Rick Warren’s Five Big Problems and His Solution
In an interview with Pastor Rick Warren, “Myths of the Modern Mega-Church” (Monday, May 23, 2005) , he tells us what he thinks are the five biggest problems on the planet today, and that the Church ought to solve them.
So I began to ask myself, what are the biggest problems on the planet? What are what I call the global giants, the problems that are so big they seem impossible to solve; the problems that are so big the United States of America can’t solve them; they’re so big the United Nations can’t solve them; they’re so big they affect billions of people, not millions? And I came to the conclusion that there were five. There were five global giants. And here’s what — in my opinion, as I’ve traveled around the world — are the five biggest problems.
The first one is spiritual emptiness . Billions of people in this world do not know that their life is not an accident. There are accidental parents but there are no accidental children. There are illegitimate parents but there are no illegitimate children, and there is a purpose for every person’s life. And they don’t know that, and they don’t know that God made them for a purpose.
Number two — this one surprises people but it is the source of all of our other problems — egocentric leadership . That is the second global giant: self-centered, self-serving, instead of leadership like Jesus, which says, “Lay down your life for your sheep.” Servant leadership –the leaders serves. The world is full of little Saddams. They are in every nation, they’re in every community, they’re in every church, they’re in every business, they’re in every academic setting, they’re in every homeowner’s association. Give a guy a little bit of power and it goes to his head and he becomes a dictator. And he doesn’t understand that I exist as a leader for the people, not vice-versa.
The third is poverty . Half the world lives on less than $2 a day. We’re working on the first national model of the PEACE Plan right now in Rwanda, where the average income is 68 cents a day.
The fourth major problem is disease — the fourth global giant. What is amazing to me is that the diseases that are killing and still affecting billions of people we found the cures for in the 19th and 20th century and now it’s the 21st century. And it is unconscionable. We know the cure for yellow fever, we know the cure for malaria, polio, measles, mumps, leprosy, and even AIDS. We don’t have a cure for it, but it is 100 percent preventable because it is a behavioral disease — 100 percent preventable. And we just don’t have the leaders who have the courage and the guts to do something about it — the conviction, the character and the courage to do it.
And then the fifth is illiteracy – illiteracy and ignorance, lack of education. Half the world is still functionally illiterate, and how are they going to make a living in the 21st century if they can’t read or write?
Now, I’ll tell you my bias. I believe these problems are so big that only the church is big enough to handle it — the millions and millions and millions and millions of local churches that are spread around….
His choices are odd. How about Sin? Injustice? Beauty? Death? (Disease is all very well, but even if we eliminate infectious diseases, there is still cancer and heart disease.)
Is the Church the solution? I think God would be a better solution. The Church is not going to cure spiritual emptiness, selfish leadership, illiteracy, poverty, and disease. Even if we limit ourselves to human means, curing illiteracy is not the role of the Church. There *are* other Christian institutions.
October 2nd, 2008 at 12:36 pm
I think Rick was saying that God IS the solution, but that his church (corporately around the world) should be the foot soldiers to make it happen. His point is that the Christian Church is 1 billion strong around the world and that if we mobilize together to fight the biggest things affecting the world today, we can at the VERY LEAST make a dent in it, and at best we can eliminate them. The Church already has buildings and leaders around the world in huge cities as well as in the most remote small villages in a far off land. You are correct…God is the answer, but God uses people to do many of his works.