Evangelist Encourages ACNA Assembly: TLC 6.23.09

First published in The Living Church.

Evangelist and mega-church pastor Rick Warren told the founding convocation of the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) to focus its energies on mission and evangelism, and let go of the entanglements of the past.

“You may lose your steeple, but you won’t lose your people,” Pastor Warren told delegates and guests of the ACNA assembly June 23 in a tent on the precincts of St. Vincent’s Cathedral in Bedford, Texas. He serves as senior minister of the 25,000-member Saddleback Community Church, a four-campus congregation he founded in southern California.

Pastor Warren told the ACNA his “heart was full for you” and that the ACNA’s work was of “extreme importance” for the reformation of the wider Christian church. It should not be “reactionary,” Pastor Warren said, but forward thinking, going out to “build disciples” one by one.

“A great commitment to the great commandment and the great commission will grow a great communion,” Pastor Warren said. The work of building this new church lay with the parish priest, he said. He urged priests to be faithful to their ministries and to eschew politics and secular temptations.

“If God has called you to serve in a local church, as a parish priest, lay leader, staff member, don’t you ever step down to become the president of the United States, or anything else, because nothing matters more,” he said.

This commitment to faith first should be kept in mind when contemplating litigation over parish properties, he added. Harking back to comments he made during the “Hope and a Future Conference” in Pittsburgh for Anglican traditionalists in 2005, Pastor Warren said the church “has never been a building,” noting that his congregation used 79 different locations in its first 13 years.

“Christ did not die for property,” he said. “God’s agenda is that he is building a family” of believers.

The Rt. Rev. David Bane, Bishop of Southern Virginia from 1998 to 2006, told The Living Church he was moved by Pastor Warren’s address. “So much of what he said is what we have always believed,” Bishop Bane said.