A RECENT COVER STORY for Christianity Today named Rick Warren “America’s Most Influential Pastor.” That’s a big title, but it still understates Warren’s influence in the nation and the world. Warren’s church, Saddleback Valley Community Church in Lake Forest, California, draws more than 16,000 worshipers every weekend, and more than 40,000 folks call it their home church. Warren’s electronic newsletter has 67,000 pastor-subscribers, and the website he founded, Pastors.com, has up to 80,000 unique visitors a day, the vast majority of them pulpit professionals. More than 1,500 congregations convened for a Warren-designed and led seminar this past fall, and tens of thousands of more churches are expected to follow in the next two years. Warren’s methods are what are commonly called force-multipliers: He teaches teachers and pastors preachers. His impact on the country through both the church and the popular culture is enormous.
In addition, Warren is probably the best-selling author in America today. His new book, The Purpose-Driven Life: What On Earth Am I Here For?, debuted at Number 6 on the New York Times Bestseller Hardcover Advice list this past weekend, but only a New York Times abacus could come to that conclusion. The Times refuses to count pre-publication sales of books through churches, for example, and discounts sales through Christian bookstores. Warren’s book has already sold more than a million copies, and it has done so despite bookstore placements far from the front shelves and tables and a near-total blackout in the secular media–which continues to believe that genuine influence depends upon favorable notice in the New Yorker. But if influence equals audience times impact times originality, then Warren is quite clearly among the two or three most influential Americans working from the West coast (after Jay Leno, I can’t come up with number 3). The news weeklies and the major book reviews convict themselves of the worst sort of prejudice when they refuse to recognize a phenomenon of this magnitude.
