PyroMarketing and the Purpose Driven Life™, Pt. 2: Rick Warren Responds
Tim Challies has made another entry concerning the situation on Rick Warren (Purpose Driven Life™) and Greg Stielstra (Pyromarketing: The Four Step Strategy to Ignite Customer Evangelists and Keep them For Life). The entry also contains a response from Rick Warren himself.

This thing is wild. In his response Rick Warren actually contends that marketing had nothing to do with the success of his book. His contention is that all the success is due to God and the timeless truths that the Purpose Driven™ concept contains. I won't quote Rick Warren (due to his request that his response only appear in it's entirety), but his claim is that no one at Zondervan or PDL™ claims to be smart enough to sell 25,000,000 copies of a devotional book...it is simply God's material that's been taught in the church for 2,000 years. Of course, the one person from Zondervan Warren convieniently leaves out of the "no one" estimate is Steilstra, who seems to think he is plenty smart to accomplish such a task.

I can't believe that Warren would be so naive, or that he expects his readers to be.

But maybe that's the problem. Maybe the Christian culture has become so naive that we would actually believe someone with a large marketing machine when they tell us that the marketing machine does nothing (move along...nothing to see here). If that's the case, why not just write the book and hand it out person by person? Why use Zondervan or Harper Collins? Heck, if no one at Zondervan knows how to take credit for the success of such books, why do they even have a marketing department. While it may be true that no one at Zondervan expected the grand success of PDL, claiming that marketing played essentially no role is blatantly false.

What is perhaps most troubling (if true) is the depiction made by Challies in reference to a New Yorker article about Warren:

The accounts I have read seem to show Warren at his most typical, acting as humble as he knows how, all the while dropping as many big names he can muster. "'I had dinner with Jack Welch last Sunday night,' he said. 'He came to church, and we had dinner. I've been kind of mentoring him on his spiritual journey. And he said to me, 'Rick, you are the biggest thinker I have ever met in my life. The only other person I know who thinks globally like you is Rupert Murdoch.' And I said, 'That's interesting. I'm Rupert's pastor! Rupert published my book!'" (see here). The article states as well that prior to its publication Warren predicted the book would sell one hundred million copies.

However, the real disappointment is that what may be the most powerful reality about Warren himself could be overshadowed in all this. He currently seems be experiencing a sincere re-evaluation of his life and ministry in relation to those in poverty. Quoted from the New Yorker article:

"Out of that psalm [Psam 72], God said to me that the purpose of influence is to speak up for those who have no influence. That changed my life. I had to repent. I said, I’m sorry, widows and orphans have not been on my radar. I live in Orange County. I life in the Saddleback Valley, which is all gated communities. There aren’t any homeless people around. They are thirteen miles away, in Santa Ana, not here.” He gestured toward the rolling green hills outside. “I started reading through Scripture. I said, How did I miss the two thousand verses on the poor in the Bible? So I said, I will use whatever affluence and influence that you give me to help those who are marginalized.”

He and his wife, Kay, decided to reverse tithe, giving away ninety per cent of the tens of millions of dollars they earned from “The Purpose-Driven Life.” They sat down with gay community leaders to talk about fighting AIDS. Warren has made repeated trips to Africa. He has sent out volunteers to forty-seven countries around the world, test-piloting experiments in microfinance and H.I.V. prevent and medical education. He decided to take the same networks he had built to train pastors and spread the purpose-driven life and put them to work on social problems.

posted by Jimmy at 6:24 PM | |