Rick Warren, the chubby, denim-clad, goateed 54-year-old Southern Baptist now hailed as America’s pastor, was the heir apparent to 90-year-old Billy Graham long before President-elect Barack Obama asked him to give the inaugural invocation.
Warren rose to the occasion in 28 years, under circumstances very different from Graham’s.
Even before Obama’s invitation, Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where Martin Luther King Jr. was pastor, asked Warren to speak at its King Day service Jan. 19.
Long before the Saddleback Civil Forum last August, where Warren moderated a values-focused Q&A session with presidential candidates Obama and John McCain, the media represented Warren as the authoritative spokesman for a new generation of evangelical Christians.
hailed as America’s pastor
heir apparent to 90-year-old Billy Graham
asked Warren to speak at its King Day
media represented Warren as the authoritative spokesman for a new generation
“Now all the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there would spend their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new.” Acts 17:21
Not that they had any desire to change, but they simply delighted in hearing and discussing something new. St. John Chrysostom, paraphrased from Navarre Study Bible, Acts
You believe Warren was asked to speak at Ebenezer Baptist Church because they wanted to hear something new? Really?
“Chubby”? That was necessary for the first sentence? Really!
Jim Elliott <>< Florida
Brian,
Yes. It seems to me that Ebenezer Baptist Church got on the New Thing Political Train a long time ago and they can’t seem to find their way off. (Probably in part because so many people get upset if anyone dares criticize Ebenezer – believing it to be above all criticism so long as they are “true” to the political legacy of MLK.)
But my post was intended to be more about the media’s and the public’s obsession with hearing and speaking about Warren. (Yes I, too, have read his books and shaken his hand after hearing him preach.) Our culture thinks that the best thing is the the new, the innovative, the change. The Church has proven with Rick Warren (and many others) that she is not above that kind of narrow thinking.