Purpose-driven donors

by John Dart

Rick Warren, named by journalists as religion’s biggest newsmaker in 2009, demonstrated his prowess in fundraising on the last two days of the year. Lamenting last week the “seriously bad news” that Saddleback Church could finish the year in the red, Warren asked members of the five-site megachurch in southern California to donate $900,000 to the church before midnight Thursday.

Raise the sum they did, and then some, with $2.4 million counted by January 2, according to Warren’s public relations representatives. That was the figure before all envelopes were opened and other contributions arrived from donors who heard the news from Warren that “the bottom dropped out” as relatively few congregants attended church the weekend after 10 “packed” Christmas Eve services. The story is a familiar one for Christians who remember 20th-century evangelists whose fundraising letters predicted dire results for their ministries if huge amounts didn’t reach them quickly.

I asked journalistic colleague Jeffrey L. Sheler for his take on this turn-of-the-decade drama as it unfolded. Sheler covered religion news for U.S. News & World Report for many years, and his Warren biography Prophet of Purpose was published in the fall.

Because Saddleback has an average weekly worship attendance of 22,000, Sheler predicted that Warren would easily make up the shortfall. “To put it in context, a $900,000 shortfall probably would amount to less than 3 percent of Saddleback’s annual budget, which a few years ago was around $30 million,” he said.

Saddleback has shown it can raise “mind-boggling amounts of money in short periods of time,” Sheler added, as when “they were trying to buy land and build a building.” Warren founded the congregation in 1980 in Lake Forest, about 65 miles southeast of Los Angeles.

When the $2.4 million figure was announced, Warren noted that the donations were all under $100. “This was not one big fat cat,” the pastor told the Associated Press, lauding his church’s “radical generosity” for “the miracle.”

Press accounts of Warren’s 11th-hour appeal were generally straightforward, but Warren predicted that “the media” (unnamed) would tell his story “but only partially, not telling the whole story.” The “whole story” he'd like told is a two-page list of social and evangelistic projects. “None of your amazing accomplishments as a church family in 2009 will be reported,” the pastor predicted.

In a later post, Warren attacked a “media culture that thrives on bad news and is typically clueless about how churches actually work.” The church of God marches on, he added, “in spite of hatefulness and insults.”

Sheler said he was not surprised that Warren complained about the news coverage, “demonstrating again his tendency to crave media attention, but only on his terms. He wants to decide what is news, and then complains that the media gets it wrong if they focus on some other angle.”