Email from Rick Warren to Lighthouse Trails
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From: Rick Warren [mailto:rickw@saddleback.net]
Sent: Tuesday, May 31, 2005 12:15 AM
To: editor@lighthousetrails.com
Subject: Correcting your Press Release
Dear Deborah,
I wish you had contacted me directly before you released your
April 20 Press Release "Rick Warren Teams Up
With New Age Guru Ken Blanchard." It would have saved you
a lot of embarassment, and the needless slandering based on
false 3rd person information that you got from a book about
me that is laughable because of literally hundreds of errors
and made-up conclusions. Here are the facts.
1. George Mair, an unbeliever, evidently
wanted to make a quick buck turning out a book on me, at the
peak of the popularity of The Purpose Driven Life. He's has
made a living churning out "celebrity bios" on
such "notables" as Paris Hilton: The Naked Truth,
Oprah Winfrey, Lethal Ladies, Barry Diller, Lisa Minelli,
and Ashley Judd. Why he chose to write about a pastor
I assume was his desire to hitchhike on the success of PDL and
hope to make a bunch of money. Since he is not even born
again, he certainly wouldn't understand theology, what
I believe, or even the basics of our ministry.
Mair says Kay and Rick went to high school together.
FACT: We lived over 600 miles apart and didnt know
each other!
Mair
says I have one child, a daughter.
FACT I have 3 grown children , two married, and one grandchild!
Mair says my father ran a youth ministry.
FACT: My father never did!
I could go on and on, but any author who gets such basic facts
wrong (that are easily checkable) should not be trusted with
his
4.. It would be bad enough just to have a book that get the
facts wrong, but now critics are quoting Mair as if what he
said is the gospel truth. For instance...
Mair says that New Age Minister Norman Vincent Peale was my
mentor!
FACT: I've never met Mr. Peale and never even read any book
he wrote! It's a total fabrication! I'm a Southern
Baptist and would repudiate every new age belief. My mentor
was my own father, and SBC missionary. My great grandfather
on my mother's side was saved
Mair says that televangelist Robert Schuller helped "found"
Saddleback Church!
FACT: This is impossible. I have never even had a private
one-on-one conversation with Mr Schuller- ever! I have
been in several interdenominational meetings that he was at,
and I shared my testimony about what our church was doing
at 3 of his Pastor's conferences in the 1980s. but the invitation
came from Wilbert Eickenberger, the director, not even
from Schuller himself. The first time I met Schuller
in a meeting was in 1985- 6 years after I started Saddleback
- so obviously, he didn't start our church.
Mair says I've hired New Age Guru Ken Blanchard to train leaders
for us.
FACT: This simply isn't true! First, I totally oppose New Age
anything. Second, I haven't hired Ken Blanchard to do
anything.
Background: Ken
is a new believer- a new creature in Christ. He should
not be held accountable for statements or endorsements he made
before he became a Christian. And he's just learning now.
That's why- ONE TIME ONLY - I agreed
to be one of a dozen Christian speaker's at a conference on
Leading Like Jesus in Birmingham, Alabama. I wanted to
support this new believer, and I do not apologize for that.
I believe they taped that conference and sold it. There was
nothing new age in it to my knowledge.
Deborah, since you obviously must hold to the inerrancy of
Scripture - the verbal, plenary inspiration of the Holy Spirit,
as I do, why didn't you follow Jesus' instructions in Matthew
18 and come to me first, instead of releasing a press release
that was inaccurate and hurtful to a brother in Christ?
PS. I'm sure you
understand that the more well known a person becomes, the harder
it is to stay current with everyone who is using your name for
their purposes. For instance, Zondervan publishers asked
me to write a commentary on an "Emerging Church" book,
although I am definitely not a part of that group. If
you read that book, you saw that I often disagreed with the
author in my sidebar commentary. But when the book came
out- it had my name paired with Brian McLaren's on the cover!
If I had known that Mr McLaren was asked to be a commentator
too, I would have declined, because I have some major
disagreements with his views of the so-called "emerging"
movement.
