Rick Warren, founder and senior pastor of Saddleback Church, comments on American Christians' spiritual duties amid the COVID-19 pandemic, during this March 2021 interview with the Barna Group's ChurchPulse podcast.
Clips have been edited for brevity and to eliminate verbal pauses. This segment of the podcast can be see without editing here: https://twitter.com/WokePreacherTV/status/1432310199516377088
—TRANSCRIPT HIGHLIGHTS—
CAREY NIEUWHOF: Any thoughts about the pastors who are saying, hey, the government's trying to suppress the church by not allowing us open, or now there's a conversation about, well, we're going to get shut down on YouTube or social media accounts because we're Christians?
RICK WARREN: Yeah, I totally reject that idea. And the very fact that people tried to politicize a pandemic is just dumb. This is a safety issue, not a First Amendment issue. Now, you might have a case if everything else opened up except the church, okay? But we're not being discriminated against.
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And the Bible says "Love your neighbor as yourself." The most practical way right now you can love your neighbor as yourself, wear a mask. Okay? And to not wear one basically says, "I don't care about you, or I don't even care about your fears."
See, this thing about this virus, and I know all these leaders. I knew the head of the CDC, Bob Redfield, and I knew Debbie Birx, and I know Francis Collins, head of the National Institute. They're all good Christian peoples, and I've worked with them for years on other pandemics around the world...These are good people. They're not partisan politicians. They're not trying to, it's not socialism in disguise. "We're trying to shut you down." They're just trying to be careful.
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What's insidious about this is that you could be a carrier and have no symptoms. That's a problem. I could carry it and not have symptoms. And so when I don't wear a mask, I'm gambling without knowing that I'm safe, that I'm not harming you.
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I've had enormous pressure to reopen the church from my own members. Not from everybody, but from pretty much the people who are watching those three hours [of cable news] every night on TV. And they're pressuring, "Why aren't we reopening? Why aren't we reopening?"
And I'm going: wait a minute. We're winning more people to Christ than ever before. We got more people in groups than ever before. We've got a great ministry to seekers out there through food. All these different things are going on. What's the problem? We baptized more people. But when they say the pressure's on, I say this.
As a pastor, God has called me not just to feed the flock but to protect it, and that means protecting it physically as well as emotionally and spiritually. I will one day stand before God and give an account of my leadership to him, how well I shepherded this flock. Did I protect the sheep that God put in the stewardship of me?
I couldn't imagine going to Heaven and saying that I let people, members, die because I had such an ego I needed a crowd to speak to. I'm not willing to gamble the health of my members to nurse my ego that would like to have a live audience...But then I said, "Are you, those of you members who want me to reopen, are you willing to accept the responsibility, to stand before God one day? I had three members die this week of COVID, okay? Without services. No telling what could happen. Are you willing to accept responsibility for the death of a brother or sister in our family?"
Source video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veIkVWFiVhs
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