Rick Warren has announced both in an interview on Fox News and in an email (see below) to his congregants that New Age sympathizer Ken Blanchard is returning to Saddleback to speak to the congregation this weekend. Below is a copy of the email Warren sent out on Friday October 26th.
Subject: This Weekend At Saddleback!
Date: Fri, 26 Oct 2007 18:18:22 -0700
From: Pastor Rick Warren
Dear Saddleback Family,
Below is information about this weekend that I encourage you to forward on to the people you work with. I urge you to attend either the Saturday evening or Sunday evening services. See you!
Pastor Rick
Special Guest
Ken Blanchard saw it all go up in smoke this week. The bestselling business author of “The One Minute Manager” and two dozen other international business and leadership bestsellers watched from a television as his beloved Rancho Bernardo home burned to the ground. What is God’s purpose now for those who lost everything this week? How can you look up when your burned out?
Books Written By Ken Blanchard
THIS WEEKEND AT SADDLEBACK CHURCH
* Ken Blanchard sharing his story: “What matters most?”
* Rick Warren speaking on “How to Look Up When You’re Burned Out”
BRING YOUR BOSS AND COWORKERS TO HEAR AMERICA’S PREMIER LEADERSHIP TRAINER in a way they’ve never heard at corporate seminars.
Service Times
Saturday: 4:30, 6:30 p.m.
Sunday: 9:00, 11:15 a.m. & 4:30, 6:30 p.m.
Direction to Saddleback Church
For those who may not understand the significance of this bold move by Rick Warren to invite Ken Blanchard back to Saddleback (and to announce it on Fox News), the following information will be vital to read. This is a chronological list of events that have taken place with regard to Rick Warren, Ken Blanchard, and Lighthouse Trails reporting.
In Summary: Rick Warren announced in 2003 that Ken Blanchard would be working together with him on implementing the peace plan and training leaders around the world. However, when it came out that Blanchard had been promoting eastern meditation, Buddhism, and the New Age for over 20 years, Warren denied that Blanchard would be working on the peace plan. Warren contacted Lighthouse Trails regarding this. Because thousands of Christian churches are still following the Purpose Driven program, thinking that they are following a biblical plan, when in fact they are walking toward a dangerous, ecumenical cliff and a false belief that there will be global peace and the kingdom of God here on earth before Christ returns (read Faith Undone), we are reposting this information. Blanchard, who has been a professing Christian since the 80s, has consistently promoted the New Age, and to this day is still endorsing New Age type books and is still on the advisory board of the Hoffman Institute, where New Age practices and beliefs permeate. While Warren denied that Blanchard would be working with him on the peace plan, documentation below shows otherwise including a video of Rick Warren stating such and also a transcript of a conversation at a Lead Like Jesus conference in Alabama between Warren and Blanchard.
Ken Blanchard is back at Saddleback today (October 28th), and while Rick Warren is using the terrible fires in S. California as a reason to bring Blanchard back, there is a lot more to consider than houses being lost. While we sympathize with Blanchard and the many others who have lost their homes to the fires, the spiritual lives of countless people throughout the world could be affected too. For those who may not understand why Rick Warren would bring Blanchard in again, there is an obvious and documented explanation – he resonates with the same spirituality as Blanchard, as is carefully shown in A Time of Departing and Faith Undone.
Note: Rick Warren has sat on Blanchard’s national advisory board for many years, along with New Age proponents Mark Victor Hansen (Chicken Soup for the Soul) and Laurie Beth Jones. When Blanchard’s website was revamped, the list of board members was removed. Attempts were made to receive a copy of the current board member list, but Lead Like Jesus would not release it. If you would like to know who is currently on the board at Lead Like Jesus, click here for contact information.
A Chronological List of Events:
Fall 2003, Lead Like Jesus, Birmingham, Alabama: Transcript between Warren and Blanchard
November 2003: Rick Warren Announces Peace Plan (audio, loads slowly)
April 2005 – Lighthouse Trails releases press release exposing Rick Warren’s plans to include Ken Blanchard in his global P.E.A.C.E. Plan – Press Release:Rick Warren Teams Up With New-Age Guru Ken Blanchard!
May 23, 2005 – Rick Warren speaks at the Pew Forum on Religion, says anyone, even Muslims can be used to implement his peace plan.
May 31, 2005 – Rick Warren writes to Lighthouse Trails – makes his letter to LT public: Warren’s email
June 2005 – Our Response and Analysis (Warren’s letter filled with misleading and untrue statements)
Excerpt from June 2006 Special Report by LT: [In 2005], we issued a press release that showed the connection between Rick Warren and Ken Blanchard. In Warren’s own words, he acknowledged that Blanchard, a New Age sympathizer, had “signed on” to help implement Warren’s global P.E.A.C.E. plan. Warren stated this at a Saddleback service as well as at the 2003 Lead Like Jesus conference in Alabama. However, a month after we issued the press release, Lighthouse Trails received an email from Rick Warren. The email was sent in the middle of the night, and by the following morning, Warren had given permission to a colleague to post his email online. We contacted Saddleback and confirmed this. Needless to say, countless people found out about this email. However, what most who read his email did not realize was that the majority of the statements in his email were not true. We posted a public response but knew that most people would either only read Warren’s email to us or refuse to believe that America’s pastor was lying and we were speaking the truth.
Lighthouse Trails learned of Rick Warren’s connection to Ken Blanchard through a book called A Life With Purpose, written by Hollywood biographer, George Mair. Ray Yungen discusses this in his book, A Time of Departing:
In the spring of 2005, someone handed me a book called A Life with Purpose by George Mair. The book is written as a positive account of Rick Warren’s life. In fact, the subtitle on the front cover reads: America’s Most Inspiring Pastor. It is clear that the author had a great admiration for Warren. While Mair wrote the book, he spent many Sunday mornings at Saddleback church services, listening to Rick Warren and donating financially. However, after Rick Warren found out about the book, he publicly criticized it. In addition, Saddleback church sent out emails to an undisclosed number of people, discrediting Mair’s book.
I personally believe Warren’s effort to debunk the book was an attempt to conceal some of its observations. What George Mair didn’t realize was that in his candid account of Warren, and in his efforts to offer this testament of praise, some things were revealed about the pastor that might have gone undetected by the average person. For instance, Mair explains how New Age prophet Norman Vincent Peale was at the foundation of the church-growth movement and furthermore “many of Peale’s uplifting affirmations originated with an ‘obscure teacher of occult science’ named Florence Scovel Shinn.” Referring to many of the methods that Peale taught and his “unification of psychology and religion,” Mair says, “Saddleback distinctly bears the stamp of Reverend Norman Vincent Peale.”
In November of 2003, Rick Warren announced to his Saddleback congregation his global P.E.A.C.E. Plan. In the same sermon, Warren introduced the congregation to Ken Blanchard, playing a video clip of Blanchard’s visit to Saddleback a few days earlier. Warren informed his large congregation that Blanchard had: “… signed on to help with the P.E.A.C.E. Plan, and he’s going to be helping train us in leadership and in how to train others to be leaders all around the world.”
In light of the fact that Ken Blanchard has promoted Buddhism and Eastern style meditation for over 20 years, it became very alarming to know that Rick Warren was using Blanchard to train leaders around the world.
The weeks following Rick Warren’s email to us, we received phone calls and emails from different men from Saddleback, one of them telling us to stop “lobbing dead cats [and “grenades”] over the wall.” It was confirmed also that an email was sent out from Saddleback to an unknown number of people, discussing the Blanchard issue. That email stated that Lighthouse Trails had lied and they should not be listened to.
FEDERAL AGENTS TRACKING DOWN LIGHTHOUSE TRAILS?
And then in December of 2005 a very strange thing happened – a woman sent us an email she had received from Rick Warren’s personal email address, which stated:
The website you refer to [Lighthouse Trails] below is well-known for publishing lies, which can easily be proven false…. The Bible says “Satan is the father of lies”, so those who intentionally spread them are doing Satan’s work for him. That is evil. We suggest you avoid listening to evil people who have a habit of lying about ministers of the Gospel. Study the Scriptures every day and flee from those who make their reputation by lying.
We contacted Saddleback about the email, and we received the following reply, suggesting that the email had been written by a computer hacker: “We are sorry that this public mailbox has been shut down due to vandalism and stolen identity. Federal enforcement officers are tracking down the source in either Africa or the Pacific Northwest.” At first, we thought this was a joke because we (who live in the Pacific Northwest) had recently issued a press release about an evangelist in Africa who had been opposing Purpose Driven. Hearing that Federal officers had narrowed down an investigation to either our location or the evangelist’s location seemed preposterous. We contacted Saddleback by phone requesting the names of these Federal agents because of the threatening nature of the “anonymous” email. A few days later a Saddleback staff member called and told us that Federal agents were doing an investigation on their web server being broken into and that Saddleback (and the agents) suspected Lighthouse Trails. We again asked for the names of the Federal agents as well as the Saddleback communications director that was handling the case. However, we were told they would not give us any names. We have not heard anything from Saddleback since.
We testify of these things, not to distract you from the issues at hand (of exposing contemplative and emerging spirituality within the church), but rather to show that Rick Warren, as well as other leaders, will go to great lengths to preserve their status and to complete their tasks, even to the point of lying, threatening, discrediting and deceiving. While we have postponed releasing this information for several months, because of Rick Warren’s continuous brazen remarks against the body of Christ and because Purpose Driven is an avenue through which the New Age is entering the church, we believe it is of utmost importance to relay this documentation to believers who are working so diligently to defend the gospel message of Jesus Christ in a time when a great falling away appears to be at hand.
February 2007: Ken Blanchard to Co-Author Book with Mystical Meditation Proponents
October 28th, 2007: Blanchard Returns to Saddleback
Further Research:
Ken Blanchard’s Endorsements of New Age/Buddhist Promoting Books
Other Transcripts, Audios and Videos of Rick Warren
Connections Between Rick Warren and Ken Blanchard
Ken Blanchard and Lead Like Jesus
Research Database on Blanchard by Christian Research Service
Pertinent Quotes by Rick Warren and Ken Blanchard:
“You’ve heard me say many times that the greatest thing you can do with your life is tell somebody about Jesus … if you help somebody secure their eternal destiny, that they spend the rest of their life in Heaven not Hell …your life counts, your life matters because nothing matters more than helping get a person and their eternal destiny settled. They will be forever eternally grateful….And I’ve always said that that was the greatest thing you can do with your life. I was wrong. There is one thing you can do greater than share Jesus Christ with somebody, and it is help start a church.” —Sermon from 11/2003 when Rick Warren Announced His Global Peace Plan to Saddleback. Hear entire sermon – This portion starts around the 14 minute mark.)
“We come into this Peace Plan with great humility … We will be like a giant mushroom expanding and exploding around the world. Whatever it takes, it will be a holy moment.”—Rick Warren, Christian Examiner, May 2005 (1)
“I look for inspirational messages from a variety of sources besides Jesus. Our folks get to hear words of wisdom from great prophets and spiritual leaders like Buddha, Mohammed … Yogananda and the Dalai Lama.”-Ken Blanchard, foreword What Would Buddha Do at Work? (2001)
“Buddha points to the path and invites us to begin our journey to enlightenment. I … invite you to begin your journey to enlightened work.” -Ken Blanchard, foreword What Would Buddha Do at Work?
“For the stability of a nation, you must have strong healthy government, strong healthy businesses, and strong healthy churches…. A three-legged stool will have stability. So I’m going from country to country teaching business its role, teaching church its role, and teaching government leaders their role-you’ve got to work together! We cannot solve the problem in your country or in the world if we won’t work together.” Rick Warren in the Philippines in July 2006
“Who’s the man of peace in any village – or it might be a woman of peace – who has the most respect, they’re open and they’re influential? They don’t have to be a Christian. In fact, they could be a Muslim, but they’re open and they’re influential and you work with them to attack the five giants. And that’s going to bring the second Reformation.”—Rick Warren, May 2005, Pew Forum on Religion
“Personal computers have brand names. But inside every pc is an Intel chip and an operating system. Windows…. The Purpose Driven paradigm is the Intel chip for the 21st-century church and the Windows system of the 21st-century church.” Rick Warren, Christianity Today, Oct. 2005
“[W]e are possibly on the verge of a new reformation in Christianity and another Great Awakening in our nation … The signs are everywhere, including the popularity of this book.” Rick Warren, Baptist Press, Sept. 2004
“I really do feel that these people are brothers and sisters in God’s family. I am looking to build bridges with the Orthodox Church, looking to build bridges with the Catholic Church, with the Anglican church.” Rick Warren at Anglican conference, 11/05
* * * * *
“And they said, ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top is in the heavens; let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth.’ But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of men had built. And the LORD said, ‘Indeed the people are one and they all have one language, and this is what they begin to do; now nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them.'” Genesis 11: 4-6
“Now the Spirit expressly says that in latter times some will depart from the faith, giving heed to deceiving spirits and doctrines of demons.” I Timothy 4:1
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