“God told me to move my focus from church planting to church renewal.” 

Pastor Rick Warren

Lake Forest, CA — From June 28-30, 2016 at Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California, Pastor Rick Warren will do something he hasn’t done in a decade: he’ll update and teach the paradigm for church health and church growth popularized in his 1995 bestseller The Purpose Driven Church.

Purpose Driven Conferences were a hallmark of Saddleback Church’s ministry to pastors in the United States for more than a decade until God led Rick Warren to enter into a season focused almost exclusively on ministry around the world through the PEACE Plan.

Over the course of a decade, more than 25,000 Saddleback Church members ministered in 196 countries and Warren trained hundreds of thousands of pastors from huts in obscure villages to the world’s largest cities. Saddleback worked around the world to Promote  reconciliation, Equip leaders, Assist the poor, Care for the sick, and Educate a new generation. All along the way, churches were planted.

“Now that the PEACE PLAN is mature and impacting millions of people around the world through thousands of churches, God has shifted my focus from church planting to church renewal, beginning in America,” said Pastor Rick Warren. “We must help plateaued churches and discouraged pastors, and we must train a whole new generation to embrace God’s five purposes for the church: fellowship, discipleship, worship, ministry and evangelism. While God’s purposes for the church have remained unchanged for 2,000 years, we continue to learn how to apply them in a changing world. The Purpose Driven paradigm is like the operating system for the church, but we have discovered so many new apps over the last ten years. We need to introduce a new generation to the paradigm all together, and we need to introduce our old friends to what we’ve learned in the last ten years,” said Warren.

Already, more than 400,000 pastors around the world have been trained in the Purpose Driven paradigm, but the Purpose Driven Conference has not been offered in the United States in ten years.  Pastor Rick Warren attributes much of the growth of Saddleback Church to the Purpose Driven paradigm, resulting in more than 42,000 baptisms, 26,000 members serving in more than 500 ministries, and over 40,000 people participating in more than 8,000 small groups.

For a generation, many of the largest churches in America have installed what Warren calls the “purpose driven chip” to catalyze growth.  Ten years after the publication of The Purpose Driven Church, a study by The Barna Group noted it was second most “helpful” book in a nationwide study of pastors. It was, notably, beaten only by another book by Warren, Purpose Driven Life. 

The new and updated Purpose Driven Church conference will take place in Lake Forest, CA on June 28-30.  Conference participants can register at www.pd.church to attend in person or watch the conference online.

Note:

Digital assets are available here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B7iK_wKaCOOgamtxYlFRS0RUaFk

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