Rick Warren On Coping In Tough Times

With the Easter and Passover holidays upon us, Early Show co-anchor Harry Smith talked to Rick Warren, author of "Purpose Driven Life" and the pastor of Saddleback Valley Community Church in California, about how people are coping during these challenging economic times.

Harry Smith: During this time, with the economy being the way it is, there are so many world crises, at this kind of teetering point, what's on your mind this weekend?

Rick Warren: You know Harry, bad news often makes the good news a whole lot better and during recessions, if you know anything about church history, recessions often lead to spiritual revival. People get disappointed in materialism and they start looking for three things, three things actually go up in recession. Typically, historically, church attendances goes up, bar attendance goes up and movie attendances goes up. And I say that because they go to church looking for meaning, they go to bars looking for connections, something that the relationship they go to movies looking for relief. And so our attendance has gone up dramatically since January.

Smith: You know, some churches have seen attendance go up, but the amount of money going into the collection plate has gone down, even dramatically.

Warren: That's understandable because we've got the last three months over 600,000 Americans per month in the first three months of this year have lost their jobs and almost 3 million last year.

At saddleback we encourage generosity, our giving is actually up because we've been telling people we need to help people who are out of work. Six weeks ago we passed out over 10,000 bags, grocery bags, 'Fill them up and bring them back next week, we're going to give them to people who are out of work.' And actually this Easter we'll start, we already started 14 services for the 40-50,000 people that will be at Saddleback this weekend and we're handing out 40-50,000 grocery bags to fill them up and help people.

Smith: You know it's interesting because the cover of Newsweek this week talks about the death of America as a primarily Christian country, a piece in the Wall Street Journal saying actually the opposite. How interesting is it to you that this conversation goes on this sort of 'God is dead, God is relevant, God is irrelevant.' It's been going on in this country since the late 60's.

Warren: Well the demise of the faith has been predicted practically every year for 2,000 years. There may be the demise of the religious right, politics come and go all the time, but the church outlasts every administration, every political view.

Last Saturday we had the largest membership class in our 30-year history at Saddleback. Politics come and go, changes come and go, spiritual hunger always goes up during tough difficult times.