Transcript: “Rick Warren Answers the DAVOS Question”

Posted on You-tube January 25, 2008

Hi, You Tubers. This is Rick Warren, author of the Purpose Driven Life and pastor of Saddleback Church. I’m here at DAVOS with a lot of my friends. And we are talking about what are the biggest problems of the planet and how are we going to solve them.

Right now, I think, there are five what I call global giants—extreme poverty, pandemic diseases, illiteracy, corruption, and spiritual emptiness. These problems are so big nobody’s been able to solve them. The U.S. hasn’t solved them. The U.N. hasn’t solved them. Nobody’s solved them. And I think it is because we are going to—it is going to take a three-pronged strategy to do this.

There is a role for the public sector. There is a role for the private sector. And there is a role for the faith sector. Each of them can do something that none of the other three can do.

Government has a role to set agenda. Government has a role to set priorities and things like that, and move nations. And there are some things that only governments can do.

Businesses have a role. Which they have—they bring expertise. They bring, they bring investments. They bring all kinds of innovations to the market.

But then also, houses of worship have things that businesses and government will never have. In the first place, we have universal distribution. The church was global two hundred years before DAVOS ever talked about globalization.

I can take you to ten million villages around the world that the only thing in it is a church. And we are in more locations than the United Nations. We speak more languages than the United Nations. We are a thousand more people groups than the United Nations.

You see, there are 600 million Buddhists in the world. There are 800 million Hindus in the world. There are a billion Muslims in the world. But there are 2.3 billion Christians in the world. If you take people of faith out of the equation you have ruled out five-sixths of the world.

So we have to mobilize this, this, these faith groups to do—to work together on these issues that have been unsolvable. And the church has, of course, the greatest distribution.

It also has the biggest manpower, being 2.3 billion people. I mean it is the church. The Christian church is bigger than China. It is bigger than India. In fact, it is bigger than India and China put together. So nothing compares to its size. We have hundreds of millions of people who volunteer around the world in villages and cities on a weekly basis. And we don’t have to pay them!

The third thing that they have is they have local credibility. At the local level people trust that priest, or that pastor—or for that matter an imam or a rabbi, the religious leader of their faith, because he is marrying, he is burying, he is helping them through the stages of life. When the crisis comes, NGOs come and go. Nations come and go. But for instance the church has a 2,000 year track record.

So I really think that what we need to do here at DAVOS is to work on a three-legged stool. The problem we haven’t solved these issues before is because we have had a two-legged stool. We’ve had government and business trying to work together. And that’s a good thing. But a two-legged stool will fall over. You have to have the faith sector. You have to have the public sector. And you have to have the private sector.

And frankly, I don’t care why you do good, as long as you do good. Your motive may be politics. You know, I am a member of the Counsel of Foreign Relations, and I have learned that when you, for instance, help people get well, that they have been unhealthy, they like your nation.

Now, that is not my motivation for doing good. But it is not a bad one. If you have a political motivation, fine, do it. You may have a profit motivation for doing good as well. You know, some businesses say we are going to make drugs and make money at the same time and help people. Great! I wish more people would do that. I wish more businesses would make more money and do more good at the same time. It is not my motivation, but a profit motive is not bad. You might have a personal motivation. Maybe you have cancer, you have AIDS, and so you care about people with cancer and AIDS.