Rob Blackhurst

A shorter version of this piece appeared in FT Weekend on August 13th 2011

The vast parking lots are filling early at the Saddleback church car park on a Sunday in mid-July. Lines of new SUVs queue for the best parking spots, guided by theme-park style marshals. The occupants, mostly young families, spill happily out into the boundless Californian sunshine. Sunday best here means cargo shorts, chunky athletic sandals and surfer dude T-shirts.

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Most of the congregation bounce up steps, past sparkling fountains and palm trees, to the main Saddleback auditorium. For those that would prefer not to walk, there are golf carts that deliver them directly to the church door.

A stand gives out chilled cups of water. For those that prefer to watch the service from the sunshine, they can drink a latte on the patio while watching the worship on the TV screens (words like service are rarely used here). The 120- acre Saddleback Campus is designed with a Visitor Attraction's attention to detail: nothing is allowed to make a first time visitor, a potential convert, uncomfortable.

Saddleback is among America's top five biggest churches – or "megachurches" as they are now known. The 25-35% of the US population that are evangelical Christians are increasingly migrating to these supersized churches. The number of churches with 2,000 attendees or more – the official definition of a megachurch – has doubled within the last ten years to 1,350.

There is a consumer's choice of different worship forms available at different venues on the 120-acre campus – which over the last ten years Saddleback have turned from parched scrubland into a green oasis. There is a "Praise" tent offering a gospel service; "Traditions" which offers hymns; El Encuentro, a Spanish language service, and "Fuel", a dark tent where a band play heavy Christian rock. Earplugs, instead of service sheets are offered at the entrance. Even those waiting to be immersed in the baptism pool are wearing branded blue Saddleback baptism T-shirts. On the speakers throughout the campus, a recent U2 song plays.

Outside the huge auditorium, the "small groups" which all members of the congregation are encouraged to join (and which keep them loyal to the brand) are advertising. An agenda is given out with upcoming activities organized by the small groups: there is a father and daughter dance; stand-up comedy, kiddie gym, Operation Backpack, to provide school materials for poor local children, and a seminar on estate planning. In addition, there is a long list of support groups on everything from "men's step-family connection" to relational intimacy, from abortion to surviving divorce. All the groups are strictly segregated according to gender; men and women are not expected to socialize together.

Here the secret of Saddleback's huge success is revealed. This is Christianity uniquely attuned to the needs of the suburbanites who live among the sprawling suburbs and well-tended lawns of Irvine –a huge new development of houses. These are lives that revolve around young children, the mall, the school-run, and the professional job.

Inside, warm up pastor has done his job with a stadium rock call and response, backed up by a band playing soft rock riffs that are as excitable as the Pacific surf. Some of the audience raise their hands in a half-rock, half-religious salutation. Saddleback's founder, and America's most famous Pastor, Rick Warren, (or Pastor Rick, as he styles himself) bounds across the stage. He's wearing a black T-shirt, converse trainers with no laces, and jeans. The trademark goatee is there, but he's half the size of the figure that is the staple of Sunday morning shows like Meet the Press and Larry King Live. The result of this drastic 40 pound weight loss, it becomes clear when he speaks, is the Daniel Plan – a diet plan – which involves forsaking sugar and bread - that is his latest effort to put the Church right in the centre of modern American preoccupations. (It's named after a bible passage in which the prophet Daniel opts for vegetables and water rather than "defiling himself with royal food and wine").

He's avuncular, whip-smart, and far from the stereotypes of the oleaginous Televangelist or tub-thumping Southern Baptist. Together with his tendency to talk about AIDs and poverty this has made him the only evangelical that gets a sympathetic hearing amongst American liberals. He's now part of the Bono-Clinton-Bill-and-Melinda Gates axis of superstar activists who attend Davos, speak to the Council on Foreign Relations, and can quote chapter-and-verse on child malnutrition figures. Warren is also now on the board of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, whose communications genius, messianic belief in technological change, and religious certainties he shares. ("He's been here at Saddleback. I've given him relationship connections I have because I know religious leaders around the world".

Rick Warren underwent his transition from mega-church pastor to America's most famous religious leader almost ten years ago after the publication of his book: The Purpose Driven Life - a 40-day plan for Christian living in the 21st century. Though Warren hates descriptions of it as a "self-help book" for the religious it borrows all the techniques of the genre – with short lessons to memorize at the end of each day and questions to think about. It tells the stressed out and time-poor that they can be doing the Lord's work while "writing a computer programme, growing a crop or raising a family for the Glory of the Lord". There is no need to find a prayer mat, he says, "You can talk to the Lord while "shopping, driving or taking out the trash". Recasting faith as relevant to the confessional age, he advises readers to treat God like a friend who can "handle honesty". Some traditionalists claimed that his Feel-good therapeutic faith was softening the edges of scripture. But it certainly captured the zeitgeist.

Soon it was on the bookshelf of every evangelical household in America, and, has according to Publisher's Weekly, become the best-selling non-fiction book in American history and the most translated book in history apart from the Bible. The book propelled Warren to A-list status in America. "Purpose-Driven" became a brand that appeared on "Drivetime Devotional" podcasts and DVDs and in marketing tie-ins with Costco and Walmart Forbes magazine ministry wrote: "If Saddleback's ministry was a business its influence would be compared with Dell, Google or Starbucks".

Today, in between the slickly executed Christian Rock, Warren is preaching about reflecting on your faults. "If you're doing something that's ruining your relationship or messing up your marriage or destroying your finances, it's because there is some kind of emotional pay-off". "I don't know what it is – maybe it's to mask your pain, maybe it's to cover up a fear, maybe it's an excuse to fail, maybe it's to compensate for guilt, maybe it's to get back at a former spouse". The therapised language is then linked to a traditional Southern Baptist message. For him, the Devil isn't metaphorical: "Satan discourages you. He wants you to stay stuck. Once you start working on something that you change he starts saying – who do you think you are? What do you think you are doing? He starts planting fears in your mind"

With techniques borrowed from the corporate training seminar, Warren tells the audience to circle the word "truth" on the one-page primer in their seats of "Saddleback notes" with the branded Saddleback pens ready in front of them. "If you remember one thing from today" says Warren: "The secret to life is not a pill, it's not therapy, it's not a seminar. You've got to know and face the truth about God's purpose for your life". Warren encourages his flock to join a "small group"- where four or five people meet together for Bible study in their homes each week. It is this personalization that allows the Saddleback megachurch brand to keep expanding and retaining the loyalty of members. It is a franchise where local initiative is encouraged, providing members follow a programme of scripture and study drawn up at HQ. On the seats in front of them is a "decision card" in which new members can tick a box and leave their details if they want to "commit themselves to Christ". Warren realized that the old Southern Baptist tradition of new members walking down the central aisle of the church in front of strangers was putting off shy suburbanites so abolished the practice.

After the service, the last of three that Warren leads each Sunday, he folds me in a bear hug in his rock-star style green room. One of the greatest taboos that can be committed here, he makes clear, is to, as turn up, as I have, in a suit "I can always tell who the visitors are. They come in a coat". For him, formal dress, is one of the pointless trappings of formal religion: "The bigger the church gets, the fewer clothes you wear. When I first started the church, I actually wore a three piece suit because I was trying to look older".

Here is a bathroom, a shower, and a bed for him to lie down in the dark between performances. In this room, he wrote the Purpose Driven Life ten years ago: "I'd start typing at 5am until about noon. Then my ADD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) would kick in. I thought at first Warren was speaking figuratively, but, apparently, his ADD is so severe – due to an adrenaline imbalance – that it can cause him to black out while preaching. It's also an explanation for the breathless gobbets of conversation that range so widely between subjects that it's difficult to track how they began. His animated, indisiplined conversation style couldn't be further from the cadences of the Southern Baptist preacher: his rambling creativity sounds like he's in a corporate away-day brainstorming session.

Over an abstemious Daniel Plan lunch of grilled aubergine, vegetable squash and chicken, Warren tells me about how when, the son of a Baptist pastor and straight out of Baptist seminary in the late 1970s, he had the calling to set up a "Church for the Unchurched" in the Saddleback Valley. This seemed to more on meticulous demographic study than divine thunderbolt. He put a map on the wall and asked where he should start a church. At the same time he examined the hundred largest churches in the country and found out what had made them a success. He found that pastors who stayed in one place for a long period led healthy churches. And secondly, he found that they were in fast-growing areas with a transient population. He settled on Lake Forest in California, a vast suburb of housing and malls that was the starting to be developed amid the shrubland and former orange groves, sixty miles south of Los Angeles. At the time it was Orange County was the fastest growing area in the US. He went door-to-door asking people if they were churchgoers, and, if not, why not. He found that mostly objections to church were sociological rather than theological – the sermons were boring, church members weren't friendly to visitors, and that churches were more interested in money than people. "I found a lot of people who said, I like God, in fact I want to be a spiritual person, but I just don't like Church. When a non-church walks in to a church building, the first question they ask is, not do they believe in the bible. They ask - is there anyone here like me? If a young couple walks into a church, the first question they'll ask is: "Are there any other young couples here? If all they see is gray hairs, they're not staying". Like all successful businesses, Warren knows the profile of the customers he is targeting: young families who will pass on Christian values to their children.

For Warren the trappings of religion are the problem: "We sing sixteenth century songs called hymns played on an eighteenth century instrument called an organ on nineteenth century chairs called pews, and wonder why they're out of date. There is no other place in the world where you sit in pews. So why don't I have my individual seat? We are as orthodox as a church five hundred years ago. We are still just orthodox Christianity. But we are relating it in the culture of Southern California today". Saddleback has grown from Easter 1980, when he started with a congregation of 200 in a rented high school gym, to the current average weekly attendance of 22,000, making it the fourth largest church in America.

California, though often associated with the secular Gods of liberal politics and advanced technology, has more megachurches – those with an attendance of more than 2,000 - than any other state. The endless exurbs between Los Angeles and San Diego have become known in recent years as the Southern Californian Bible Belt. Evangelicals – once seen as southern and rural and poor are, here on the West Coast, educated and upwardly mobile.

Warren has been adept at spreading the word through the latest products of the Golden State's gizmo industry. In the early eighties he started the "Fax of Life" – a weekly letter for business leaders. Saddleback was, according to Warren, the first church on the internet in 1992. Now, there's a Saddleback iPhone App and Warren has half a million followers on Facebook and Twitter.

I ask whether writing the best selling book in American history was difficult? "I wrote and rewrote ten hours a day for seven months and only spoke at Christmas and Easter. It was like birthing a baby. There's not a new idea in purpose driven life that hasn't been said in 2000 years of history. It's been said all before. If I had a fifteen-word sentence, how could I say it in nine? How can I say it in five? I made it so simple that it's translatable. One of the rules of writing is that you tell stories, and people are naturally attracted to stories. But I thought how do you publish a book that lasts five hundred years. One of the things about the Desert Fathers I noticed is that they did not tell stories that were contemporary".

Initially the publishers wanted to reject it. "When I gave it to them they said: "Fail – nobody's going to buy a book with forty chapters. I said, "fine. I'll take it to another publishers. And they said: "it's ok we'll publish it".

Warren's really revolutionary tactic was to bypass the bookstores, where it went under the radar of the secular media, and market the book direct to Evangelical America. The book was an accompaniment to a forty-day spiritual growth course that Warren had sold to 32,000 churches – or one in ten churches in America were taking. "I said to the publishers that I wanted them to supply books to me at cost for churches who were doing the campaign to buy. They said, 'if we do that there won't be any demand left to sell in bookstores. I said: "Oh, you of little faith". Instead, it became a classic word-of mouth success. "It became a book that you didn't read. It became a book that you go and buy 10 copies and pass on to your friends. If you read a book, and it changes your life, you think I'm going to pass it on".

And how does a Pastor maintain his humility when he has written the best-selling book in American history? "It scared me to death" he says, "When it became the best selling book in the world for three or four years. That brings an enormous amount of attention and an enormous amount of money. You write the best selling book in history – it's tens of millions of dollars. It scared me spitless because I just thought: I don't want to be a celebrity".

All of a sudden I'm getting invitations to Davos, and to TED and to Harvard and to Oxford and Yale and UN. I'm starting to get calls from very well known business leaders saying: "Can you help me?" "The money was the easy part. We just gave it away. We said, first we're not going to change our lifestyle on bit. I still live in the same house I've lived in for 22 years. I still drive the same Ford truck that I've driven for twelve years; I've paid seventeen dollars for this watch from Wall Mart. It still keeps the same time as a Rolex. I don't own a jet; I don't own a yacht". He paid back twenty-five years of salary to the church, and became a "reverse tither". The entire Saddleback congregation is encouraged to give 10 per cent of their income to the Church. Warren gives ninety per cent of his income away. The harder part he says, was knowing how to cope with the influence: "There were famous names from government and business that called me. I'm going – I'm just a pastor. I never intended to become an executive coach for global leaders. I started getting invited to Davos. I didn't know what to do with it".

One of the major impacts of a "Purpose Driven Life" was that politicians everywhere, seeking the favour of America's evangelicals, attempted to bathe in Warren's lustre. He was invited to National Prayer Breakfasts and has prayed at the inauguration of President Bush and Obama. John Edwards, the now disgraced Democratic Presidential Candidate, proudly displayed his own embossed copy of A Purpose Driven Life.

And during the last Presidential Campaign, Warren became the first religious figure to host a Presidential debate between Obama and McCain at Saddleback. Obama later chose Warren to offer prayers at Obama's inauguration – a decision that much of Obama's liberal, pro-choice base, regarded as a sell-out to appease conservatives. ("The first big mistake of Obama's post-election politicking", according to liberal broadcaster Rachel Maddow).

Warren sounds weary of politics when the furore is mentioned: "I know them both so they knew I wasn't going to pull gotcha questions. They actually played to their strengths. Obama's got that professorial thing where there is always a nuance to everything. It could be this, and it could be this. McCain is the happy warrior. Yes, no, get a job! They are as different as night and day"

Warren was the first major evangelical leader to venture into traditional liberal territory – debt relief, climate change, human trafficking, HIV and even Israel. He has softened the agenda of evangelicals beyond the Religious Right's "talking point" issues of stem-cell research, gay marriage, and, above, all abortion. "On AIDS I get criticism from both sides with gay people saying: "you don't agree with everything in my lifestyle and from fundamentalists who say, "Why are you friends with a bunch of people who are gay. When someone is dying of AIDS I don't walk up to them and say: "Was this your fault?" "Of course I'm pro-life. But I call myself whole life. I'm not just interested in that little girl being born. I'm interested in her growing up, getting an education, not living in poverty and having healthcare. When I started talking about that ten years ago as an evangelical and a theological conservative: that was pretty unusual"

He hates being categorized politically: "People say am I left or right wing? I say that I'm for the whole bird. I prayed at President Bush's inauguration and President Obama's because both happen to be friends. I'm actually registered independent because I minister to both sides".

This is far remove when the nineties when Karl Rove's highly successful strategy of mobilizing the evangelical vote (78% of evangelicals voted for Bush in 2000 meant that Born-again Christianity became synonymous with Republicans.

"Evangelicals got way too close to politics," he says: "Politicians need pastors far more than pastors need politicians. In the end, I don't believe politicians change the fundamental core of human beings. I'm interested in something deeper than that. Because I don't need anything from them, they trust me. I'm going to say how are you dealing with your stress?"

At the same time he is far from a liberal. In 2004, he was considered to have offered Bush behind-the scenes support by taking part in a White House Conference call with pastors to warn them that opposition to embryonic stem cell research and abortion were non-negotiable issues. He has regularly described the 45 million fetuses aborted since Roe versus Wade in the seventies as a "holocaust". And, though he didn't want to get drawn into the row, he recorded a message for his congregation in which he told them that the Bible compelled them to support Proposition 8 in California – the vote to ban gay marriage in California.

At the same time, he sees the high-wire negotiations over the deficit as a sign that America is in denial over its economic problems: "The economic problems are spiritually based – the world's inability to delay gratification. Since the number one thing politicians are interested in is getting reelected, I don't see many signs of adult thinking regarding the economy".

Instead he's decided to take the economic circumstances of his flock into his own hands. Eleven per cent of them are out of work.

Even in wealthy Orange County, they are keeping 2,000 families a week afloat through their food pantry. "It's a white collar church" he says: "I've got a lot of Tech CEOs here – and some have been out of work for a couple of years. I'm encouraging them not to be dependent on one income. In the book of Ecclesiastes it says, "Cast your bread upon the water and it will return to you". That's actually an investment verse –saying that you should have multiple sources of income and multiple sources of investment. I do not believe in wealth redistribution – I think the Bible teaches wealth creation. Profit is not a dirty word".

I'm trying to teach our people to have multiple sources of income besides their salary so there may be passive income. How I can I turn a passion, a hobby into a supplementary income, so I'm not just depending on one source?"

This indifference to politicians comes largely from his belief that religious communities can be harnessed to tackle global ills. The secularization thesis – that with the march of technology religious belief will fade away, has been comprehensively discredited, he argues. The twenty first century is likely to get more religious, not less – with 1.5 billion Muslims an 2.3 billion Christians. He rattles off the statistics as if he's a CEO discussing his quarterly forecasts. "There are few secularists outside Manhattan and Europe.

Whereas Islam is growing by birth, Christianity is growing by conversion: "It is growing by 60,000 people a day – and China is exploding. By the end of this decade, China will become the number one Christian nation in the world. He thinks that the Churches universal distribution network has been overlooked. "Local congregations bring things that neither business nor government will ever have. I could take you to ten million villages where the only thing there is a church. There's no business, there's no government, there's no post office. The church was there two thousand years before Walmart started talking about globalization".

Funding at the local level is less likely to be siphoned off, bypassing the intermediate bureaucracies that take their cut. "If you were able to get that straight to the synagogue or mosque, they'll know who is conning you and who isn't". And they are also the last to leave in conflict zones: "When the genocide happened in Rwanda, all the NGOs left, but the church stayed".

Warren's dramatic conversation to the cause of AIDS came at a time when issue was, at best, ignored by America's evangelicals, and, at worst, seen as a righteous judgement. In 1983, when the first signs of the outbreak were emerging, Moral Majority Founder Jerry Falwell had called the disease a "gay plague" and "The judgement of God on a society that promotes homosexuality". The feeling that it wasn't an issue for him was one that he initially shared: "For a long time I thought AIDS was a sectional disease, just as a certain number of people get diabetes. A certain number of people get AIDS. When I went round the world, I realized that more women get AIDS than men; more people have AIDS in the world than there are registered gays. It shouldn't have mattered anyway"

For him, the wake-up call came when he visited Mozambique. He went to a typical rural village church with a congregation of fifty that were looking after twenty-five AIDS orphans. "I thought - this church is doing more to help the poor than my rich megachurch in America. It was like a knife to my heart". Since then Warren has taken a public AIDS test at Saddleback, and started an AIDs ministry for those with the disease in the local area. He sees that it's a particular challenge for evangelicals. "You can't get it out of the air. It's either needle use or sex. That makes some Christians uneasy but in Jesus's day he hung out with people called lepers. We chose AIDS as a signature issue because it was least expected for the church to be there".

Warren was invited by President Kegame to trial his grandiose plans for a "purpose-driven nation" in Rwanda. In the mountainous western region of Rwanda, it's two days walk to the nearest hospital. By training volunteers in the local churches they have transformed a two day journey for medical help into a five minute walk. He shared these plans with global leaders at Davos: "Now Melinda Gates comes up to me afterwards and says: 'Rick, I get it. The church can be the distribution centre for healthcare, for job training, for education and literacy'. In Rwanda, they've trained 2,800 healthcare workers - starting of with learning to dress wounds and finishing with learning to minister Anti-Retrovirals to people dying of AIDS. And it costs nothing! No NGO or Government could ever have that kind of exponential growth because they don't have the local churches".

Warren's closeness to Prsident Kegame has been roundly criticized, and he's been accused of ignoring his increasingly autocratic tendencies. He's still an unabashed defender: "He's not without fault. One of the big problems right now is the opposition to laws in Rwanda that you can't be a genocide denier. There are laws in European countries that prevent exactly the same thing regarding the death camps. What he will not allow is the rewriting of history. Somehow he's figured out a way of getting these people who killed each other to live together. I know a lot of leaders who I would not trust as much as a man who has shown leniency to the people who were killing his family".

In the meantime, Warren has expansion plans. He has said he will "turn the church over" and retire from the Ministry in the next ten years. He's succession planning, like all good CEOs. The temptation for Pastors is to go on too long" he says.

First, he wants Saddleback Church to become the first big evangelical franchise in the world. There are plans for churches in the "major strategic cities of the world" – in Beijing, Beunos Aeres, Berlin and London. 'This will be our decade of destiny" he says. In the great supermarket of American spirituality, Warren has been a winner. It remains to be seen whether his genius for communication will translate beyond the barbecue on the beach spirit of Southern California to buttoned-up Europe. But it would be unwise to bet against this combination of charisma and hard-nosed business acumen. "Can you tell I'm excited", America's leading Pastorpreneur announces, to no one in particular. With that, I'm dispatched, and I'm presented with a copy of the Purpose Driven Life. I look inside. It had, of course, already been personally addressed and signed.