Putting the E in Evangelism: Pastor Opens Business Online
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--is going 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 https://www.pastors.com.
Patterning his effort on Web successes like 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 even 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 his company--financed through royalties from his popular book “The Purpose-Driven Church”--is a profit-making venture, though 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 revenue 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, https://www.angelfire.com) to Jesus night lights ($12.95, https://abundantgracegifts.com) to Church of Elvis T-shirts (“He has a hunka-hunka burnin’ love for whosoever believeth in Him,” $19.95, https://www.chelsea.ios.com/~hkarlin1/welcome.html).
Evangelist 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).
The ‘Largest Online Community of Pastors’
And other Southern California organizations offer electronic access on the Internet. Costa Mesa-based Trinity Broadcasting Network, the world’s largest Christian television network, offers live Web-casts of its services. And many Christian leaders--such as evangelist and religious conservative James Dobson, who founded Focus on the Family in Arcadia 23 years ago--encourage devotees to donate money to their groups through their Internet sites.
But, like he does with all of Saddleback’s pursuits, Warren wants to make Pastors.com the biggest and the best, and he 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 department of comparative religion.
“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 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 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 sermons, such as “How to Tell God You Love Him,” ($36 for nine sermons) as well as computer programs such as QuickVerse, which simplifies sermon preparation ($74.99).
Warren, pointing to his success with a money-raising plan that he said has generated $50 million for Saddleback over the last 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 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 service for missionaries and church leaders--untraceable e-mail, in fact, for missionaries in countries where Christianity is frowned upon.
* Free chat groups and other forums to discuss the ministry, plus others for wives of clergymen and Christian university professors and theologians.
* An E-bay 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 like offering free e-mail seem unusually modern. But it’s no different than high-tech companies offering stock quotes, publishing services or investment tools as a method of luring--and keeping--visitors, said Anya Sacharow, an analyst at New York City-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 evangelism 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 grown 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 businesses 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.”
Warren says his company is a for-profit venture because he wants to avoid government meddling that would come with nonprofit status. But he says he doesn’t even know how much money the company makes from its work, which has included distributing millions of copies of Warren sermons and training more than 115,000 pastors in 63 countries.
Most of the seed money for the Internet launch came from Warren’s royalties on “The Purpose-Driven Church,” a book that has sold a million copies in 14 languages.
Warren said he and his wife of 25 years, Kay, have been praying to determine how best to use the royalties, which have allowed him to stop drawing a salary as pastor at Saddleback.
In the meantime, Warren is unrepentant about what others may describe as the commercialization of church. He says he will not alter his campaign to charge English-speaking church leaders for his services and sermons in order to make money to spread the word to new countries, in new languages, and to give it all away to poor churches.
“This is the way to help these pastors,” he said. “The whole reason is not profit but service to the people.”
There is evidence that the new Web site, existing purely on word-of-mouth until now, is already having an impact. The site is generating more than 32,000 “hits” from religious leaders each day, according to Warren.
“I think it is working already,” Falwell said. “I think he has built what I believe to be a modern-day phenomenon.”
