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After it was over, Warren said to his hosts, "Take me out to a village. I want to meet some pastors." They took him to Tembisa, a huge and desperately poor township outside Johannesburg. Local evangelists there often plant new congregations, using large blue-and-white striped tents. In many instances, homeless widows and orphans live in the tent during the week and also worship there on Sundays.

When Warren arrived, the tent church pastor boldly walked up to him, saying, "I know who you are. You're Pastor Rick."

"How in the world do you know who I am!" Warren exclaimed.

"I get your sermons every week."

The pastor told Warren that once a week he walks 90 minutes to a post office with an internet connection. He downloads Warren's sermons from Pastors.com and preaches them on Sundays.

"You are the only training I have ever had."

Cut to the heart, Warren says, "I burst into tears. I thought, I will give the rest of my life for guys like that—the real heroes out in the bush." That night, Warren sat under the African sky and prayed, "God, what are the other problems that you want to tackle?" Warren told CT, "God gets the most glory when you tackle the biggest giants. When David takes on Goliath, God gets glory. What are the problems so big that no one can solve them?"

Around this time, Warren says he was driven to reexamine Scripture with "new eyes." What he found humbled him. "I found those 2,000 verses on the poor. How did I miss that? I went to Bible college, two seminaries, and I got a doctorate. How did I miss God's compassion for the poor? I was not seeing all the purposes of God.

"The church is the body of Christ. The hands and feet have been amputated and we're just a big mouth, known more for what we're against." Warren found himself praying, "God, would you use me to reattach the hands and the feet to the body of Christ, so that the whole church cares about the whole gospel in a whole new way—through the local church?"

The Warrens returned to Southern California, still not fully understanding what lay in store for them. Kay says God handed her a Polaroid and new things kept appearing in the picture.

Warren had 18 pages of notes from his trip and began further developing a conceptual framework for his emerging vision. He described the problems that harm billions of people around the world as the "global giants."

Warren labeled the five giants:

• Spiritual emptiness. "[People] don't know God made them for a purpose."
• Egocentric leadership. "The world is full of little Saddams. Most people cannot handle power. It goes to their heads."
• Poverty. "Half the world lives on less than $2 per day."
• Disease. "We have billions of people dying from preventable disease. That's unconscionable."
• Illiteracy. "Half the world is functionally illiterate."

Next, Warren, an incurable lover of slogans and acrostics, wrote out an acrostic, peace, to match up against each of the five global giants:

• Plant new churches, or partner with existing ones.
• Equip leaders.
• Assist the poor.
• Care for the sick.
• Educate the next generation.

Finally, Warren, whose Purpose Driven curriculum has trained 400,000 pastors from 162 nations, decided to put at the heart of the PEACE plan the local church and its members. "Every revival and spiritual awakening in history starts with the peasants, not with the kings. It starts with average, ordinary people," Warren says. "There are not enough superstars to win the world. It has to be done by average people."

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October 2005, Vol. 49, No. 10