Rick Warren

Richard Duane Warren is an American Southern Baptist evangelical Christian pastor and author, born on January 28, 1954, in San Jose, California. He founded Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California, in 1980, growing it from a single-family Bible study into one of the largest congregations in the United States with weekly attendance reaching tens of thousands across multiple campuses.

Warren's literary breakthrough came with The Purpose Driven Life, published in 2002, which sold tens of millions of copies in dozens of languages and became one of the best-selling nonfiction hardcover books in publishing history. An earlier title, The Purpose Driven Church (1995), shaped congregational strategy across denominational lines and won a Christian Book of the Year award.

He delivered the invocation at the inauguration of President Barack Obama on January 20, 2009, despite criticism from both progressive and conservative observers over the choice. Warren also founded the PEACE Plan, a global initiative addressing what he called the five "global Goliaths": spiritual emptiness, corrupt leadership, poverty, disease, and illiteracy.

After the 2013 suicide of his youngest son Matthew, who had struggled for years with mental illness, Warren and his wife Kay launched mental health advocacy work through their church and partnered with Catholic and secular institutions on the Gathering on Mental Health and the Church. He stepped down as Saddleback's senior pastor in 2022 after more than four decades of leadership.

The name Rick is a short form of Richard, a Germanic compound meaning "strong ruler" or "powerful leader," derived from the Proto-Germanic elements rīkijaz (powerful) and harduz (hard, brave). Carried into England by the Normans, it became one of the most enduring royal names in English history. Today the diminutive Rick projects a friendly, approachable masculinity, and he wears it as a man of public ministry would.