c. 2004 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Forty is what you might call a biblical number. Noah was adrift for 40 days of rain. Moses spent 40 days and 40 nights on Mount Sinai, receiving the Torah, or Ten Commandments. Jesus endured 40 days of temptation in the wilderness. And about 8,000 Christian churches have spent 40 days figuring out why they’re here.

They call the campaigns “40 Days of Purpose,” and the results have been, they say, spectacular. A 100-member congregation in Gresham, Ore., River Hills Church, is a case in point.

But first, a little background.

In the beginning, there was a pastor, Rick Warren of Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif., who wrote a book, “The Purpose-Driven Church.” It proved pretty popular, especially with pastors. Seven years later he wrote a second book, “The Purpose-Driven Life,” and the results, multiplied by 40 at least, have been phenomenal.

The book is a best seller and then some. It has sold 15 million copies in the past 17 months _ twice as many copies as “The Da Vinci Code,” a runaway novel that’s made headlines for the past year, and about seven times the initial press run of a typical John Grisham novel.

Two years ago, as Saddleback Church worked its way through his book, they counted: 671 new believers who embraced Jesus; 1,200 new members of the church; 2,000 more people who started coming to church; 2,200 new volunteers who wanted to help with God’s work; 3,700 who announced their intentions to become missionaries; 2,400 who started small groups that met once a week for six weeks, inviting 25,000 of their friends to join them in their study.

And what did they study? Five principles that Warren says will help them discover what their purpose on Earth might be.

Some 300,000 ministers have taken training classes from Warren on leading their congregations through the book. Each “Purpose-Driven” congregation shares a search for meaning with Christians across town, across the country and across the world.

At River Hills, members were _ for six weeks anyway _ all on the same page, or at least in the same chapter.

The church’s pastor, Dave Adams, had read Warren’s earlier book, “The Purpose-Driven Church,” and had heard good things from friends whose congregations had completed the 40-day campaign. He and other leaders of the small, independent church thought they might be good candidates.

“We are a real mix of people,” Adams says, “a lot of young people, children, young families. The way we worship is designed to reach out to people who are looking, who are seeking. We ask people if they have a good church home. If they say, `Yes,’ we say, `Great.’ If they say, `No,’ we invite them to worship with us.”

Adams says his church’s mission is “to reach out to people who are unconvinced that Jesus is Lord.” But, given that mission and his responsibility to current members, he couldn’t resist devoting 40 days to Warren’s “Purpose-Driven Life.”

“We believed that his five purposes for our lives would bless us and help us to grow,” Adams says. Now, almost two months later, he’s glad they spent 40 days grappling with the question about why each of them is here.

Adams estimates that about 75 people read and prayed over the book. He figures volunteers for various ministries of the church grew about 15 percent to 18 percent. Every week, he says, newcomers check out the Sunday morning service, and attendance has grown by about 18 people a week. Four adults have been baptized, and the number of small groups has grown from four to nine.

Whether they met as a congregation, as part of a small group or read the book on their own, members tried to cover a chapter a day.

Cyndi Gabriel has been a member of River Hills for 30 of her 31 years. Today, she’s married with three children of her own and found it something of a struggle to read a chapter of “The Purpose-Driven Life” every day. Some days she’d get up at 5 a.m.; other days, she’d read it during commercial breaks during “American Idol.”

She admits that the book is short on rocket science, long on homespun lessons about worship, service and sacrifice.

“But they were all gems,” she says of the ideas that she’s come across in the book. Since April, she’s started her own small group to work through the book a second time. The six women in the group include one new church member, one who doesn’t attend and one who comes to church to take part in a program.

“Some are infant Christians,” Gabriel says, “but we all need help in our personal journeys.”

In his book, Warren draws on more than a thousand Scripture passages to make his points. In the process, he enlists about 15 English language translations, something readers love or hate about his approach.

Adams, who often preaches from different translations, likes it. But critics accuse Warren of editing Scripture to fit, of plugging in his pages other “Purpose-Driven” products and making a fortune from a book that isn’t all that original.

But Warren, who’s pastor now to a church with an average attendance of 18,000, reportedly lives a relatively simple lifestyle and keeps only about 10 percent of his books’ royalties, forwarding the rest to the church and its mission projects.

KRE/PH END HAUGHT