LAKE FOREST, Calif. (ABP) — Saddleback Community Church is the largest congregation in the Southern Baptist Convention. But is it really Southern Baptist?
Pastor Rick Warren told a group of high-profile journalists in May that the 40,000-member church no longer is a member of the Southern Baptist Convention. But he retracted that statement Aug. 20, saying he misspoke.
A “transcript” of the interview, which was posted on the website of the widely respected Pew Forum for Religion and Public Life in May, was altered to delete the declaration at Warren's request, a Pew spokesman said. The revised “transcript” does not indicate it was altered and no explanation is offered on the website (pewforum.org).
Warren told Associated Baptist Press Aug. 20: “I'm Southern Baptist. Our church is Southern Baptist. And we are a leader in SBC missions support in our state.”
In the original May 23 interview, Warren responded to a question by Rebecca Haggerty of NBC's “Dateline,” who asked in what denomination he grew up.
Warren responded: “My father was a Baptist pastor. I grew up in little tiny churches of less than 50 people. I call myself an evangelical. We are – “Haggerty apparently interrupted with another question: “Your church is not a Baptist church?”
Warren responded: “No – it was. In the early years, when we first got started, it was a part of the Southern Baptist Convention. One out of ten churches in America is an SBC church, and the reason the denomination's so big is that every church is totally independent. The denomination has no control over it. So basically we cooperated with them in their missions program, but now we're doing our own missions program.”The altered transcript, on the other hand, ends the quotation with “I call myself an evangelical.” It then jumps to the next question by Haggerty, on a different topic.
Burke Olsen, a spokesman for the Pew Forum, told Associated Baptist Press the response was edited out at the request of Warren or his representative. Asked if such alterations are made routinely without any acknowledgement in the transcript, Olsen said, “Our longstanding policy is to let speakers change anything they want to in a transcript.”
In a later email, Olsen added, “The Pew Forum gives its event speakers the opportunity to review the transcripts of their remarks. The transcript currently posted on the Forum's website has been reviewed and approved by Rick Warren. Anyone seeking additional comments should contact Mr. Warren's office directly.”
Warren told ABP he missed a chance to change the quote in the first transcript because he was traveling and too busy to review it. “Bad idea!” he said. “… When I read the transcript, I was horrified!”
Warren, whose recent book “The Purpose-Driven Life” has sold a record 20 million copies, later asked Pew to change the quote, which the organization did. But not before the transcript got passed around among some Southern Baptists, stirring discussion on several Internet chatrooms and weblogs.
Ryan DeBarr, a Southern Baptist from Louisville, commented on Warren's apparent departure from the SBC. “…[I]f he feels out of place in the convention, then I think it's a good move for all sides,” he wrote on his blog, ryandebarr.com. “I can appreciate a person who stands by their convictions. Disagreement isn't always a bad thing, if it's handled correctly, and I hope this will be.”
The rumor of Saddleback's departure from the Southern Baptist Convention took on more credence after the July Baptist World Alliance meeting in England, where Warren, a keynote speaker, disagreed publicly with the SBC's withdrawal from BWA.
Saddleback Community Church, started by Warren and his wife, Kay, in 1980, has always downplayed its denominational affiliation because of what Warren calls “widespread misperceptions” about Southern Baptists. Nothing on the church website mentions the SBC, and Warren admits many people who attend the church are not aware of its SBC affiliation.
“I am not ashamed of my Southern Baptist heritage and we clearly explain in our membership class that Saddleback is affiliated both doctrinally and financially with the Southern Baptist Convention,” he explained in his 1995 best-seller, “The Purpose-Driven Church.” The congregation decided not to promote its SBC membership so that the SBC's negative connotations wouldn't interfere with the congregation's evangelism. “Many unbelievers, particularly those with Catholic background, told me they would never even consider visiting a Southern Baptist congregation.”
Saddleback claims 40,000 members and regular attenders, which would make it the largest church in the country. In 2004 the church gave $150,000 through the California Southern Baptist Convention, which qualifies it as a California Baptist and Southern Baptist church.
Warren said he misunderstood Haggerty's question during the May interview, which included journalists from ABC, NBC, National Public Radio, The New Republic, National Review, Washington Post, New York Times and Atlantic Monthly. Warren appeared at the Pew Forum's “Faith Angle” conference in Key West, Fla., where he was asked to speak on the topic “Myths of the Modern Mega-Church.”
“At one point I thought I was asked if Saddleback was identified as a Southern Baptist church, and I told the reporter 'no' because we've never had Southern Baptist in the name of our church,” he told ABP in an Aug. 20 e-mail. “Reading the transcript, I saw that the question was, 'Your church is not a Baptist church?'
“In the early years of our church, we used to put the byline 'Southern Baptist Convention' under the name 'Saddleback Community Church' in our ads, business cards and brochures, but we dropped that by 1982. But for 25 years our church has been involved in the convention at the association, state and national level and has no intention of changing that.”
“The bottom line is I jumbled my words in haste trying to quickly explain that Saddleback has thousands of members — over 4,500 — who've gone on short-term missions around the world. It appears that I said we're not supporting Southern Baptist missions, but, of course, that simply isn't true.”
Warren said a person in the public spotlight is bound to “eventually say something he didn't mean, or intend, or even believe.”
“Any individual's ministry and impact needs to be evaluated in toto, and not on the basis of one stray comment from a live (and sometime adversarial) interview,” he added. “I trust that fellow Southern Baptists will realize that my and Saddleback's mission is better reflected by our faithful track record over 25 years, rather than my fatigue in the spotlight during a busy week.”