Saddleback Church Case Study: Strategic Analysis of a Mega-Church

This case study analyzes Saddleback Church, a prominent mega-church founded by Rick Warren. It examines the church's strengths, such as its cultural flexibility, community building, and self-critiquing approach, alongside its weaknesses, including a lack of clear definition and promotion limitations. The study explores opportunities like adapting to societal changes and the spiritual search for identity, as well as threats such as a lack of unity among congregations. The analysis further investigates Saddleback's growth, its impact through the PEACE program, and its role in the mega-church movement. It discusses the sustainability of its growth, the influence of Rick Warren, and the church's strategic initiatives, including its focus on consumer tastes, small groups, and various programs. The case study provides insights into Saddleback's organizational structure, leadership, and its approach to reaching and engaging its community.

Running head: SADDLEBACK CHURCH
SADDLEBACK CHURCH
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author note

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SWOT analysis
Strengths
The Saddleback community church showed flexibility with the culture and experimenting with
the new things; these attracted many people. The publications of Pastor Rick Warren has also
motivated many people, and it fueled the church’s ministries. The conferences of Saddleback
church teaches the pastors from all over the world regarding the church growth. The Saddleback
church provides the video café service that involves the choices of the worship style, small
crowd and videotaped sermon. The Saddleback church focuses on the experimentation and the
newness as they take culture very seriously. They showed that their values arise out of the
culture rather than being imposed on the culture. This engagement with culture helps them to
reach many people. This church reflects the importance of contextualising to the local
community of church besides than just being engaged with the broad cultural shift. The major
strength is building the community both inside and outside the church. The unusual strength of
this church is that they often open about their conflicts, self-disillusionment and shortcomings.
Thus, the self-critiquing is one of the strength as this helps to improve. This church also focuses
on the holistic faith, which leads to personal and social transformation (James, 2015).
Weakness
Saddleback church focuses on the experimentation, the newness and the nature of the reaction
regarding the over perspective models that meant that the church shows reluctance in defining
themselves regarding method and category. Thus, they lack in providing the clear definition and
direction. The unfair stereotyping and the false dichotomies with which the other churches and
methods are prejudged limit the church contemporaries (Edwards et al., 2017). Another

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weakness of this church is that during the promotion through radios, leaflets, their message or
their information reach to the restricted group of people due to their promotion style.
Opportunities
There are also outside factors, which help to identify the potentials of the church, this church was
able to reach the several needs of the people, which they have due to the cultural change in the
Western society. The changes include the urban struggle for the time and money the churches
can revise the expectations that are placed and how they find and use the financial and human
resources — the hyperechoic that are people looking for those churches that can meet them on
the personal level and sharing their values. Also, the spiritual spreading that is the people’s
choices is generally towards that object, which gives them hope to find the identity, acceptance
and connection to the whole world. The opportunity that this church presents is its newness and
the adjustability features, as when any movement is growing, it is more convenient to adjust its
shape and direction by creating and modifying the new and healthy values of the church culture.
This is advantageous as although there is the existence of some weakness, but there is also
flexibility in the values of this church.
Threat
This missional church with many congregations faces a threat that is though Saddleback church
can get more and more members from many congregations though there is lack of unity among
the members. In the traditional churches, every people attending the single service and
participating in the same style of the worship reflects the unity. This church suggests the
churchgoers focus on the intimate relationship with the people within their congregation rather
than expecting the members to be close with everyone across the spread of the congregations.

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The congregations need to be equally valued like the outworking of the church’s vision and
mission. This also can bring threat to the process that is the congregation members are only
considered when they are connected with the mission, and the vision of the church and these
allocations of the paid ministry resources can bring the threat to the church (Thumma & Bird,
2015).
Will Rick Warren and Saddleback be able to increase its local ministries
throughout Orange County, plant more daughter churches, and have a global
impact through the PEACE program?
Saddleback church establishes the cooperative network among the pastors that lead to the growth
of the mega-churches. Saddleback church spread their message and influences the growth of 34
daughter churches and provided the administrative support for getting them launched into
independence. This church has been directly involved in the establishment of the daughter
churches, and this church represents the fulfilment of the declared mission of the church that is to
plant at least one daughter church in every year. Rick Warren will able to increase the church’s
local ministries throughout the Orange country, will be able to create more daughter churches as
that country, and will be able to spread the impact of the PEACE program globally. The PEACE
program is the foundation of missions, and it addresses the five global giants that include
spiritual emptiness, poverty, disease, self-serving leadership and illiteracy (Kurien, 2017).
Warren believes that some churches will be able to solve this addressed problem of society. The
focus of the PEACE program is to mitigate the addressed giants through the power of ordinary
people in the local church. This theory of addressing these factors and mitigating them influences
the people to become a follower of the theories. The PEACE program looks after planting
churches that promote reconciliation with efficient leaders for serving the poor, taking care of the

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sick and educating the next generation (Newton, 2015). These factors influence the people and
the theories that people are unable to serve God, thus serving poor will serve God and the
theories that God lies within living beings, influence people to increase the local ministries in the
country (Yip & Hoon 2016).
Is Saddleback part of a larger mega-church movement that is a fad?
Saddleback is the part of the larger mega-church movement, and the programs raised by
Saddleback church motivates to spread the church communities and Warren’s book The Purpose
Driven life and through the leadership seminars Saddleback reached various pastors and the
leaders with the purpose driven message for the church growth in the country (Lee & Dreyer,
2018).
Are mega-churches a permanent feature of the religious landscape?
Mega-churches are the permanent feature of the religious landscape as they provide the message
that they need to market that is they identify the consumers and reaches them. They also serve as
the model of the church growth which reflects them as the permanent feature of the religious
landscape (Gunda, 2018).
Can the high rate of church growth be sustained?
The high rate of church growth can be sustained as the church growth are enhanced by the
models and the mega-church even provide the church services and looks after the smaller
congregations in the country, who cannot achieve the same size, this motivation for the church
services to every people will sustain the high church growth rate (Falconer, 2017).

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How much of Saddleback’s growth is rooted in Rick Warren as an individual?
Rick Warren and his wife Kay founded the Saddleback Church when he was 26years old, and he
continued to serve as the senior pastor. He is called Papa Rick all over the country, and he is
considered as the voice of wisdom, encouragement, hope and vision. His vision for the PEACE
plan to fight with the giants of the spiritual emptiness, poverty, pandemic disease, self-serving
leadership, illiteracy and poverty. Warren considers the church growth as their life’s work to
empower the local churches and the local leaders to create sustainable change, which gives a
voice to the helpless and the voiceless ones. Warren mentors the young leaders, and the leading
pastors can learn many values from his book, ‘The Purpose Driven Church’ and this book
inspires them to inherit their callings to the ministry. There was a debate raised among the critics,
Christians and the non-Christians that whether he delivers the message of the serving souls for
the Jesus Christ or for adopting the marketing techniques. There a question raised that whether
Saddleback is the market-pandering or the purpose driven church (Thumma & Bird, 2015). Then
also he was able to make Saddleback as one of the strategic implementation and the foundation
of any church in the US. Warren has made Saddleback as one of the successful church that has
local growth, a national profile and the international influence. Warren has spearheaded the
miraculous growth of the megachurch from 7 adherents to 20,000 member congregation. This
shows the deep root of the Saddleback’s growth in Rick Warren (Gitau, 2018).
How is this organization moving forward?
Rick Warren founded the Saddleback church with seven adherents, and this mega-church follows
the theories of serving the poor. This church puts the effort in identifying the missions that they
hope to reach. The five keys that help the church in building the campaign are the financial
planning, construction, move-in phase and the strategic planning. Saddleback church was able to

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develop the campus that would fit their needs, and they spent an ample amount of time and effort
in figuring out the requirement, they wanted the building campaign to fit in (Ellingson, 2016).
The campus of the Saddleback church has the worship centre and also consists of the different
types of services and the self-governing children’s ministry centre. Saddleback follows the
purpose driven model that is to abolish the objections or any distractions of preventing people
from attending the church (Ong, 2018). During the growing time, the church should pay attention
to the attractiveness, cleanliness and the parking place for the people and how the people are
going to feel while walking into the church through the doors. The main motto of the church is to
strive for excellence and to give their best in communicating God’s truth. This approach of the
church views the attendees of the church as the consumers of the business who are looking for
any special attractive package. To succeed in such an environment of the society, the Saddleback
church uses the best tools like polls and surveys. The most significant key of their growth is that
they have given much effort in adopting the tastes of the people, where the conformity is not the
critical theological one. Saddleback church also polled their followers to the radio station stations
they listened to, by having respect to the church music. The result of this was that there was no
one who listened to the organ music when they were given the option rather 96% of the attendees
listened to the adult contemporary (Santos, 2018). Thus, the survey of the music style at the
Saddleback that was unapologetically contemporary. The pastor of the church acknowledged that
it could not be everybody’s style for which he has founded the alternate churches, and he
recommends that caters more to the traditional style of the music (Stevens, 2016).
Saddleback church caters the various categories of people with different programs offerings like
the program for kids, high school, singles, college age and the junior high school. There is a
chance for everyone to get lost in the large Saddleback church or not feeling connected, for this

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Saddleback church has made various attempts to reduce such effects with the extensive use of
the small groups and this lead to the involvement of the more than 13,000 people with 1450
small groups (Hirsch, 2016). This helps the attendees to select the small groups where they can
fit them in an organized manner as the singles, men, women and couples. For getting the
involvement of the more people, Saddleback also operates the sports ministry by attracting more
than 1200 people, which enables the Saddleback church to operate in the other sectors of the life.
The variety of programs of Saddleback church is also considered as the resource ministry geared
towards the pastors (Jenkins, 2015). Saddleback church wants to fill up the role of the toolmaker
and the primary laboratory by not carrying it to its ministry whereas to empower the other
churches for expanding and energising their efficient ministries. This church has gained the
excellent and tremendous growth from the year 1980; their seeker-friendly approach has proved
to be fruitful at the local, national and the international levels. In this effective manner if the
church can view the vision and the mission of their growth, then they will be able to grow ample
amount of their daughter churches throughout the country (Hellemans, 2015). The internal
analysis of the church has helped in identifying the numerous strength of this church, which
enables them to promote their church in every small group and by having all these, the
Saddleback church will be able to increase their daughter churches throughout the country. The
programs in the form of the seminars in a different place like in televisions, radio helps to spread
their messages to the people. Their seminars also provide the teachings to the pastors, which
would encourage the pastors of other megachurches to expand their branches and more the
number of branches there will be more serving of peoples, and like this way, Saddleback church
leads in the megachurch movements. These churches believed in the concept that serving the
people means serving to God (Farlow, 2016).

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