Rick Warren on fire to help others

His voice hoarse and choked from a week of breathing the smoky Southern California air, pastor Rick Warren spoke Monday in Amarillo, talking to reporters about his church’s efforts to aid the firefighters and victims of three blazes raging nearby.
Warren, who pastors Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif., was the keynote speaker at the annual meeting of the Baptist General Convention of Texas. He is the author of the best-selling book “A Purpose-Driven Life.”
Just minutes after arriving in Amarillo and being ushered into the Amarillo Civic Center, Warren held a press conference, but did not talk much about his PEACE Plan for global missions. Instead, he spoke about what was foremost on his heart.
“Many of our people had to be evacuated,” he said.
There were 18 fires in the area around San Diego and Los Angeles. Three of those were burning up in Saddleback Valley. The 120-acre campus of his church served as a staging area for firefighters as well as an evacuation center.
“We fed about 400 to 500 firefighters during the week,” he said.
His church — which he said has nearly 100,000 members and 22,000 in attendance on Sundays — sprang into action all across the area when the wildfires broke out. He said they sent trained chaplains to evacuation centers and sent out volunteer teams to do disaster relief.
“We were almost as quick as the Baptist Men of Texas,” he quipped, referring to the emergency response group of the BGCT.
As he spoke and took questions from the press, he remained vibrant and jovial despite the weariness that was showing in his pale blue eyes.
Warren took some time to express his ties to Texas, noting his father and daughter were born in the state, he went to seminary near Dallas and a Texas Baptist church was the first one to sponsor the upstart Saddleback Church 27 years ago. Because his father was the 18th born of 20 children, he has many relatives across the Lone Star state.
He said he was looking forward to talking about missions and his missions-oriented PEACE Plan. The theme of the annual meeting was “Missions — Together We Can Do More.”
“I think it’s one of the things we can do well together,” he said. “Texans have a long history in missions.”
He said in the middle 1800s, missionaries were sent out from New York City to evangelize Texas. Now, “Texas should be sending missionaries out to New York City,” he said.
In the PEACE Plan he spelled out before more than 2,000 conventioneers that night, he said the masses should be sent out locally and abroad to do mission work. He said churches need to “release the latent, pent-up power that’s sitting in our pews today.”