pastor,’” Sheler said.

But during his time in the desert, Warren said he had a “dialogue” with God when God agreed that Warren didn’t deserve to be successful nor did he deserve to be saved. However, he was saved by grace and by the same token his ministry is successful because of grace.

“'You just have to basically get out of the way.' 'It’s not about you,' as he would famously write in the opening lines of The Purpose Driven Life many years later. 'It’s about Me, God,'” Sheler said, paraphrasing what Warren heard God say to him. “He recognized it didn’t matter who he was; he was a flawed human being. What was important was he was putting himself in God’s service and God had chosen him as a matter of grace.”

On his second issue, Warren felt God clarified to him that the church was not his church but God’s. From that point of view, he felt God reminded him that the Lord will build His church and make sure people grow spiritually.

Coming out of the desert, the two questions that threatened to derail Warren’s ministry were answered. However, Warren said he still struggled with the issues and was in depression for months afterwards.

Now after three decades of pastoring Saddleback Church, the congregation has grown to more than 22,000 regular attendees and sits on a 120-acre campus.

Sheler concluded the Web discussion Wednesday with his personal insight on the subject of his biography.

“The amazing thing for me – having seen him in private meetings and public situations and private conversations – is you don’t see two or three different Rick Warrens,” Sheler remarked. “You always see the same person. Sort of what you see is what you get. I really think he is authentic, far from perfect, fun to hang around with, and I think as people get to know him, they will find many layers of intriguing aspects of a remarkable human being.”

“Did you see Rick Warren going to, I think it was Africa with Obama to conquer birth control and promote abortion? I didn’t see Bush or McPain doing trips like that.”

From a TV interview, and I believe this to all be true, or there being no evidence to the contrary;

MR. GREGORY: ...are you having on fighting some of the most difficult problems around the world, including your work on the continent of Africa?

MR. WARREN: Mm-hmm. Well, David, in, in 2002 when I wrote “Purpose Driven Life,” and then it became a, a big best-seller and sold a lot of copies, it, it honestly brought in tens of millions of dollars. When you write the best-selling hardback in American history and the most translated book in the world except for the Bible, it’s tens of millions of dollars. And frankly, when this money started coming in, I—it scared me. I thought, I’m a pastor, I live a pretty simple lifestyle and I don’t need money, and so what am I supposed to do with this? And when you write a book and the first sentence says, “It’s not about you,” then you figure the money’s not for you, too.

So we made five decisions.

The first one was we’re not going to change our lifestyle one bit. I still live in the same house I’ve lived in 16 years. I drive a 10-year-old Ford truck, bought my watch at Walmart. You know, to me if you’ve got a good pair of jeans and a comfortable T-shirt, you don’t have a whole lot of needs. So we didn’t change it.

Second thing is I stopped taking a salary from Saddleback Church now seven years ago.

The third thing is I added up all the church had paid me in the first 25 years and I gave it all back. And I did that because I didn’t want anybody thinking that I do what I do for money. I do this because I love Jesus Christ and I love God, and it’s, it’s out of my motivation—and I love people that do this.

We set up some charities.

We have one called Acts of Mercy which my wife leads that helps people infected and affected with AIDS, and another one called Equipping Leaders, and we pay for leadership training all around the world. We set up a program called the PEACE Plan, P-E-A-C-E, which stands for Promote reconciliation, equip servant leaders—ethical leaders, assist the poor, care for the sick, educate the next generation.

By the end of December next year, we will have—we will have, the PEACE Plan, have been to every single country in the world. There’s 195 countries, 193 in the U.N.—North Korea and Bosnia aren’t in the U.N. We will have been in every country doing these humanitarian works.

Warren doesn’t care if Obama agrees with him or not.

All Warren cares about is MONEY and FAME. To hang around people like Obama, gives him fame and the opportunity to make more money. Warren is NOT for real.

Allow me to refresh your memory.

Rick Warren Lauds Obama Choice Of Openly-Gay Pastor For Inaugural Prayer
Stuart Whatley | January 15, 2009 03:26 PM

Pastor Rick Warren, demonstrating his recently discovered and ever-increasing political savvy, has issued a statement lauding President-elect Obama’s choice of openly-gay Pastor Eugene Robinson for the Sunday night Inaugural kickoff prayer. From the statement, issued to Christianity Today:

According to press reports, it is because of a mutual respect that each feels towards the other over the HIV/AIDS pandemic on the African continent. That rationale, however, is not only dishonest, but is not even logical given the two distinct positions that the men come to on the matter. Because of this supposed shared concern, Warren is ready to turn over the spiritual mantle to a man who represents the views of Satan at worst or progressive anti-God liberals at best in most of his public positions on the greatest moral tests of our time.

Warren’s stand on the matter in this instance is what is in doubt – not Obama’s!

Barack Obama has a long history of defying the intended morality of Scripture. As a state legislator, he actively worked to preserve availability of abortion in all nine months of pregnancy. He opposed parental notification. He opposed any and all bans on partial-birth abortion (an act that includes delivery of the baby up to the head, the crushing of the baby’s brain, the suctioning of the brain matter, and then completed delivery of the child’s deflated cranium). In his run for the U.S. Senate, Obama even asked his wife to pen a letter to Illinois voters that reassured them of his commitment to fighting for the right to butcher children in the womb.

Barack Obama has long supported the advance of the radical homosexual activist lobby in its pursuit to destroy traditional marriage. He supported the creation of “special rights” for people who engage in homosexuality for the sole purpose of putting them at the front of the line on issues of employment, housing and litigation. He has also solidly backed the advancement of all “hate crimes” legislation, which ultimately may be used to silence clergy who believe according to their own convictions that homosexual behavior is wrong and preach so from biblical texts. Obama has a perfect voting record against the defense of marriage.

Barack Obama advocates continued funding for Planned Parenthood clinics in our nation’s inner cities, which are performing genocide against the populations of African Americans living there.

And most damnable of all, when a brave nurse named Jill Stanek brought about national awareness to a practice at a local hospital in suburban Chicago that allowed the starvation and neglect of newly born children who had survived abortion procedures – Obama opposed her. He opposed the right of those children to be given the chance to live and he advocated against a ban on such procedures – then known as “born alive abortions.”

...

http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=52998

“President-elect Obama has again demonstrated his genuine commitment to bringing all Americans of goodwill together in search of common ground...I applaud his desire to be the president of every citizen.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/01/15/rick-warren-lauds-obama-c_n_158294.html

Now doesn’t that just warm your evil heart? Hmmm?

What a stand up guy fr CHRIST? Huh?

Why is Obama’s evil in Rick Warren’s pulpit?

Posted: November 17, 2006
1:00 am Eastern

By Kevin McCullough

Rick Warren, the best selling author of “The Purpose Driven Life” and senior teaching pastor at Saddleback Church in California, has invited Sen. Barack Obama to speak to the congregation of the faithful on Dec. 1, 2006. In doing so, he has joined himself with one of the smoothest politicians of our times, and also one whose wickedness in worldview contradicts nearly every tenet of the Christian faith that Warren professes.
So the question is “why?”

Why would Warren marry the moral equivalency of his pulpit – a sacred place of honor in evangelical tradition – to the inhumane, sick and sinister evil that Obama has worked for as a legislator?

http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=52998

NO CHRISTIAN should have anything to do with Obama or Warren. They are hopelessy EVIL. Even Billy Graham REFUSED to be a Chpalin for this President. SUre pray for these EVIL men but don’t endorse them or whitwash EVIL and SIN like these tow do.

“Folks are upset when they find their religious guru to be just “another struggling human being” and not a god...”

Not at all. I expect that. Stop trying to rationalize away how misguided Warren is and how much of a greedy hypocrite he is.

Rick Warren Lauds Obama Choice Of Openly-Gay Pastor For Inaugural Prayer
Stuart Whatley | January 15, 2009 03:26 PM

Warren’s stand on the matter in this instance is what is in doubt – not Obama’s!

Barack Obama advocates continued funding for Planned Parenthood clinics in our nation’s inner cities, which are performing genocide against the populations of African Americans living there.

...

http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=52998

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/01/15/rick-warren-lauds-obama-c_n_158294.html

Now doesn’t that just warm your evil heart? Hmmm?

Even Billy Graham, wants NOTHING to do with Obama, the Obomination.

GET REAL!

Stop trying to rationalize away people’s legitimate reasons or seeing Warren as evil. BTW, Salvation is NOT works driven as Warren owould have you believe. Rewriting the Bible is also a huge no-no. Running around doing things, as in the Purpose Driven Life, will NOT get you eternal life. It is ALL ABOUT repenting and turning you life over to Him.

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