Bill Gates is deemed by Time Magazine to be one of the 100 most influential in the world today and not because of Microsoft. Rick Warren is also mentioned, but not because his Saddleback Community Church has 82,000 people who are on their mailing list.
Gates and Warren two titans of influence are being lauded and looked to not because of how much money Gates is banking or how many people Warren is attracting to read his books and attend his church. (They have both certainly received plenty of attention for those things.) In the worlds of finance and faith, these two guys are biggees. They are veritable giants. But big isn’t the issue this time.
No, what is notable here is what they are doing with their “bigness.”
Gates makes the list this year because of what he is giving away, not keeping. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has a $27 billion endowment. So far, according to Time, they have spent 750 million toward global vaccinations (“with plans to double that”), and 1.2 billion on educational causes.
Warren’s book The Purpose Driven Life is mentioned both because it’s the number one selling nonfiction book ever, but also because Ashley Smith read passages from it to escaped murderer Brian Nichols, leading Nichols to turn himself in to police. But he make the Time list for trying to move his church and readers from “my” purpose to the greater purposes of God in the world.
Under Warren’s leadership, Saddleback has decided to take on poverty, disease and illiteracy, starting with the entire country of Rwanda. (The president of Rwanda and their national boys’ choir appeared at their capital campaign fundraiser at Angels’ Stadium last weekend.)
In many ways, Gates and Warren are the kinds of “heroes and icons” that we Americans most admire. They represent the ultimate fulfillment of another biggee book, Bruce Wilkinson’s The Prayer of Jabez. Most of us dream of doing “big things” for God and the world, but we think we have to wait until we “get big” ourselves. Now that Gate is worth $46 Billion he can start giving it away. Warren told his congregation that now they had fulfilled their vision of having a church of 20,000 members they could start looking to the world.
Both are admirable sentiments, worthy of praise, recognition and affirmation. But do we all have to wait until we are “big” to do “better”?
As a young minister, after I gave a talk to a group of teenagers about caring for the poor, one of the teenage groups’ adult leaders said to me, “You know, after I make enough money and get my family the security we need, I would love to do the kinds of things you are talking about.” That was twenty years ago. I wonder if he did. Or does his bank book still need to be a bit bigger?
In my own church, we are trying to take seriously both the need to be a strong, healthy community (we have only recently felt recovered from a painful church split ten years ago) and the need to mobilize our people and resources to make a difference in our community and the world. The temptation for us, both collectively and individually is to think that we have to be big before we can do something significant in the world.
Maybe we don’t have to wait until we are big enough to tackle global vaccination or helping an entire third-world country. Jesus seemed to think that something as small as a mustard seed could eventually make a pretty big difference (Mark 4:31-32).
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