Saddleback Church

The Harvest Crusade, the evangelical rock concert and revival that drew more than 125,000 worshipers last summer, will begin Wednesday at Edison International Field with a Fourth of July fireworks show. The crusade has added two days to its traditional three-day run. Other new wrinkles will be a children's night, a two-night skateboarding exhibition and a car and motorcycle show the next Sunday.

For a few hot hours Saturday afternoon, a sterile stretch of South Orange County suburbia transformed into a rowdy free speech zone outside Saddleback Church in Lake Forest. Nearly 1,000 demonstrators from across the political spectrum descended on the megachurch for the forum with presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama. Protesters bearing drums, banners and megaphones sweated in the scorching sun, rallying passing motorists to toot their horns in solidarity as choppers circled overhead.

One guarantee about California's prisons: Most who leave them aren't out for long. Here's how bad it is, according to the state Department of Corrections: 74% go back for at least a second prison term--and the vast majority of those don't even make it past their parole date before being nabbed again. Orange County is fourth highest in the state, with more than 6,000 from here currently serving repeat terms. So when you see someone come along determined to buck those odds, it's encouraging.

In an address that melded her personal faith and her campaign vow to battle AIDS, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton on Thursday said that if elected, she would boost U.S. spending on the disease and encourage abstinence and the use of condoms to eradicate it. "AIDS remains a plague of biblical proportions," the New York senator told hundreds of church members gathered at the annual Global Summit on AIDS and the Church at Saddleback Church in Lake Forest.

The meeting between John McCain and Barack Obama today at Saddleback Church in Orange County will be brief -- a handshake and perhaps an exchange of pleasantries in between back-to-back interviews with the church's pastor, Rick Warren. But for the 3,000 people in the audience and viewers watching live on cable television, this first onstage matchup will offer a preview of the three critically important presidential debates, the first next month at the University of Mississippi.

As a resident of south Orange County, Ron Wilbur couldn't imagine how he would be able to help a remote village in Kenya. But his pastor asked, so the longtime Saddleback Church member volunteered to fly across the globe to bring healthcare, food and God to Africa. Wilbur, of Rancho Santa Margarita, is one of 4,500 charter members of a program officially unveiled Sunday by Pastor Rick Warren at the 25th-anniversary celebration of the Lake Forest church.

Saddleback Church is used to generating numbers of biblical proportions: 20,000 people attend its weekend services; each month Pastor Rick Warren sells about 1 million copies of his book "The Purpose Driven Life," and more than 350,000 pastors from 120 countries have been trained in the Saddleback way. But even for one of the country's largest churches, Saddleback's latest venture is ambitious: It has been feeding Orange County's estimated 35,000 homeless people three meals a day for 40 days.

Let me suggest the creation of a new governmental position: Moderator General. And it just so happens I have a nominee: Rick Warren. Yes, he already has a job as pastor of Saddleback Church in Orange County, but based on his performance Saturday in interviewing John McCain and Barack Obama, the young man has another talent that needs to be tapped. Forty-eight hours after the event, I'm still overly bubbly because I feared that Warren's back-to-back interviews with the presidential aspirants would fall flat.

In 1965, there were only 93 churches in America that averaged over 1,000 in attendance. Today there are more than 8,000 of these larger churches in our nation, with many here in Southern California. Contrary to the claims of some pundits, the trend toward larger churches is not abating. Last year, another American church joined the above-1,000 category every three days. Large congregations are nothing new to Christianity.

Rock Harbor Church in Costa Mesa will present its seventh communitywide "Stirring," billed as "a night for churches to worship God together." The free event is at 7:30 tonight at the Orange Coast College football stadium. The concert will feature worship leaders and music from Rock Harbor, Mercy Covenant, Coast Hills Church, Saddleback Church, University Praise, Aliso Viejo Vineyard and the Catacombs.