He is the hottest act in Orange County, and Orange County hasn't seen many hot acts. His venue is SRO every weekend, which means perhaps 20,000 souls; last weekend, it meant national TV exposure and international publicity.
So I decided to go to church (that is, mega-church) last Sunday to see Rick Warren in action, chat with him and, well, review his act.
The good pastor is a portly, breezy, garrulous Southern Baptist who is not really Southern and not too much of a Baptist and his mega-church is not so much a house of worship as it is an evangelical launching pad for his worldwide causes.
He told me that the task of interviewing presidential candidates last weekend was tougher than he'd imagined. "I know both of these men and the trouble is that they are mirror opposites in almost every way -- the way they talk, the way they think. You get whiplash talking with them back-to-back."
Yet that is what Rick Warren did and his show grabbed two hours live on CNN worldwide and spurred even more folks to refer to him as the post-2000 Billy Graham.
Given the sudden burst of publicity (the cover of Time, stories in every major newspaper), Rick Warren was stoked Sunday morning. The two presidential candidates had traveled thousands of miles to be grilled by him and his aud was thunderously reverent, giving him boisterous applause as he made his stage left entrance for his regular Sunday sermon.
Warren bills his act "The Purpose Driven Life" (also the name of his bestseller) and he makes it clear to followers that his purpose is to achieve the international stage for his causes. He has stressed that, though an evangelical, he is also a nonpartisan. Attired in his normal preaching gear of Hawaiian shirt and jeans, Warren proclaimed, "I am not left wing and I'm not right wing, I'm for the whole bird. You have to have two wings to fly," which, in Orange County, is a giant applause line.
Warren was thrilled with the results of his "civil forum" not only because of his ratings but because he had deftly turned it into a commercial for his church's activities in both Orange County and in foreign countries like Rwanda. On the Saturday show, he let McCain do a full-fledged commercial for Saddleback's initiatives and rewarded the Republican candidate by scrupulously avoiding follow-up questions or interrupting his stump speeches.
Indeed, the pastor caught some heat from the press: Although he'd assured his audience that McCain had not heard Obama's prior responses to the questions, it appears that the Republican had actually been able to listen to that part of the show from his car while driving to the event Rick Warren seemed pained by the suggestion of favoritism.
If many questioned the pastor's talents as a political interviewer, he was nonetheless rocking as a mega-church preacher.
A Rick Warren sermon is folksy, impromptu but smartly prepped, with accompanying Biblical citations emblazoned on giant TV screens above the stage. As a man who admits to a mild attention deficit problem, Warren's preaching is broken up every 10 minutes for moments of live gospel rock emanating from a highly skilled 10 member band and a chorus of 20 (this is serious show biz, folks).
The music, performed at all six regular weekend SRO perfs, is supervised by a one-time Greenwich Village hippie named Rick Muchow (pictured left) who, clad in black T-shirt and black jeans, conducts, does the pre-show warmup and even delivers an occasional number.
Muchow has a pool of 200 musicians (many of them paid, some volunteers) to keep up with the pastor's furious schedule. And he knows he has to keep things up-tempo - Rick Warren's audiences don't speak in tongues (this is conservative Orange County), but they are on their feet, waving their arms and doing a sing-along (the lyrics, too, pop on the screen, creating an effect of gospel karaoke).
The pastor himself keeps his sermons positive and practical. His church may be evangelical, but his concerns focus on the global AIDS epidemic and building parental support for the millions of orphans around the world.
He stresses the need for generosity and humility and goes to lengths to emphasize that he himself stays humble. "Praise is like bubble gum," he says, "You chew on it but you don't swallow it."
As for his portly stature, he says, "I watch my weight (patting his stomach). How can I not watch it?"
His vast and growing audience admires his folksy charm. It even abides his non-partisanship, though in Orange County being "on the right" is a mandate. During the Saturday evening meeting, when John McCain declared that life begins at conception, the audience exploded in applause.
Rick Warren isn't preaching about conception. He argues that "civility" is a lost ingredient in this country's public debate and he's determined to try and salvage it in his own folksy way.