Speaking From a Digital Dais
When Pastor Rick Warren talks about serving God these days, he’s talking hardware--his new 128-bit, high-security Internet server.
The founding pastor of Saddleback Valley Community Church in Lake Forest--billed as California’s largest church, and an emblem of the megachurch phenomenon that has transformed American religion--has gone online.
Since 1980, Warren has sold sermon transcripts, books and Bible lessons to church leaders across the globe through a company called The Encouraging Word. Now the 45-year-old pastor, already known as much for his entrepreneurial spirit as his evangelism, has taken his company to the Internet at www.pastors.com.
Patterning his effort on Web successes such as the Internet portal Yahoo, Warren offers free e-mail, chat rooms, classified ads and even auctions to draw church leaders and missionaries to his site. There he sells sermons, songs, videos and church fund-raising plans--an exercise in religious entrepreneurship, he says, that goes well beyond anything else on the Internet.
But critics say the site could represent something more threatening than just another ripple in a sea of electronic commerce: the commercialization of God.
Warren concedes that The Encouraging Word--financed through royalties from his popular book “The Purpose-Driven Church”--is a profit-making venture, though he says he has no plans to reap millions in the stock market by taking it public. And although he draws a salary as president of the company, he says revenues will be plunged into spreading Saddleback’s ministry, for free, to new countries.
Saddleback is hardly the first religious organization to peddle its wares on the Internet.
Religious sites offer everything from porcelain Virgin Marys ($17.95, angelfire.com) to Jesus night lights ($12.95, abundant gracegifts.com) to Church of Elvis T-shirts (“He has a hunka-hunka burnin’ love for whosoever believeth in Him,” $19.95, chelsea.ios.com/~hkarlin1/welcome.html).
Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority, has an online Ministries Store (Le Grand Seiko watches for $199, King James reference Bibles bound in black, burgundy or navy leather for $16.24).
And other Southern California religious organizations offer electronic access via the Internet. Costa Mesa-based Trinity Broadcasting Network, said to be the world’s largest Christian television network, provides live Webcasts of its services. Many Christian leaders--such as evangelist and religious conservative James Dobson, who founded Focus on the Family in Southern California 23 years ago--encourage devotees to donate money to their groups through their Internet sites.
But, as with all of Saddleback’s pursuits, Warren wants to make Pastors.com the biggest and the best, and is already billing the site as the “largest online community of pastors and church leaders.”
“To a degree, all he’s doing is ratcheting up the game one more notch by getting everything online,” said Benjamin J. Hubbard, chairman of Cal State Fullerton’s comparative religion department.
“But Rick Warren and his ministry ought to proceed with great caution,” Hubbard said. “How far do you want to go into the mass marketing of religion? How much is enough? . . . I think that this kind of profit-making is not in the best tradition of Jewish and Christian ethics. It smacks of commercialism gone mad.”
But that’s what it takes to make an impact, said Falwell, who sits on Pastors.com’s advisory board.
“I faced those charges four decades ago,” said Falwell, who first took his evangelism to television 44 years ago. “Today, the Internet is the culprit. To me, it is nothing more than common sense. It is very practical to go where the people are. I think if Jesus were on the Earth today, he would use radio, television, the Internet and whatever other media explosions are about to surface.”
Pastors.com offers recordings of Warren’s sermons, daily prayers, full orchestration of religious songs and videos that “allow you to experience the music a little bit more like a live concert.” Church leaders can buy recordings of Warren’s sermons, such as “How to Tell God You Love Him” ($36 for nine sermons), plus computer programs such as QuickVerse, which simplifies sermon preparation ($74.99).
Free E-Mail, Chat Groups
Warren, pointing to his success with a money-raising plan that he said has generated $50 million for Saddleback over the past five years, will also offer financial consulting services to other churches.
“Too often, sacrificially given offerings end up paying for the commissions of high-priced consultants,” Warren wrote this week in a mass e-mail advertising the Web site. “As a pastor, I feel this needs to change. . . . Since God gave me the ideas, we offer this program to other churches for just $150 and NO commissions.”
Other attractions:
* Free e-mail for missionaries and church leaders--untraceable e-mail, in fact, for those in nations where Christianity is frowned upon.
* Free chat groups and other forums to discuss the ministry, plus others for wives of clergy and for Christian professors and theologians.
* An EBay Inc.-style auction house, where churches can trade choir robes or Communion ware, plus free classified ads (“Want to swap homes with a missionary or pastor for vacation or furlough?”).
“These are services that the average church could never afford,” Warren said. “And we’ll give it to them for free. . . . We’re now the No. 1 portal for church leaders in the world.”
Especially for a church, tactics such as offering free e-mail seem decidedly modern. But they are no different than high-tech companies that offer stock quotes, publishing services or investment tools as a method of luring--and keeping--visitors, said Anya Sacharow, an analyst at New York-based Jupiter Communications, an online market research firm that focuses on Internet commerce. “E-mail is the No. 1 activity that people are doing online,” Sacharow said. “There is a link between the utility of using e-mail and the affinity of religion.”
It isn’t surprising that Warren, who has been on the cutting edge of the megachurch phenomenon since it began 20 years ago, is blurring the line between divinity and electronic commerce.
Evangelical megachurches soared in popularity by offering practical, bite-sized life messages in enormous sanctuaries, often through elaborate, polished, dramatic presentations. But as they have gotten older, many of them also have been forced to reinvent themselves to combat dissension and an inability to connect with younger congregants.
Warren, who boasts an average attendance of 15,500 each time he steps to the pulpit, is a master of innovation, reinvention and using sophisticated business techniques to lure suburban church-hoppers.
For example, during the 1980s, when fax machines first hit the mass market, he created a daily inspirational message called “The Fax of Life” that he sent to tens of thousands of business leaders. The firms often distributed the messages to their employees--and kept Warren’s name in the spotlight.
Saddleback is a Baptist church, but, like most megachurches, welcomes people of all denominations.
“We are always starting new stuff,” Warren said. “Because we started from scratch, we don’t have a lot of people saying: ‘We can’t do that.’ We’re kind of the R & D for the rest of Christianity. If it works, great. If it doesn’t, throw it out. We’re just not afraid to try. And we’ll use any tool we can to get the message out.”
