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  Karaoke for the Lord: The Recipe for Success at American Megachurches

Karaoke for the Lord The Recipe for Success at American Megachurches

By Susanne Weingarten

Part 3: An Internicine Battle

The first real internecine battle is currently being waged - over an initiative to combat the effects of greenhouse gases. At the beginning of 2006, 86 leading evangelical thinkers - including scores of Christian college presidents and megachurch pastors like Warren, Hunter and McLaren - signed a "Call to Action" placing the issue of climate change high on their agenda. This commitment is being brought home to their followers under the slogan "creation care." The idea: It is our responsibility to prevent man from destroying God's Creation.

"The Republican Party is largely serving the interests of the oil, gas and utility industries who pay large donations to Republican politicians," says Richard Cizik, vice president of the main evangelical lobbying group, the National Association of Evangelicals. "Can we expect that party to speak out on behalf of the environment without our political advocacy? Of course not!"

The evangelicals' old guard quickly fired back. There is no scientific proof, their leaders said, that man was causing climate change. Most important of all, they argued, was that human beings - as the highest form of life - take priority. Environmental protection retards economic growth and that is bad for the average American. The initiative's opponents have started playing "dirty politics," one of the signatories said. "There's no place for that in Christian policy."

But the evangelical traditionalists fear more than the climate change initiative. They are worried that their days of gaybashing and ranting against abortion could be numbered in the face of moderate mass resistance. Which is just what the younger leaders are striving to achieve, having realized that they have put themselves into an extremely tight political corner by using what Hunter calls "below-the-belt" issues. "We want to expand our political involvement to issues that are important for all the people," the pastor at Longwood says.

Even evangelical foot soldiers are edging away from the GOP camp

Rick Warren, for instance, has sent Saddleback volunteers to Rwanda as the first step of a global peace project aimed at combating poverty and disease. Their brief is to promote education and build churches. Warren has even established an AIDS foundation. Help to fight AIDS? An evangelical? That's never happened in the United States before. Wasn't it Jerry Falwell who said that AIDS was God's punishment of the perverted?

But the new generation of evangelicals is less concerned about damnation and more focused on caring. According to Warren, the ultimate issue is to "love the sinner, not the sin" - a statement that shows that he and his colleagues have not been converted into liberals overnight. Their rejection of abortion and gay marriage is "not negotiable," as Joel Hunter says. But other rights for homosexual couples, such as inheritance, well, that's not really any of the church's business now, is it? The megachurches represent a catch basin for thousands with radically different convictions; they have acquired a degree of acceptance that earlier evangelical churches simply didn't need.

And if the megachurch managers really turn up the volume, there evangelical movement will no longer be recognizable. Using the Internet, Rick Warren alone reaches a network of more than 10,000 churches that follow Saddleback's lead. Every year he holds workshops for thousands of budding preachers; he widely distributes sermons, teaching materials and advice. And his current bestseller has made him the talk of millions in Christian households. The purpose-driven man from Orange County is probably the biggest mouthpiece that U.S. churches have ever produced. And if Pastor Rick takes up the environmental gauntlet, the White House may have to batten down the hatches.

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