Mega-Church to Be a ‘Spiritual Oasis’

After 13 years of moving from one high school gymnasium to another, members of the Saddleback Valley Community Church are preparing to create a “spiritual oasis” in the hills of the Foothill Ranch development .

Earlier this month, about 6,000 members of the church gathered for the first worship service on the 74-acre Foothill Ranch site, the largest church campus in California and one of the 10 largest in the nation.

Instead of glitzy buildings and flashy monuments, church founder the Rev. Rick Warren said, he envisions a park-like campus with running streams and green pastures.

“People always say they feel closer to God in nature,” Warren said. “When God made Adam and Eve, he put them in a garden, not a skyscraper.”

Construction is expected to start this spring on the first low-key campus buildings, including an 86,000-square-foot fellowship hall that will seat up to 3,000 people, a 36,000-square-foot day-care center complete with Sunday school classrooms, and 11 acres of parks and lighted fields for baseball, softball and soccer, Warren said. Until then, services will be held in a huge 2,500-seat tent.

Later construction phases will include a 7,000-seat auditorium, a library, a bookstore and a center for the church’s 67 target ministries, which deal with such issues as divorce, single parenting, bereavement and job stress.

The $50-million mega-church project will take about a decade to complete. Already, grading crews have moved more than 40,000 truckloads of soil to make way for the future buildings.

“We see our buildings as tools for ministry, not monuments,” Warren said. “We’re much more into putting money into landscaping, trees and a park atmosphere than making an architectural statement.”

Eventually, there will be church activities on the campus every night of the week, Warren said. “We believe churches exist for the community, not vice versa,” he said. “We want to say, ‘What can we do for you?’ ”

That philosophy has guided Warren since he first moved to the Saddleback Valley in 1980, fresh out of seminary school and determined to start a church attractive to those who had never attended church before.

A large part of Warren’s self-described “Saddleback strategy” has been to tailor his worship services to unchurched, well-educated, professional baby boomers in their mid-30s and 40s.

While remaining evangelical and biblical in theory--it is affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention--the church is contemporary and innovative in programming and style, with an abundance of rock and gospel music at weekly services.

So far, there are 18,000 names on the church membership list, with an average of 6,000 people attending four different services each weekend.

In recent years, Warren has also helped start 20 churches in other parts of Orange County. This coming year, he plans to create 12 new Spanish-language churches in the county.

For all his various activities and missions, Warren said, there is one thing he’ll never build on the mega-church campus: a television studio.

“I’m never going to be on television, and I’m never going to be on the radio,” he said. “I just really enjoy being a local pastor.”