In affluent Lake Forest, Calif., Rocky Road intersects Purpose Drive at one of several entrances to the Rev. Rick Warren’s sprawling Saddleback Church. The immediate feel is that of a shopping mall or college campus; certainly not a church.

In addition to the humongous metal-crafted worship “tents” and main auditorium, there’s the Beach Café, Terrace Café, Baptismal Pool, Prayer Garden, Children’s Building, Nursery Building, Student Zone, Green Room, Plaza, on and on. Shuttles cart people back and forth from the parking lots.

Walking into Tent 3, which according to the full-color brochure (entitled “Getting Around Saddleback Church”) is designed for those who “love gospel music and would love to sing more as part of your worship experience,” I was immediately struck by the stacks and stacks of large collection baskets near the front door. On a side table were stacks of offering envelopes and cheap ink pens embossed with the Saddleback logo.

This was definitely big business. For $3, I picked up one of the hundreds of CDs for sale on the Plaza that gave the audio for Warren’s study on “accelerated spiritual growth” from the week before.

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Popping the message into my car stereo as soon as I was back on the road, I got reminded just what kind of world influence the flip-flop-and-Hawaiian-shirt wearing, overweight and goateed Warren enjoys and flaunts. He starts off with:

“I’ve really missed you. I’ve been gone for three weeks, actually out of the country for part of it. I was in Davos, Switzerland where I spoke at the World Economic forum. We had a wonderful meeting there.

“And then we spent a week in New York City where we working with churches who are preparing to do a city-wide 40 Days of Purpose this fall and we’ll have maybe between 500 and even up to a 1,000 churches doing 40 Days of Purpose in New York City.

“And then I spent the third week in Washington, D.C. where we were at the National Prayer Breakfast. I spoke at the National Cathedral. We did a White House briefing on Rwanda and had a number of different meetings related to the P.E.A.C.E. Plan.

“I got back into town this week just in time to have surgery on my shoulder—something I’ve been putting off for well over a year. I was ready to do all six services this weekend and the doctor said, ‘Not a chance.’ So I had to debate with him and he said I could do one of them and so I wanted to share with you today what I’ve been waiting for several weeks to share with you.

“You know, we’ve been on this series on accelerating your spiritual growth for the past five weeks. We’ve been talking about different aspects of your spiritual growth and uh, today we want to wrap it up with ‘How to feed yourself from God’s Word.

“You know, until you learn to feed yourself from God’s Word you’re never going to be able to grow and be all that God wants you to be. You can’t grow spiritual maturity without the Bible.

“In fact, notice their in your outline. I f you take out your outline, Jesus said in Matthew 4 verse 4, he said, ‘People need more than bread for their life; they must feed on every word of God.

“Now, the truth is most Believers don’t know how to do that. We don’t know how to feed ourselves; in fact, most Believers have to depend on second-hand sources in order to grow. They depend on pastors, they depend on sermons, they depend on Bible studies, tapes, classes …”

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Well, after listening to the “accelerated” study (which was shockingly BO-RRRING coming from someone so heavily promoted by the media as ‘funny and laid back,’ etc.), I can say with absolute certainty you can’t depend on Warren.

His instructions are at kindergarten-level (mostly delivered in a semi-sarcastic and condescending tone) and are often dead wrong, showing his satanic corruption under the guise of Southern Baptist minister.

At one point, He actually advises the audience to take Moses’ law books, or Torah, and understand they’re what David is personalizing in the Psalms and are meant for us to us to treat as personal prayers to God for our lives today.

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Warren brags about how 30 years ago, while he was still in college, he wrote a book on how to study the Bible that was so enlightening Billy Graham invited him to lecture on it to more than 12,000 spiritual leaders from across the world.

He gives the cutesy acrostic he made up at the time, called SPACE PETS: “Just imagine the Jetsons’ doggie or a little kitty in an astronaut outfit. Here are nine questions that you can ask of any passage of Scripture. Why don’t you write this down. First, you can ask, ‘Is there any sin to confess?’ That’s the S of SPACE PETS.

“And if there is, I say, ‘Lord, you know, uh, there was pride in this verse; I need to confess my pride. There was envy in this verse; I need to confess my envy. There was lust in this verse; I need to confess my lust.’

“P is, ‘Is there a promise to claim?’ Did you know there are over 7,000 promises in the Bible and they are all there waiting like blank checks for you to claim? . . .

“ ‘Is there a prayer to pray?’ You know, if you’ve ever wondered, ‘How can I learn to pray?’ pray the prayers of the Bible. Did you know that in almost every book of the New Testament that Paul wrote, he starts with a prayer?

“You can pray those prayers for your children, for your husband, for your wife, for your friends. And, by the way, you’ll know they’ll be answered because they’re inspired and so they have to be the Word of God and so they have to be God’s will!

“You can actually pray the prayers of the Bible. Many of the psalms are prayers of David. You can just pray them back to God.”

This is all pure baloney. Anybody who knows anything about David’s psalms would know this.

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Warren actually contradicts himself when, just after telling his audience they must study God’s Word and not the words of men, advises, “A third way to meditate on a passage of Scripture is to paraphrase it. To paraphrase means just to put it in your own words . . .

“Many of the paraphrased translations that we get today, like the Living Bible and The Message paraphrase, were people who were scholars that read the Word of God and then paraphrased in modern language.”