In 2 Corinithians 6:14, Paul commands the Corinthians believers to "NOT be unequally yoked with unbelievers." Yet, this is exactly what Rick Warren proposes to do to accomplish what he calls the "Global expansion of the Kingdom of God." (See: Rick Warren's "Whatever it Takes" Plan)
In his speech at DAVOS 2008, Rick Warren outlined his plan to end the world's Global Giants--pandemic diseases, extreme poverty, illiteracy, corruption, global warming, and spiritual emptiness by partnering with ALL Faiths, some of which he called "brothers and sisters" namely Jews and Muslims, (Can anyone say Chrislam?) as a distribution network for food, medicine, education, etc. He declared that the future of the world was Religious Pluralism. In other words, everyone remains in their own religion, but works together for the common good.
To see the video this transcript was taken from:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGytW4yh0C8
starting at 40:15 minute mark.
TRANSCRIPT------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“First I applaud DAVOS for having this session…if you are a global business leader, you need to understand that the future of the world is not secularism, it is religious pluralism. You may not like that, but you are going to have to deal with it. The world is becoming more religious, not less. The myth that as education rises, religion would go down is that literally a myth. And, if you happen to be in a country where either houses of worship are not strong, you have no idea of the vitality of faith around the world and see how influential it really is.
There are major problems on our planet. I call them the global giants. They affect not millions of people but billions of people--pandemic diseases, extreme poverty, illiteracy, corruption, global warming, spiritual emptiness. We cannot solve these problems without involving people of faith and their religious institutions. It isn’t going to happen any other way. On this planet there about 20 million Jews, there are about 600 million Buddists, there are about 800 million Hindus, there are over 1 billion Muslims, and there are 2.3 billion Christians. If you take people of faith out of the equation you’ve ruled out 5/6 of the world. And if we only leave it up to secular people to solve these major problems, it isn’t going to happen.
Now, I’ve been coming to DAVOs for some time and we always talked about partnerships. And I’m in favor of partnerships, but we’ve been missing the third leg of the stool. When we talk about partnerships at DAVOS we basically talk about public and private, or public being government and nongovernment organizations and private meaning the “for profit” organizations. A one legged stool will fall over and a two legged stool will fall over, you have to have three legs. And the third leg of the stool are the people of faith representing faith on this stage and others. It is the faith component. Government has a role that only government can do. Profit has a role that only profit can do. And churches and mosques and synagogues and temples have a role that only they can do.
There are some things that churches have… let me just take my own faith as a Christian pastor. Let me give you some things that government or business will never have that the church has.
1) We have universal distribution
I could take you to ten million villages around the world and the only thing in it is a church. They don’t have a school, they don’t have a business, they don’t have a program, they don’t have a fire department, they don’t have a government, but they’ve got a church.
The church was global 200 years before DAVOS even started talking about globalization. It is truly the only global organization. It speaks more languages than the United Nations, it’s in a thousand more people groups than the UN. It is the only truly global organization. So we have universal distribution. And we have used this in disaster relief very effectively.
I lead a very small network of about 500,000 churches in 162 countries. That’s one little network compared to the Catholic Church, which If you go to Africa, 30% of the health care done on that continent is done by the Catholic Church, you can’t ignore that. If you take the Catholic Church out of Africa, you’ve just lost the number one provider of health care on that continent. So, we have universal distribution. The second thing we have is:
2) We have the largest pool of man power.
Not counting all of the brothers and sisters who are Jews and Muslims and other Faiths, Hindus, Buddists. If I could get just one half of Christianity involved in these major conflicts , that would be a billion people. Hundreds of millions of people serve through their congregation every week at no cost. No government and no business will ever match the commitment of volunteers to Faith. None, ever. You need to understand that as a business leader. The third thing that we have is:
3) We have local credibility.
Last year I did a world tour where I did 46,000 miles in 45 days. I literally went around the world…and in every country, I met with the government leaders--usually the president, prime minister, top business leaders and the religious leaders. In every one of those countries, what I found is, when you get down to the city level, the credibility lies with the Imam, the Pastor, the Priest, the Rabbi--Why? Because that person is marrying, burying, they’re there in the seasons of life, they care for the sick, they help the people, when the wars come everybody else leaves, all the NGO’s pull out, but the church and the mosque stays. Why? It IS the community, you can’t talk community development without talking about churches, and mosques and temples and synagogues, you just can’t talk about it, because they are the community.
So, my challenge to you is, “Can we not all get along?” (laughter from audience). Can we not just work together. I don’t have to share your motivation and you don’t have to share mine for us to work on things like poverty, disease and illiteracy and things like that.
Frankly, I don’t care why you do good, as long as you do good. Now there are some people who do good for a political reason. I happen to be on the Council of Foreign Relations in America and we’ve learned that when you help people with health care in a country, they tend to like your country. You help people get well, they like you. Now that’s not my motivation, but it’s a good motivation. I don’t have a problem with political motivation, helping people get well, they like their country, fine.
You may have a profit motivation. You may be a pharmaceutical and say, we’re going to make drugs and we’re going to do good and make money at the same time. Great! I wish more companies would do that, I wish they’d make profit and do good at the same time. It’s not my motive, but it’s not a bad motive. You may have a personal motivation, you say well I’ve have had cancer so I care about people who have cancer, or I have aids, so I care about people who have aid. That’s fine.
My motivation is that I have a savior named Jesus Christ, who said “Love your neighbor as yourself.” It doesn’t have to be your motivation, it has to be mine, but can we not work together in building the three legs of the stool.
For the last three years, I have been working on a prototype of this. It is called the P.E.A.C.E. plan:
Promote reconciliation
Equip ethical leaders
Assist the Poor
Care for the Sick
Educate the next generation
In my own church, I’ve had over 7,700 of my members overseas in 68 countries doing this Peace plan. We’ve learned a thousand ways that don’t work, but we’ve learned a few dozen that do. And we are learning how to work with businesses and how to work with governments and how to work with churches and mosques.
I’ll end with this story:
Last December, I was asked by President Bush to be the closing speaker at the Global Summit on Malaria. And I said, I want to just show you why we cannot eliminate Malaria, much less any other problem without houses of worship. Let me just show you one example. So I said, I’ll show you three slides. I put up the first PowerPoint slide and it was a slide of Western Rwanda.
I said there are 700,000 people in this province. Here are the three hospitals, and I pointed them out on the map. Only three hospitals for 700,000 people! It‘s a 2-day’s walk to any hospital. That means if you get sick you’ve got to walk over mountains for two days. Two of those hospitals are faith based, and one of them is secular, it’s government based. So you wouldn’t even have two thirds of that without, you know, Faith.
Then I said let me show you this, and I showed them the 18 clinics in the western province. I said it’s still a day’s walk to any of these clinics, and some of these clinics mean I’ve just got a bottle of aspirin on the shelf, that’s it.
Sixteen of those clinics are Faith based, actually church based, and two of them were government based. Then I said, watch this, and I threw up a map with dots all over the map, dot dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, everywhere, and I said here are the 726 churches in this province. If you are sick, let’s say you have aids, where would you like to get your ARVs? After it was over, Melinda Gates came up to me, she said,” I get it Rick, houses of worship are the distribution center for all we have to do” and that’s what we need to partner on. Thank you.
END OF TRANSCRIPT--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From a humanistic point of view, this really is a very logical plan that appears to have a lot of potential and merit. However, as with certain socialistic plans implemented by Christianity, there is no mention of reaching people with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. What good does it do to improve their health, education and comfort level, but not proclaim the truth that can save their souls? It kind of reminds me of fattening them up for the slaughter.
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