Kay Warren, wife of Saddleback Church pastor Rick Warren, has been an active church member since she can remember, with her devotion to God sprouting and developing decades before she became one of the nation’s most well-known and revered Christian leaders.
“My dad was a pastor, so I’ve been in church since I was basically brought home from the hospital,” Warren told TheBlaze of her upbringing in San Diego, California. “I was enrolled in Sunday school from probably two weeks on, and I became a Christian when I was 8.”
Warren and her husband have built a massive ministry at Saddleback — a multi-site church based in California that regularly attracts more than 25,000 people to services. In a series of interviews conducted over the past two years, Warren discussed — among other subjects — the couple’s early years in ministry, describing how “each wore a million hats.”
“He was the pastor and the lead pastor and I was the church secretary and the church pianist and the first Sunday school teacher,” Warren said “Anything he didn’t do, I did. The two of us together were this team, and it was fun as the church grew to be able to take off a hat and give it to someone else.”
Over the years, the Warrens’ ministry grew well beyond the confines of Saddleback Church, with Rick Warren’s popular book, “The Purpose Driven Life” making him a household name among Christians, and with Kay Warren becoming a very public advocate for orphans and people living with HIV/AIDS — opportunities that came as the church grew and the many hats each of them initially wore were passed off to others.
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