Rick Warren Kicks Off Purpose Driven Conference in Korea

|PIC1|Evangelical pastor Rick Warren delivered a lecture in his trademark Hawaiian shirt to 20,000 people at the largest church in the world, Yoido Full Gospel Church in South Korea, on Thursday.

Despite the rainy weather and day of the week, ministers and believers crowded inside the main chapel of the megachurch where the thousands remained seated for the entire Purpose Driven Church Conference to pick up Warren's pastoral method.

After raising Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif., which he heads, into a global church through the 40-Days of Purpose Campaign, Warren has presented a new church growth model to all 50 states in America and 10 countries around the world.

In his first lecture, "Raise a Purpose Driven Church," at this week's conference at Yoido, Warren emphasized that a church must become purpose-driven to grow healthy. He further explained four phases for a revival to occur – personal revival, relational revival, revival with a purpose and structural revival. Among those, many churches get stuck at the third phase – revival with a purpose – and therefore cannot grow.

There are five biblical mandates Warren extracted from the Bible. They include service, ministry, evangelism, fellowship and training.

|PIC2|The Church does not only serve as a place for worshipping and building friendships, but it exists to change the world, Warren continued. He said that only churches that experience revival with a purpose can accomplish structural revival and thus grow to be healthy churches.

Before heading into the final day of the conference on Friday, Warren was scheduled to lead a gathering of some 100,000 Christians at the Sangamdong World Cup Stadium Thursday night. After concluding the Purpose Driven Church Conference, Warren will head down to Pusan for another revival gathering.

Warren's trip to South Korea is part of his 34-day tour of 13 countries. Upon his arrival to Seoul, he had expressed impressiveness of Korean churches outreaching across the globe. On July 17, Warren will visit North Korea to discuss plans for next year's Pyongyang Revival centennial anniversary. Warren had been invited to preach to 15,000 Christians in North Korea. Warren said there is no political agenda. Details of the 2007 gathering have yet to be discussed.




[Editor's Note: Karen Hwang in San Francisco and Jae-kwang Ryu in Seoul, South Korea, contributed to this article]





Lillian Kwon
Christian Today Correspondent