PURPOSE DRIVEN LIFE 40 DAYS OF PURPOSE

There may be some Christians who have not heard of the Purpose Driven Life but they probably are living in a cave. This is a book written by mega-church author Rick Warren. Because he has an extremely large base (a church of 15,000 along with many "purpose driven" churches around the country), many of his books were promptly bought for small groups and church-wide campaigns. As a result, its sales shot up and made the New York Times best seller's list and the rest is marketing - you can find a copy in every Wal-Mart across the country.

It seems to be a fair, basic book to introduce friends to Christianity in nonthreatening language. It is probably comparable to Billy Graham's "Peace With God" or some of Bill Bright's Campus Crusade writings. Few such as John MacAuther are critical of the book as he feels Warren kind of soft-soaps sin and defines the problem of man in terms of "lack of purpose" instead of living in rebellion to God. Further, salvation can be found without conviction or repentance but by simply saying a prayer and being "welcomed to the family".

Personally, I don't know if this is a valid critique or not as I have not carefully written the book - I always saw it as too basic to be useful for me at this point in my life though the fact that it is basic may make it useful for others. In Christian circles it is easy to criticize a book because it doesn't say everything you would like it to say - but then every book can't be 900 pages long.

My guess (and again I didn't read the book but merely skimmed it) is that it is probably a good book to introduce folks to Christianity and some basic Christian disciplines. Hopefully the person won't stop there but go on to read other Christian books that have withstood the test of time. Perhaps my criticism or dislike of the marketing methods of Saddleback (having spent three years in a ministry that began at their church) is they tend to market their products as original and all-inclusive when in fact their products tend to be ideas that have been around for years developed more thoughtfully by others; Saddleback takes these ideas, dumbs them down, brand them with the Saddleback logo and slogans and makes it accessable to the masses.