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If Rick Warren is a Regular-Guy pastor, Purpose-Driven is a regular-church approach—easy to miss because it seems so ordinary. Purpose-Driven is built around five fundamental purposes—fellowship, spiritual maturity, service, evangelism, and worship—which just about any church, large or small, Pentecostal or Episcopal, can get behind. Purpose-Driven has to do with balance: making sure none of the five purposes gets neglected, and that no one of them dominates the church. It's a broad, middle-of-the-road appeal, yet pastors get excited about it.

At last May's conference, pastors from all 50 states and 30 countries showed up. They came from all age groups and with all levels of experience. For example, T. L. Garrett, executive pastor of Trinity Church in Lubbock, Texas, came with seven of the sixteen pastors from his 2,000-member church. Garrett is a lean Texan of late middle age, a veteran of many years of ministry. He said his team leaders came intending to "redefine what we are doing for family ministries."

David Nederhood, a much younger man, is pastor of a Christian Reformed church in Alameda, California. "[My] biggest challenge is to convince people that this really is Reformed." How does he do that? "It's pretty hard to argue with the Great Commission and the Great Commandment," from which Warren's five purposes are drawn.

Raymond Ng helped launch his two-year-old Chinese language church in Milpitas, California. They adapted some expectations to Chinese culture, he said, but on the whole Purpose-Driven fit. Warren's how-to book, The Purpose-Driven Church, has been translated into 17 languages and sells well in many developing countries, notably China.

Julio Rosas, pastor of the San Martin de Porres Church in Lima, Peru, said he read The Purpose-Driven Church in 1996 and immediately began translating portions into Spanish. His church has since tripled to 1,500 members and has planted two daughter churches. Rosas was among dozens of church leaders from South America who came to the May conference.

Many pastors told of "going Purpose-Driven" and seeing their congregations grow remarkably. Frank Reynolds, a pastor for 22 years in Manchester, New Hampshire, went Purpose-Driven in 1997 and saw attendance go from 250 to 750. The pastor of a huge Evangelical Free church in Laredo, Texas—launched on Purpose-Driven principles in 1986—described 30 percent growth per year. A pastor who attended the seminar in 1995, feeling discouraged at the time, said he has seen his church increase its staff from two pastors to sixteen.

Warren's own story inspires pastors. He grew up in rural Northern California, son of a Southern Baptist minister who launched and pastored tiny churches. Warren remains a small-town personality, a class president and class clown rolled together. "He's not sophisticated in any way," his wife Kay says. "This is a man who will come out in an Elvis costume. He's a ham. He's a goofball."

They met when they were both 16, at a Baptist training meeting for evangelism. "He was imitating Billy Graham at a talent contest," she says. "He was way too brash, way too loud, way too everything I wasn't interested in." At the height of the Jesus movement, Warren helped lead a school revival that got written up in church papers. Skinny, long-haired, aggressively evangelistic, he was invited all over the West Coast to speak on how to build a Christian club at your high school.

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November 18 2002, Vol. 46, No. 12