Perhaps the reason so many people including church leaders have welcomed the Purpose Driven material is that Rick Warren seems to have a biblical basis for his views (he boasts of the number of Bible verses quoted). A little study soon reveals a pattern of taking verses out of context, quoting verses that seem to support his view, quoting verses that have nothing to do with the point he's trying to make, and ransacking the whole catalogue of translations and paraphrases to find scripture which seems to lend support to his statements. The Message paraphrase is the most heavily used.

Let me first confess that I have not read Rick Warren's The Purpose Driven Life.  Rightly or wrongly, the reason I have not read it is that I choose my reading not based on what is popular but on what seems profitable spiritually.  Having been utterly turned off by The Purpose Driven Church and its thoroughly unbiblical (though savvy) paradigm for church growth (see the critique of this in my book, Turning Back the Darkness: The Biblical Pattern of Reformation), I did not expect much from anything else Warren has written.  He strikes me as a very attractive and well-meaning Christian with a great entrepreneurial spirit but very little interest in biblical accuracy.  If there was one face I would put up to represent pragmatism in the evangelical world, it would be Warren's.

But, as a pastor, I have had to become at least familiar with The Purpose Driven Life, because so many people are reading it.  I have, therefore, done the following: 1) I stood in a Christian book store aisle and thumbed through it for 15 minutes.  You can learn a lot about a book with a 15-minute skim; 2) I have read other reviews; and 3) I have talked to people I know who have read it and who have at least some biblical discernment.  Out of all of this, which is less than optimal, I admit, I would say the following:

1)  I don't see anything harmful in The Purpose Driven Life.  This alone is exceptional among recent Christian best-sellers.  Whereas I vigorously warn people against reading The Prayer of Jabez, and many of the heretical best-sellers today, I don't see any reason to warn people against The Purpose Driven Life.

2)  The Purpose Driven Life is mainly about by-products of Christianity rather than Christianity itself.  This is my main beef, but it is also the central feature of the entire seeker sensitive movement that Warren now presides over.  It isn't about the attributes of God or the saving work of Christ and "other boring stuff like that."  It's about you.  It's about what you can get out of Christianity.  Rick Warren long ago conceded that the audience must be treated as consumers and must be appealed to out of their love for self.  But, you say, The Purpose Driven Life begins by saying, "It's all about God, not about you."  I praise the Lord for that statement, but it just does not ring true in a book that is all about you.  Notice the "purpose" language -- this comes from psychology and management consulting, not from Jesus Christ.  This is why The Purpose Driven Life is so popular, and also why its spiritual impact will be vastly less than its financial impact.  Warren usually says that the reason people like me complain about his books and his approach to church is that we are jealous of his success, just the way the Pharisees were jealous of Jesus.  His books sell in the millions and mine sell in the thousands.  But is that really why we complain?  If J.I. Packer's Knowing God sold in the millions, I can assure you that people like me would dance in the aisles, rejoicing with praise unto God.  The reality is that people don't want to know God, they want to know how they can be happy.  They are seeking.  But they are not seeking God; they are seeking the idols of self-actualization.  And I am deeply troubled by this approach to evangelism that begins by agreeing to bow down to the idols of the person we are trying to lead to Christ.  As it is written, "He who marries the spirit of the age will soon be a widow."

3)  With that criticism, The Purpose Driven Life seems to do a fair amount of spiritual good for its readers.  Here is where Warren has a knack for first compromising with selfish consumers but then challenging them with biblical truths.  The guy is not perfect, but he is not all bad, either.  It is true that he uses Scripture completely out of context, and that his idea of doing exegesis by just quoting multiple translations is ridiculous (especially when most of the translations are bad).  So, while I have not made it my business to scrutinize Warren's theology in detail, it seems to be pretty evangelical at least.  The Purpose Driven Life is not a book I would give to someone to jump-start their walk with God.  But it seems that Warren does challenge his readers with biblical ideas.  I have had people come to my church and become members because Rick Warren told them they had to start worshiping God.  As best-selling spiritual books go, it gets a lot worse than that.  If Rick Warren is only feeding milk to people, at least it seems to be genuine milk, and God has a long record of blessing milk.  So, in contrast with Bruce Wilkinson, Tommy Tenny, T.D. Jakes, and others, Warren should not be resented or opposed but rather appreciated for what he is worth.  If someone has been blessed by the milk of Rick Warren, then we should appreciate that and move them on to something more solid like Jerry Bridges or some of our authors here in the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals.

4)  Lastly, I'm not sure whether to consider the whole "Forty Days of Purpose" phenomenon as shameless marketing or naive revivalism.  It is surely a bit of both.  This is just one more instance of the never-ending movement mentality of people, where the latest-big-thing has to be mass marketed everywhere.  This is perfectly suited to our fast-food American culture -- "knock it out in forty days" -- but is not well suited for the biblical notion of life-long discipleship to Jesus Christ.  When I see a church that has given in to "Forty Days of Purpose", it seems to me that they must be terrified of missing out on the latest big thing and that they have utterly capitulated the actual ministry of their church to the big marketing machine.  But now let me put a better spin on that, because I know that may be uncharitable towards the actual motives of loving pastors.  They want to reach out to the lost, but they just no longer believe in the ordinary means of grace, and especially in the preached Bible.  Surely "Forty Days of Purpose" shows that we do not believe God's Word is sufficient to do God's work.  Instead of getting out into the community to form meaningful relationships, in which we proclaim the gospel in word and in deed, and then have a godly, loving, and biblical church to invite people to -- instead of that, we now have to have the big machine.  Well, there is plenty of precedent for that in America, and it has usually ended up doing more harm than good, precisely because it communicates a lack of confidence in the Bible while promoting consumer pragmatism.  Where "Forty Days of Purpose" will probably produce positive results is that it gets many churches that are doing nothing to start doing something.  Churches don't know what to do (again, because of a lack of confidence in the Bible), and so "Forty Days of Purpose" at least mobilizes them to a certain extent, and I am sure that it will produce some positive results.

So, in sum, let's not anoint Rick Warren as our national spiritual guru. His compromises with culture and intense pragmatism will not provide the substance that we need.  But let's not make him out to be an enemy.  People who read The Purpose Driven Life will read all kinds of godly, challenging truths that many of them would never get otherwise.  And obviously Warren is effective as a communicator.  Hopefully they will respond by joining a substantive, biblical church and will grow into strong believers.  I am sure that is what Rick Warren wants, and while I would not and could not do much of what he does, neither do I condemn him for it.  "Only that in every way, whether in pretense or in truth, Christ is proclaimed, and in that I rejoice" (Phil. 1:18).

Rev. Richard Phillips is the chair of the Philadelphia Conference on Reformed Theology and senior pastor at First Presbyterian Church Coral Springs, Margate, Florida.

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