I was searching for something in a previous blog post (it really does serve as a memory extention), and I saw my post about Rick Warren’s Blog about 4 months ago. I’m not sure when this happened, but http://www.rickwarren.com/ is now just a press release published by A. Larry Ross & Friends.
Kigali, Rwanda, November 16 – Dr. Rick Warren, best-selling author of The Purpose Driven Life and founding pastor of Southern California’s Saddleback Church, concluded a four-day pastoral visit to Syria earlier this week as part of a three-nation pastoral training and PEACE Plan tour. The trip began last week in Germany, where more than 5,000 church leaders gathered to hear Dr. Warren give an overview of a plan to mobilize local churches to attack the global problems of poverty, disease, illiteracy, corruption and spiritual emptiness. Similar training with church leaders in Rwanda continues this week.
I looked in the Internet Archive Wayback Machine and found they stopped paying attention to it in April so I cannt see when it left. It was dificult to navigate since the site was done using nothing but imagemaps that don’t appear anymore. The Google cache (which will probably change again soon) has a copy of his “Facing the world’s five giants!” article, and then the only other page on the domain known to Google is “About“.
What happened to Dr. Warren? I was hoping he could stick with it.
Now, for the part of the post where we get to conjecture (cue theme song). Why did he stop?
- Did people tell him they weren’t interested? . . . I doubt it.
- Maybe he figured regular writing about himself and his work wasn’t for him? . . . A book writing attention seeker out to change the world not interested about writing about himself and his work regularly? You do the math, judge.
- Could it have been the open nature required for good primary source blog writing? . . . I am guessing that anyone who would even consider having a press release (written by an agency) posted as their web site could ever be a real blogger.
This, I believe, is going to be the primary deterrent to blogging by ministers. Ministers don’t like to be vulnerable and open. They are sometimes afraid to be truly human in the eyes of the people around them. This self-centered pride has led to the sinful downfall of many Godly servants. He can now go back to hiding behind the marketing rather than opening his heart.
For me, I’ve always wanted to write a book. Somewhere early on in blogging, I realized that if I gave away all my best stuff, there would be nothing left to write into a book. Not entirely true, of course, but could have scared Rick Warren off.