"And he asked them a lot of questions about what advice they'd give to a new pastor in the area. "He knocked on doors of hundreds of people," says his brother-in-law, Tom Holladay. But he did have a plan: to build a church for people who never went to church. Warren had no money, no building, no congregation. In 1980, fresh out of seminary, Rick Warren and his wife, Kay, moved to Mission Viejo, Calif., to start a church. Warren spoke at the Clinton Global Initiative on Sept. “It’s something like Steve Jobs leaving Apple,” Smoller said.More than 22,000 people attend Rick Warren's Saddleback Church each week. Now, Saddleback Church faces a daunting task: finding a new face for the church. He didn’t always fit in with conservatives, either: he dedicated money to helping people with AIDS, opposed the use of torture and worked to combat global warming. Obama’s choice of Warren as his invocation speaker drew the ire of civil rights groups and gay rights activists, who criticized Warren for supporting Proposition 8, the state constitutional amendment that would have banned same-sex marriage. Warren’s time as pastor wasn’t without controversy. Matthew had battled “dark holes of depression” and mental illness, Warren told his congregation at the time, also posting his thoughts on his Twitter account, which now has 2.2 million followers. In 2013, Warren’s 27-year-old son, Matthew, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Smoller added that compared to previous megachurch pastors, Warren is less focused on wealth and more “transparent and authentic.” He said this could be partly attributed to Warren’s experience with tragedy. How many priests in Orange County can you name?” “People became more attracted to the individual rather than, say, the liturgy. “These people are ‘charismats,’” Smoller said. Warren emerged as one of the key early figures in Orange County evangelicalism - a roster that included Paul and Jan Crouch, who founded Trinity Broadcasting Network, and Robert Schuller, founding pastor of Crystal Cathedral, said Fred Smoller, associate professor of political science at Chapman University in Orange County. In this “Warren-ified,” celebrity evangelicalism, churches are often defined by a single face, Hall said. “Rick Warren is the pope of a version of American evangelicalism,” said Amy Hall, associate professor of Christian ethics at Duke Divinity School. Warren is both the proponent and product of the American evangelical megachurch movement- a movement characterized by multimillion-dollar buildings, enormous congregations and iconic leaders. Over 200,000 church leaders studied the principles in that book, according to the Saddleback Church website. In 1995, he published “The Purpose Driven Church,” part of his effort to export Saddleback’s megachurch pattern to other congregations. Warren’s megachurch model became a paradigm for other church leaders. Time magazine flashed his face across its cover. He interviewed national leaders like George Bush and John McCain, spoke with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and hosted Rwandan President Paul Kagame at the Lake Forest campus. except the Bible, according to Tanya Luhrmann, an anthropology professor at Stanford who has written about American evangelicals. While leading his church, Warren achieved influence in other ways: he became a bestselling author of “The Purpose Driven Life,” a book that sold more hard copies than any other in the U.S. Over 30,000 tune in each week to hear Warren speak. He gave the invocation at President Obama’s inauguration in 2009. What began as Rick and Kay Warren’s home Bible study exploded to over a dozen campuses in California - including the 120-acre main campus in Lake Forest - as well as churches in Argentina, Hong Kong, Germany and the Philippines. Over the next few decades, Warren transformed his church into a behemoth of evangelical Christianity.
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