the zeitgeist report

This New Yorker profile of Megachurch starter Rick Warren gives an account of the Saddleback Church in Orange County. It is written by New Yorker kookie idea guy, Malcolm Gladwell, linked from his new (started in January) blog:

December of 1979, when Warren was twenty-five years old, he and his wife, Kay, took their four-month-old baby and drove in a U-Haul from Texas to Saddleback Valley, in Orange County, because Warren had read that it was one of the fastest-growing counties in the country. He walked into the first real-estate office he found and introduced himself to the first agent he saw, a man named Don Dale. He was looking for somewhere to live, he said.

"Do you have any money to rent a house?" Dale asked.
"Not much, but we can borrow some," Warren replied.
"Do you have a job?"
"No. I don't have a job."
"What do you do for a living?"
"I'm a minister."
"So you have a church?"
"Not yet."

Dale found him an apartment that very day, of course: Warren is one of those people whose lives have an irresistible forward momentum. In the car on the way over, he recruited Dale as the first member of his still nonexistent church, of course. And when he held his first public service, three months later, he stood up in front of two hundred and five people he barely knew....

Warren speaks of his writing of the blockbuster The Purpose Driven Life:

To write "The Purpose-Driven Life," Warren holed up in an office in a corner of the Saddleback campus, twelve hours a day for seven months. "I would get up at four-thirty, arrive at my special office at five, and I would write from five to five," he said. "I'm a people person, and it about killed me to be alone by my-self. By eleven-thirty, my A.D.D. would kick in. I would do anything not to be there. It was like birthing a baby." The book didn't tell any stories. It wasn't based on any groundbreaking new research or theory or theological insight. "I'm just not that good a writer," Warren said. "I'm a pastor. There's nothing new in this book. But sometimes as I was writing it I would break down in tears. I would be weeping, and I would feel like God was using me."

Gladwell offers an odd and self-serving political interpretation of the Lord's Prayer:


UPDATE: The NYTImes picks up on Gladwell's change of mind from his weblog, which he plans to use for updating his books and article. He now supports Canada's healthcare system.