From the Associated Press:
LAKE FOREST, Calif. – Evangelical pastor Rick Warren's plea for donations to fill a $900,000 deficit at his Southern California megachurch brought in $2.4 million, Warren announced to cheers during a sermon at the church on Saturday.
Well, whoop-dee-freakin'-doo!
]
Warren
had posted this on his website last Wednesday:
With 10 percent of our church
family out of work due to the recession, our expenses in caring for our
community in 2009 rose dramatically while our income stagnated.
He continued that his Saddleback Church in Lake Forest had largely managed to stay within its budget during
the year, but “the bottom dropped out” when Christmas donations were
down. He then asked for the 900 grand.
“We're
starting the new decade with a surplus,” Purpose-Driven Rick beamed Saturday. “It came from
thousands of ordinary people. This was not one big fat cat.”
Great. But Warren's holy nut sack is still tiny compared to the one Oral Roberts was swinging in January 1987, when he told his
television audience that unless he raised $8 million by that March, “God
will call me home.”
Roberts raised
$9.1 million.
He was convalescing in Newport Beach when God called him home this past Dec. 15, so he missed that upstart Warren's act.
Come on, P-D Rick: You pulled this donate-or-else shtick in 2004 and 2005 but have never whipped out the “or I'll die” card. Don't be a wuss next time.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.