The Reverend Rick Warren was in the news last January because of controversial positions he'd taken on gay marriage, positions that some felt should disqualify him from appearing at Obama's Inauguration.
I found it interesting because I'd had reason to study Warren's Saddleback Church in recent years as part of work I've doing with a large social change organization that wanted help developing more extensive and deeper relationships with its members. We concluded that Warren was on to something. And it had nothing to do with Jesus.
Besides being part of the evangelical movement, Saddleback had the following characteristics: it welcomed newcomers and explicitly refrained from requiring them to worship in any conventional way. Visitors and members could go to the Church on Sunday and feel free to attend services or not. The bar to entry was very low. Saddleback has groups of all kinds going on all the time--classes for adults, couples, and kids, recreation activities, childcare, and other helpful services. The core of the religious life of the Church takes place in small groups that meet in members' homes-giving rise to Malcolm Gladwell's description of it as a "cellular church." People can rise up within the Church hierarchy steadily if they wish. If they don't, that's fine too. And Saddleback's membership has grown rapidly to its current level of over 20,000 members.
The reasons for Warren's success are probably complicated. My view is that he connects with the widest possible number of needs that his parishioners have. Saddleback doesn't only address needs to worship, but needs to belong, to get recognition, and to satisfy longings for meaning and for a sense of agency. They relate to their members as whole people, not simply as "members." This is the lesson that other organizations can and should learn. When you connect with people on all levels, they become more engaged, loyal, and active in your organization. Sounds simple, right? It's not.
Too often, social change organizations ignore this lesson and see their members as a means to an end-the "end" being the agenda of the staff or leader. The relationship is instrumental. Labor unions, for example, tend to view their members as narrowly motivated by needs for economic security and protection on the job and not as people with needs for meaning, recognition, learning, and relatedness. The engagement is narrow. They follow the "commonsensical" notion, popularized by Abraham Maslow, that people have to have their survival (translated: economic) needs met before they can adequately meet their higher order psychological and spiritual needs. As a result, in most unions, regardless of size, only 2 - 5% of the membership is actively engaged.
This version of Maslow's hierarchy is wrong and lots of progressive social change organizations have suffered because of it. People often deem their non-economic needs as more important than their economic ones. People crave recognition and will often work for less money in exchange for it. They need to be connected to something bigger than the self and will often sacrifice a great deal in the service of this longing. And, of course, we know from decades of research that the need for attachment and mutuality often trumps even the need for physical safety and security.
Any organization that wants to grow and really energize its membership should look at the mega-churches. They "get" something that we don't.
