Obama and McCain to appear at Saddleback

According to this news release, presumptive Presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain are scheduled to make their first joint appearance on August 16th hosted by Rick Warren and his 22,000-member Saddleback Church's Civil Forum on Leadership and Compassion.

Warren states that the primary purpose of this event will be "to hear both candidates speak from the heart -- without interruption -- in a civil and thoughtful format absent the partisan 'gotcha' questions that typically produce heat instead of light." Warren, who will be the sole moderator and question-asker for this event, will not be asking many of the questions that typical presidential debates raise. Rather, he will be "pressing issues that are bridging divides in our nation, such as poverty, HIV/AIDS, climate and human rights."

These types of events and these issues for Warren are an outcropping of his "P.E.A.C.E. plan", which according to the Purpose Driven website is a 50-year plan to address "spiritual emptiness, selfish leadership, poverty, disease, and ignorance."

The fact that Warren, #1 on Barna's top 10 list of influential evangelical leaders, lists poverty, disease, climate, human rights, etc. as the most critical issues for Christendom is a clear indication of the pernicious and ubiquitous influence of two things: the Social Gospel movement and baby-boomer ethics. In a prosperous culture during a prosperous time like the one we live in today, the social gospel with it's emphasis on service and helping others (and it's corresponding deemphasis on salvation by faith alone, repentance and the substitutionary atonement of Christ) dovetails nicely with postmodern, baby-boomerism.

In the future, I hope to post a more detailed explanation of how these influences have harmed the advance of the one true Gospel by undermining propositional truth and supplanting it with service that assuages the pangs of a guilty conscience.