Pastor Rick Warren of Saddleback Church is going to host another Purpose Driven Church Conference this month after a 10 year hiatus.
The conference will help church leaders from across the globe integrate a "Purpose Driven" model into their churches that is based on Warren's bestselling book "The Purpose Driven Life", according to The Christian Post.
"God has shifted my focus from church planting to church renewal," Warren says of the planned conference, which will be held from June 28 to 30 at Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California.
"We must help plateaued churches and discouraged pastors, and we must train a whole new generation to embrace God's five purposes for the church: fellowship, discipleship, worship, ministry and evangelism," Warren continues. "While God's purposes for the church have remained unchanged for 2,000 years, we continue to learn how to apply them in a changing world."
For the past decade, Warren focused on the PEACE Plan ministry, which inspired every Christian and church to serve people in poverty-stricken and war-torn areas.
"Now that the PEACE Plan is mature and impacting millions of people around the world through thousands of churches, God has shifted my focus from church planting to church renewal, beginning in America," he explains.
Now, the Purpose Driven conference is going to focus on "the operating system for the church," and Warren says they have "discovered so many new apps over the last ten years" to beef it up.
"We need to introduce a new generation to the paradigm all together, and we need to introduce our old friends to what we've learned in the last ten years," says Warren.
More than 400,000 pastors around the world have already been trained in the Purpose Driven paradigm by Warren, resulting in 42,000 baptisms, 26,000 members serving in more than 500 ministries, and over 40,000 people participating in more than 8,000 small groups.
Warren also says in a video message that church leaders who participate in the conference will be saved from "an enormous amount of heartache, because I'm going to share all the mistakes I've made and stuff I had to learn the hard way."
"It's wise to learn from experience, but it's wiser to learn from the experiences of others, and I can save you a lot of time and money. You don't have the time to make all the mistakes yourself," he adds.
One of the things Warren has learned in 36 years of ministry is that pastors always have to be fast, fluid and flexible to keep their church growing. He also thinks they need to be "spontaneous so you can make changes with the Spirit when the Spirit moves different ways."
