Pastoral Influence

A few years after founding the PEACE Plan, pastor Rick Warren and his Saddleback Church congregation decided they wanted to be the first church in history to take the gospel to every nation.

In the 11 years since the beginning of the PEACE Plan, the 37,000-member church has sent 21,000 members to nations around the world.

"Jesus said, 'Go and make disciples in every nation,' so we said why don't we do that," Warren told his Lake Forest, Calif., congregation in a recent sermon. "We didn't even know how many there were.  We looked it up. There are 196 nations in the world.

"On Nov. 10, 2010, we went to nation 196—a little island in the Caribbean called St. Kitz, with only 35,000 people. No other church in 2,000 years has done that besides Saddleback Church. This is a history-making church. It's like saying, 'We are going to be pioneers,' and we did that."

In 2012, Saddleback launched a campaign to plant a dozen churches in "base camps" throughout the world with the goal of reaching every remaining unreached people group. The goal has since been expanded to 16 churches and Saddleback has opened churches in cities around the world, including those in Hong Kong, Berlin and Buenos Aires.

Around the globe, there are 12,000 people groups; 6,000 of those have less than 2 percent of Bible believers in their populations and about 3,000 have no known church anywhere, says Tommy Hilliker, Saddleback's membership pastor.

The effort is part of the PEACE Plan, Warren's 50-year vision to mobilize 1 billion believers to copy Jesus' model of ministry and tackle the five "global, evil giants" of spiritual emptiness, self-centered leadership, extreme poverty, pandemic disease and illiteracy and lack of education.

"The 'P' stands for plant churches because the No. 1 problem in the world is spiritual emptiness–people need Jesus," Hilliker says. "We want to plant churches around the world to fulfill the Great Commission and the Great Commandment. The second global giant is lack of leadership. The 'E' stands for equip servant leaders. There are a lot of self-serving leaders. 'A' stands for assist the poor. One of the top problems in the world is poverty. 'C' stands for caring for the sick. 'E' stands for educating the next generation."

Warren—whom polls have identified as America's most influential spiritual leader and the author of The Purpose Driven Life, the best-selling hardback in American publishing history–believes the church can make dramatic progress in not only solving many of the world's most perplexing problems, but fulfilling the Great Commission too.

It is part of what Warren calls the "Decade of Destiny"—a goal to mobilize a network of churches globally to reach these unreached people groups.

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