LAKE FOREST, Calif. - Megachurch pastor Rick Warren recently launched a global coalition of pastors, business leaders and other institutions that aims to tackle what he deems as the most pervasive problems in the world today.
Warren went public with the initiative at the end of the three-day Purpose Driven Network Summit last week hosted by his home church, Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif.
The P.E.A.C.E. Coalition will be an international alliance of churches, businesses, ministries, universities, and other institutions who will work together to address five "Global Giants" that affect billions of people worldwide: spiritual emptiness, lack of servant leadership, extreme poverty, pandemic diseases, and illiteracy.
The acronym for the plan is based on the five actions Jesus modeled: Promote reconciliation; Equip servant leaders; Assist the poor; Care for the sick; and Educate the next generation.
"I am confident about the P.E.A.C.E. Plan because it's not my plan. It's not a Westerner plan. It's not a megachurch plan. It's Jesus' plan," he told 1,700 pastors and Christian leaders during the May 20-22 conference.
Warren, who authored the best-selling Purpose Driven Life, called the plan "the most complicated thing" he's ever done.
"It's 100 times more complicated than the Purpose Driven Network," he said. "What we are trying to accomplish will not be done in 10 or 20 years."
Although the initiative is known as a "plan," Warren refers to it as a "network of networks" that links public, private and church sectors.
In the network, the local church takes center stage in directing participating groups to produce a collaborative response to the problems. It goes beyond the parachurch ministry model where people "pay, pray, and stay out of the way," according to Warren.
Dave Ferguson, pastor of Community Christian Church in West Chicago, Ill., said the effort allows local churches to "work directly with each other through a decentralized network instead of being separated by hierarchical silos.”
"I think a lot of pastors that I've talked to really felt that in the last few years their church got hijacked by politics," Warren explained during a press conference last Thursday. "The answer we believe is not in politics …. The answer is in the church."
The network will include professionals from cross-disciplinary fields but will be led by "amateurs" or those who do the work out of love.
The mission statement of the P.E.A.C.E. plan is: "Ordinary people empowered by God's Spirit, doing what Jesus did, together, wherever they are."
Saddleback Church will also provide free software – including a social networking system and global missions database – to facilitate communication between P.E.A.C.E. Coalition members.
The launch of the Coalition will coincide with the beta phase of the plan, known as P.E.A.C.E. 2.0. For the past four years, more than 7,700 Saddleback Church members have traveled in over 1,000 teams to 68 countries to test the initial phase of the P.E.A.C.E. Plan. Their reports and data have been compiled to map out the second phase.
At the conference last week, Warren said he hopes around 500 churches will participate in the launch and eventually train others who enlist later on.
Ultimately, said Warren, the goal is to mobilize 1 billion Christians worldwide to participate.
"Most churches only think about their own church and their own community," he told attendants, who represented 39 countries and 50 states. "But our mission is the global glory of God."
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The worldview that Mr. Warren espouses "used' to be called Dominionism ~ the belief that we as Christian's need to 'conquer the world for Christ' so that we create a throne worthy of Him to come back and claim. Obviously this goal encompasses many disciplines, one of them being the "social gospel" that says we have to feed the world's poor and help the oppressed - entirely apart from addressing their spiritual needs.
Satan has certainly blinded some men's eyes, in that they can't see that Jesus made it clear that taking the gospel to the entire world and making disciples of men was Christ's foremost commission to us. This is the primary way by which we 'love our neighbor as ourselves" - temporal concerns should take a back seat to eternal ones.
You may feed a man today and he dies tomorrow and goes to eternal damnation.
Why do these people not see that you can share the gospel with the same man along with a meal and give him an eternal hope?
It seems to me that many Christians have little trouble accepting our Lord's command that "You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and most important[s] commandment.", but great difficulty accepting the command that "The second is like it: ‘You must love your neighbor as yourself.'" How we live comassionate lives is debatable, but I don't understand how a Christian can deny the responsibility of looking for the best way to fullfill the obligation.
Jesus is our purpose and our life :D
Church,
This is a serious matter and disciples of Jesus Christ need to be discerning about this issue.
Think about this: ‘purpose-driven’ theology has now permeated 3 ENTIRE NATIONS and the stated plan is for every nation on the face of the earth to be ‘purpose-driven’. It is a GLOBAL Peace Plan.
Remember that when the disciples asked Jesus questions concerning the end of the age, the FIRST thing that Jesus said was “Take heed that no man deceive you.” (Matthew 24)
Church, please take Jesus’ warning seriously. Consider what Revelation 17 & 18 says and compare it closely to what is being organized in these ‘purpose-driven’ nations…
A total marriage of Religion-Government-Business
Feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, helping the widow and orphan are noble and right endeavors. And for a disciple of Jesus Christ, these are the out-workings of who we are. Faith without works is dead.
But discerning Christians, please beware:
This global partnership that Mr. Warren is organizing… Religion-Government-Business… or as Peter Drucker called it, the Three-Legged-Stool… is the exact same global partnership that God Himself will judge and destroy in the future. Please read Revelation 17 & 18.
The woman (religion)
The kings (government)
The merchants (business)
Be aware that when Mr. Warren’s Global PEACE Plan was first unveiled, the “P” stood for “Plant Churches.” But it then morphed into “Plant Faith Communities”, and now it has been changed into “Promote Reconciliation” No more mention of ‘planting churches’.
This is what the Lord says to His people in regards to this unholy alliance:
Then I heard another voice from heaven saying, "Come out of her (the woman – false religion), my people, lest you take part in her sins, lest you share in her plagues...” (Revelation 18:4-5)
Is the partnership organized by Mr. Warren’s Global Peace Plan laying the foundation for the Global Partnership we see in Revelation 17-18?
I do know there are many who profess to be born again, and yet they follow the "man driven model" introduced by Mr. Warren himself. I can't tell you the amount of churches that have strayed from line by line teaching of the Word of God, and have replaced their Bible Study groups with Purpose Driven social gospel workshops that neglect the Gospel of Christ; yet will subscribe to the words of man. What really bugs me is that this Purpose Driven P.E.A.C.E Plan is nothing more than a subtle way to introduce the thought that the church needs to make the world a better place for Jesus's return. However, when we look at what Mr. Warren himself and others in the seeker friendly emergent circles are doing, and compare it with what the Scriptures teach, we kinow there is something seriously off base here. We know that when Jesus comes back for the second time, the world is going to be in extreme turmoil because men chose to follow thsir lusts and their way rather than God's Way. They turned their backs on Jesus and instead accepted the counterfit called the antichrist. When I hear all these new "tends" in Christianity that do not teach Sound Doctrine, because they take a small piece of the Scriptures and then build their own "manmade" doctrine out of it, then i have a serious problem with it. I also have a problem with Mr. Warren inviting politicians from a "socialist/liberal" background such as Hillary Rodham Clinton to his church during the "Aids Summit". You can not combat Aids at it's core unless the Gospel of Christ is being preached. People will not change their behavior unless there has been repentance. Pumping trillions of dollars to help people in a humanitarian way without there being a sincere efort to teach people the Truth of the Word is all work being built upon the sand. Christians wake up. I am not saying that helping people is wrong. I am not saying that we must not help the poor. However, what I am saying is that it needs to go in line with the Word of God, and not some "purpose driven" model. It also grieves me that Bono from U2 has been endorsing this sort of social gospel - of course, it shouldn't surprise me because he is a heavy proponent of the COEXIST movement, and it seems like Mr. Waren wants people of all faith's to work together in the cure for Aids, etc........Christians wake up. Bono is not a Christian; neither is Oprah, and Mr. Warren is seriously mistaken.
The Emerging Church: Last Days Apostasy and a Return To Darkness" - found at: http://www.understandthetimes.org/commentary/c29.shtml
"How to Know When the Emerging Church Shows Signs of Emerging in Your Church" - found at: http://www.understandthetimes.org/commentary/c54.shtml
"The Inclusive Gospel" - found at: http://www.understandthetimes.org/commentary/c66.shtml
"I think a lot of pastors that I've talked to really felt that in the last few years their church got hijacked by politics," Warren explained during a press conference last Thursday. "The answer we believe is not in politics …. The answer is in the church."
The first step in the healing process for the church is to acknowledge its own sin.
The next step in the healing process is to acknowedge that all believers make up the Body of Christ. We are all One with Christ as our Head.
The next step is for the church to learn how to care for its own even as it is under attack from the secular world.
If this is what "the Plan" is all about, then Pastor Warren is on the right track. But I don't know that the church has 10-20 years to straighten out the mess.
The "P" should stand for "Preach the Gospel" ... THEN it would be Jesus' "PEACE Plan" ... see Lk 9:1 through 10:12, especially Lk 9:2.
My goodness. The answer to all of these "giants', has been here since the time Jesus walked the earth. I can't understand why we need a coilition to produce this. This is the basic teaching of the Bible. The problem has been with the church, or I should say, parts of the church, who have veered away from the teachings of Christ and mixed them with some kind of social gospel.
If all true "believers of Christ" would strive to under His word and to make his character manifest in our lives, no one would be looking for any other answers. I pray to the Lord
that He will "wake up that segment of the sleepers" and let them see that HIS grace, mercy and most of all, His Love, are the keys to all of this. To know and truly understand the trinity.
Five Global Giants
1) All religious paths lead to God and heaven
2) Cheap Grace: Christians can live how ever they want and still go to heaven
3) God approves of gay sex
4) Man is nothing more than an ape
5) All religions allowed except Christianity
Electing Sen Obama as president would reduce America's war mongering tendencies, Mccain would continue the war mongering policies of bush & cheney. Obama will be more of a peace president than both clinton and mccain.
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